ALERT! Protect Moscow’s Khimki Forest from Rampant Corruption
Moscow’s Khimki Forest [search] is 2,600 acres of public conservation land that is an urban refuge for people and wildlife, particularly important now Russia's record heatwave. Despite laws that prohibit road building and logging, Khimki forest is being bulldozed and cleared. Environmentalists working to protect this forest are defending the trees with their bodies while they and journalists are being attacked by thugs and arrested by police. Protesters have responded in kind by vandalizing the regional administrative buildings.
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Thanks for supporting this important campaign! This project could be just the first of many: similar roads and development projects are slated for 26 public forests and parks around Russia, and the bigger cloud is the Moscow Central Ring Road proposal, which activists estimate would need to bulldoze 100,000 hectares of forests around the city, its last green buffer available to Mucovites.
A note about the vandalism of Khimki Town Hall: it's unclear who the vandals were: they were not affiliated with the environmentalists leading this campaign, first of all, and secondly, it's been speculated that they are the same masked goons that the construction company hired to attack the activists on July 15. In both cases, cops used the violence as pretext to arrest the activists, not the goons, so it is suspicious.
See my post at Grist.org for more info on this whole issue,
http://www.grist.org/article/moscow-forest-battle-boils-over/
Erik
Posted by: Erik Hoffner | July 31, 2010 9:48 AM