How about some good news for once? You must grow tired from all the bad news I bring you. I do. Our good news comes from Chile, that slim country in the south. Until a recently a dictatorship, Chile is again trying on the fashions of democracy.
No sooner had Augusto Pinochet begun to relax his iron fist than multinational corporations from the Northern Hemisphere started lining up for a share of Chile’s natural resources. Among the first was Norway’s Resource Group International, or RGI. RGI maintains a fleet of fishing vessels – factory trawlers – that roam the oceans of the globe, depleting one fishery after another. RGI commissioned a new trawler – the American Monarch – to fish off the Chilean coast. The American Monarch, which is neither American nor a monarch, is the largest fishing vessel ever built, at almost 100 meters long. It’s able to catch and process 500 tons of fish each day. It cost 56 million dollars. Even though the United Nations says 70 percent of the world’s fisheries are fully or over-exploited, RGI plans to build 16 more trawlers after the American Monarch.
In Chile, the coastal fishermen decided they had no desire to trade a military dictator for an economic one. They banded together and raised their voices to protest the American Monarch’s fishing permit. With help from Greenpeace in Chile, Norway and the U.S., they exposed RGI’s global record of hit-and-run fishing. Just as the American Monarch was being launched from its Norwegian shipyard, the Chilean government pulled its permit. It now sits mothballed at RGI’s pier in Seattle. Fifty-six million dollars and it has yet to catch as much as a single perch. But that’s not all. As part of its fishing application process, RGI made some land-based investment in Chile. They chose to invest in a scheme by Trillium Lumber Company, of Bellingham, Washington to cut down the old-growth lengua forest on Tierra del Fuego, at Chile’s southern tip. Last month, the Chilean Supreme Court pulled the permit on the logging operation, in part because it violated the right of Chilean citizens to live in a clean environment.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t over yet. Both RGI and Trillium are well-financed companies with phalanxes of lawyers and lobbyists. They’re not about to just turn around and go away. But I will tell you this – RGI has announced they are canceling 12 of the 16 factory trawlers they were planning to build and they’ve put two others on hold. I’ve got to give Chile credit for that.
I give credit to Chile because she is a democracy so young that she has the right to a clean environment written into her constitution. I’d like to think the fishermen and supreme court justices were thinking of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda when they sounded their bell of democracy.
In one of his last poems, Neruda wrote:
Is the sea there? Tell it to come in.
Bring me
The great bell, one of the green race.
Not that one, the other one, the one that has a crack in
its bronze mouth.
And now, nothing more, I want to be alone with my
essential sea and the bell.
I don’t want to speak for a long time, silence!
I still want to learn,
I want to know if I exist.
The One That Got Away
How about some good news for once? You must grow tired from all the bad news I bring you. I do. Our good news comes from Chile, that slim country in the south. Until a recently a dictatorship, Chile is again trying on the fashions of democracy.
No sooner had Augusto Pinochet begun to relax his iron fist than multinational corporations from the Northern Hemisphere started lining up for a share of Chile’s natural resources. Among the first was Norway’s Resource Group International, or RGI. RGI maintains a fleet of fishing vessels – factory trawlers – that roam the oceans of the globe, depleting one fishery after another. RGI commissioned a new trawler – the American Monarch – to fish off the Chilean coast. The American Monarch, which is neither American nor a monarch, is the largest fishing vessel ever built, at almost 100 meters long. It’s able to catch and process 500 tons of fish each day. It cost 56 million dollars. Even though the United Nations says 70 percent of the world’s fisheries are fully or over-exploited, RGI plans to build 16 more trawlers after the American Monarch.
In Chile, the coastal fishermen decided they had no desire to trade a military dictator for an economic one. They banded together and raised their voices to protest the American Monarch’s fishing permit. With help from Greenpeace in Chile, Norway and the U.S., they exposed RGI’s global record of hit-and-run fishing. Just as the American Monarch was being launched from its Norwegian shipyard, the Chilean government pulled its permit. It now sits mothballed at RGI’s pier in Seattle. Fifty-six million dollars and it has yet to catch as much as a single perch. But that’s not all. As part of its fishing application process, RGI made some land-based investment in Chile. They chose to invest in a scheme by Trillium Lumber Company, of Bellingham, Washington to cut down the old-growth lengua forest on Tierra del Fuego, at Chile’s southern tip. Last month, the Chilean Supreme Court pulled the permit on the logging operation, in part because it violated the right of Chilean citizens to live in a clean environment.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t over yet. Both RGI and Trillium are well-financed companies with phalanxes of lawyers and lobbyists. They’re not about to just turn around and go away. But I will tell you this – RGI has announced they are canceling 12 of the 16 factory trawlers they were planning to build and they’ve put two others on hold. I’ve got to give Chile credit for that.
I give credit to Chile because she is a democracy so young that she has the right to a clean environment written into her constitution. I’d like to think the fishermen and supreme court justices were thinking of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda when they sounded their bell of democracy.
In one of his last poems, Neruda wrote:
Is the sea there? Tell it to come in.
Bring me
The great bell, one of the green race.
Not that one, the other one, the one that has a crack in
its bronze mouth.
And now, nothing more, I want to be alone with my
essential sea and the bell.
I don’t want to speak for a long time, silence!
I still want to learn,
I want to know if I exist.