Australia: Giant protest planned in upper Florentine Valley this Weekend!

Massive turnout of protesters in the Upper Florentine Valley this
weekend. Ula Majewski, of the group Still Wild, Still Threatened, said
she expected hundreds of people to head for the forest flashpoint
tomorrow. “This will be the biggest forest rally for a number of
years. People have been very fired up,” she said. “We’ll be seeing a
series of rolling actions leading up to Sunday, which will be a
massive community action in which the Tasmanian people will be voicing
their disapproval of the industrial-scale destruction of some of our
most precious old-growth forest.

“We’ve had messages from hundred and
hundreds of people across Australia and internationally, who are just
outraged by the fact that the Australian and Tasmanian governments
continue to condone this horrific devastation.” Early yesterday,
activists established another tree-sit within the forestry exclusion
zone and one woman attached herself to a forestry machine. She was
later released and arrested. Tasmania Police yesterday directed
activists staying at the vigil camp on Gordon River Rd to leave the
area for 24 hours. The cost of the five-day police operation to clear
protesters from Camp Flozza as logging operations begin in the area is
believed to have passed $60,000.

Forestry Tasmania forecasts the value
of production from the Florentine coupe is about $2 million. Half of
that value is to be derived from eucalypt and special species sawlogs
and the remainder from pulp logs. Forestry Tasmania harvested 12,900ha
last year and made a profit of $8.5 million. Wilderness Society
spokesman Vica Bayley said the Florentine operation would lose money.
“What I’ve heard coming from within Forestry Tasmania is that, (with)
this new aggregated retention, this new logging, they log at a loss,”
he said. “The only way they can do it is if they can absorb that loss,
or if there’s still money left over from those handouts from the 2005
election to subsidise it. They’re finding they can’t turn a profit
logging by this method. “Obviously they’re quite prepared to run their
entire business at a loss, because they have done for the last few
years.”
http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2009/01/17/50155_todays-news.html

— Posted to http://forestpolicyresearch.com via gmail to posterous and
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