An activist occupying a tree on the edge of Bathurst Resources Cypress Mine expansion, has effectively stopped the expansion for a third day. Activist, Hamish Edwards has been camped on a platform 10 meters up a tree since Easter Sunday, blocking machine access to the site with ropes that are supporting the platform.

Edwards has been verbally trespassed by police, but has indicated that he won’t be coming down anytime soon.

“Communities fought for almost a decade to stop the Cypress Mine, and all of the consequences that they warned about have eventuated - vast amounts of forest has been felled, acidic runoff is killing the waterways, wildlife habitat has been destroyed. We can’t allow Bathurst to keep expanding its reach” says Edwards.

The Cypress Mine was hotly contested by the community groups including the Save Happy Valley Coalition from 2004-2013, because of the known environmental damage it would cause.

Bathurst Resources is in the process of expanding the Cypress Mine into an area of old-growth beech forest. At least 10 hectares of this roroa/great spotted kiwi habitat has been slashed by Bathurst contractors in just the last year.

“A line must be drawn. We can’t allow fossil-fuel barons to keep destroying these landscapes and the creatures that inhabit them, so that they can keep burning dirty coal. If we give them an inch they will take a mile.”

“Bathurst is already trying to use the undemocratic fast-track bill to continue spreading it’s carnage into the Denniston Plateau.”

Bathurst Resources has listed a proposal for the largest coal mining project in New Zealand under the fast-track, a proposal that would expand into the Denniston Plateau.

Almost a year ago exactly, 70 people from across Aotearoa set up a camp on the footprint of the abandoned Escarpment mine in protest to Bathurst’s proposal to turn the Denniston Plateau into an open cast coal mine. Six others occupied coal buckets on the aerial ropeway, shutting it down for three days.

Months later, in July and August, two activists occupied the aerial ropeway again, stopping its use for 23 days.

“So much damage has already been done, but we have the power to stop more trees from falling in Bathurst’s pursuit of dirty fossil fuel money.”

“We will keep coming back until Bathurst finally gets the message: their coal mines are not welcome.”

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