Greeks rally outside Parliament July 8, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in Greece News.trackback
Greek environmental demonstrators rallied outside Parliament, cycled through nature trails and sent thousands of protest e-mails to the government.
Sunday’s action was not part of Live Earth concerts around the world, but was held to protest damage to the Parnitha National Park caused by a recent wildfire. The blaze destroyed thousands of hectares of pine, fir and oak forest on Mount Parnitha, near Athens, between June 28 and July 3. Protected species of deer, turtle, snakes and other animals were also killed in the fire or forced to scatter.
Several thousand demonstrators, blowing whistles and chanting «shame on you,» gathered outside Parliament, at Athen’s Syntagma Square, on Sunday afternoon, some holding up pieces of burnt trees from Parnitha forest. «This time, people have really had enough … we need more greenery in Athens,» said one of the protesters, who was waving a green flag. «Look what happened other times … forests burnt down and houses appeared in their place.
Earlier Sunday, cyclists gathered at Parnitha, about 20 kilometers north of the capital, other protesters with cell phones and digital cameras took pictures of the burnt forest, and bloggers continued a mass e-mailing campaign to government agencies.
Protesters are demanding tougher forest protection laws, arguing the government mishandled the Parnitha firefighting effort. They also claim rapid urban expansion in the capital has been allowed spread across southern Attica region at the expense of the environment, recently aided by large infrastructure projects built for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. Greater Athens is home to around 4 million people, or more than a third of Greece’s population.
«There is a genuine interest from the public about the environment that we’ve never seen before,» Constantinos Liarikos, of the conservation group WWF, told The Associated Press. This protest started spontaneously, with some young people exchanging text messages on their cell phones, and it grew from there in a totally grass-roots way … We are simply backing this effort, Liarikos said.
The Parnitha fire broke out during a June heat wave across southeast Europe that saw temperatures reach 46 C (114.8 F) in Greece and killed more than 40 people in the Balkans and Italy. Greek firefighters had been battling wildfires at the rate of 100 per day, when the blaze swept across the Parnitha National Park and surrounding forests.
The WWF group said more than half of the 3,800-hectare protected forest was destroyed in the fire. It wants that protected area to be expanded eight-fold to include surrounding forests, and to impose an overnight traffic ban to protect roaming animals. «Right now the animals are scattered and scared, they don’t know where to go. Lots of cars passing through the forest, especially at night, will only make this worse,» Liarikos said.
grhomeboy
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