Please Help Us Stop The Australian Government Dumping Toxic Waste On The Reef
Get involved with the fight to stop the dumping, both literally and metaphorically, on the Great Barrier Reef.
Could you imagine dumping crap all over this?
OK, this is not really like my usual posts which are wacky, to say the least.
However, since the very life of the Great Barrier Reef is on the line, I thought I would explain a bit about what's going on.
In north Queensland, near the town of Bowen, which in itself is just south of Townsville, there is a coal loading port called Abbott Point.
This coal loader port is the main gateway for export of coal from the nearby Galilee Basin coal fields.
A couple of the major players in the coal game, never-done-a-stroke-of-work-in-her-life, Gina Reinhardt is one, want to redevelop this coal loader port to allow for even more ships to come in and export even more bloody coal to China (mainly).
To do this they have to dredge the area around the coal loader, to deepen the channel.
Then once they made this plan, they, the coal companies, realized they needed somewhere to dump this toxic crap, dredge spoil it's called.
These eco-vandals have now decided to dump it nearby in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
Needless to say, it is the most appalling act of eco-destruction, all for short term profit from the coal fields.
The dredge spoil is super-toxic.
Coal ships have been coming in and out of that port since 1984, and dropping oil, grease, bits of coal and mercury paint has been leaching off the bottom of the hulls of these ships.
All of this crap has been falling to the bottom of the ocean since then, and now will be part of the dredge spoil that will be dumped in the marine park.
The health of the Barrier Reef is already parlous, years of runoff from bad agricultural practises, mainly to do with sugar cane have seen to that.
And this toxic dump could signal the end for the massive fragile beauty of the Reef near Townsville.
Although the dump is in a small area, I'm sure you've already understood that the plume from this dump site will stretch for hundreds of kilometres up and down the Reef, spreading its message of death all the way.
So its a horrible, senseless decision, done for ideological reasons by Greg Hunt, the Australian Minister for Destroying the Environment.
However, you can still do something from your computer screen to stop this.
Greens Senator Larissa Waters is fighting this tooth and nail, and she can be reached at : Senator Waters, you can contact her and offer verbal support.
GetUp! are running petition and financial campaigns to fund the lawyers of the Queensland Environmental Defenders Office, who are trying every legal means to stop this.
GetUp! can be contacted here: GetUp! Reef Fighting Fund.
But most of all you can contact the minister who made the decision to allow dumping, Greg Hunt.
He is an evil man, truly.
No one sane could agree to dump toxics all over the Great Barrier Reef.
Tell him what you think here: Greg Hunt is an eco-bastard.
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