Reuters reports:
Young Poles battle government over swamplandSee also here.By Monika Filipiuk
ROSPUDA VALLEY, Poland - Scores of young activists camped in a remote peat bog in the northeast of Poland last month and threatened to chain themselves to trees to stop bulldozers clearing land for a highway. …
“I came here to tell the government it’s wrong to destroy such a beautiful place,” said Mateusz Wojcik, a 20-year-old engineering student who traveled 800 miles from Wroclaw in southwest Poland to the Rospuda Valley. …
“We’ve come from across Poland to say there are better sites for a road,” said Magda Figura, a member of the environmental group Greenpeace, her breath freezing in the morning air.
Activists regard themselves as the last line of defense for the valley’s more than 50 rare or endangered plants and animals, including the fen orchid, lesser-spotted eagle and whitebacked woodpecker.
Scientists say Rospuda is one of the few pristine peat mires left in Europe and that slicing it down the middle with a highway would be like “slaughtering the last woolly mammoth.”
Update: here.
And here.
And here.
And here.
Update 11 December 2007: here.
Update September 2008: here.
Polish troops in Iraq: here.
European governments vs. forests: here.
Soni wants re-look at road endangering Zanskar wilderness
New Delhi, Dec 24 - Concerned over the environmental impact of a road being built in Jammu and Kashmir’s spectacular Zanskar area, also known as India’s grand canyon, Tourism Minister Ambika Soni says she will take up the matter with the state government.
Posted : Mon, 24 Dec 2007 05:00:03 GMT
Author : Kavita Bajeli-Datt
Category : Environment
New Delhi, Dec 24 - Concerned over the environmental impact of a road being built in Jammu and Kashmir’s spectacular Zanskar area, also known as India’s grand canyon, Tourism Minister Ambika Soni says she will take up the matter with the state government.
‘Some foreign travellers have expressed concern about the road being built at the Zanskar river. I will raise the matter with the Kashmir chief minister,’ Soni told IANS.
Soni said she wants Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad to reconsider the project and was hoping to speak to him about it at the National Development Council (NDC) meeting Dec 19 but did not get a chance.
‘He was busy so I told his OSD (officer on special duty) about the issue. He told me that the chief minister would speak to me about it,’ she said, adding that she has taken the matter seriously.
‘We don’t want that the ecology of the area to be affected,’ Soni said.
The road is being built over the Zanskar river in Ladakh to connect the two areas of Neemu and Padum, the district headquarters. But in the process, it will endanger a vast stretch of wilderness.
Zanskar river, which freezes during winter for a month, is a virtual paradise for adventure tourists who love to trek through the 150 km-long snow-laden gorge that passes through Neemu to Padum.
John Yost, co-founder of Mountain Travel Sobek, a US-based travel company who brought the matter to the notice of the tourism minister, said he was ‘heartbroken’ to see the road being built.
‘I led two rafting trips on the Zanskar river last summer and was heartbroken to see the road being built along its canyon. One of the grandest places on earth, as stunning as the Grand Canyon in the US, is being sacrificed to someone’s definition of progress,’ he said.
Yost, who was in New Delhi to attend the 6th Annual Convention of the Adventure Tour Operators Association of India (ATOAI) on ‘Indian Adventure Tourism - the Next Step’, said, ‘Adventure travel, like wildlife, needs habitat.
‘With each natural gem lost beneath another layer of concrete, you have one less place to bring your clients,’ he said.
British tour operator Steven Berry said it is an ‘incredible area’ but politicians for ’short term gain’ are destroying it.
(c) Indo-Asian News Service
Comment by Administrator — December 24, 2007 @ 6:22 pm