150,000 Acres of Chile's Rainforest Protected

Santiago – Conservation groups have acquired 150,000 acres in the heart of the world’s second largest remaining temperate rainforest, Chile’s Valdivian Rainforest, thanks in part to a decision by the Chilean Supreme Court to strike logging permits on the property. The Supreme Court’s decision sent a clear message to Chile’s government and wood products industry that the destruction of the country’s native endangered forests will not be tolerated. At issue is the common and very lucrative practice in Chile of buying native forests, clearcutting them, and then converting them to tree farms. For more than 30 years in Chile, forest conversion has not only been tolerated, it has been promoted. The permits struck by the Chilean Supreme Court, previously granted to logging company, Bosques SA, would have been the largest current forest conversion project in Chile on record. Chile’s environmental practices have come under increased international scrutiny over the past year as the country has experienced perhaps its most contentious environmental campaign, which has focused on the fate of Chile’s endangered native forests.

If the Bosques SA project had moved forward, it would not only have destroyed a huge swath of the second largest remaining temperate rainforest in the world, it would also have threatened the rare siempre verde (“forever green”) forest type that is unique to southern Chile, as well as endangered river otters, wildcats, marsupials, woodpeckers, owls, frogs and plants that exist nowhere else in the world. Tree species endangered by the Bosques SA project include the alerce, known as the “Chilean redwood.” The alerce’s typical lifespan (over 3,000 years) is exceeded only by California’s bristlecone pine.

“The days of barbaric practices such as destroying endangered forests to make way for environmentally-catastrophic tree farms are numbered,” said Aaron Sanger of ForestEthics, a U.S. group leading the international environmental campaign to protect Chile’s forests. “Any wood products company still associated with those practices will lose, just as Bosques SA lost in Chile’s Supreme Court.”

A key factor in the Court’s decision against Bosques SA, say analysts, was the strong resistance to this project expressed by hundreds of citizens around the world. Chile’s Agriculture Minister and the Executive Director of Chile’s National Forest Corporation (CONAF) received letters, emails and faxes from around the world strongly condemning the project. Chile is particularly sensitive to international opinion on the environmental practices of its wood industry as wood products are the second largest component of Chile’s export economy. The United States is the largest consumer of Chilean wood products, which are used primarily in the building of new homes.

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