Rainforest to be Cleared For Rocket Launch Pad

by Fred Pearce

Besides international corporation, Guyana's Natives are battling the government, which is mapping the rainforest for potential commercialization and restricting traditional use. In a press released by the Rainforest Foundation, a recent government order was cited: A project funded by the World Bank extended a national park from 5 to 242 square miles without consultation or notification to the 500 people in the nearby village. This community no longer has access to the areas they traditionally use for fishing, farming and hunting, and will be fined as "trespassers" if found within the reserve.]

One of the Caribbean's last jungles could soon echo to the sound of rocket launches. Guyana has agreed to sell a large tract of pristine swampy rainforest to a Texan rocket-launch company, Beal Aerospace, for just $3 an acre.

The deal, signed in April, replaces Beal's original plan to build its $250 million launch pad on the Caribbean island of Sombrero in Anguilla, which angered environmental scientists. Guyanese prime minister Samuel Hinds hailed the project-which could see more than 20 commercial satellite launches a year -- as "a quantum leap for Guyana into the new millennium."

But critics say the country will gain little economically, while rainforest dwellers will be thrown out of their homes, swamps drained, forests cut down and ancient archaeological remains trashed.

In the U.S., Beal Aerospace is testing 230-foot rockets fuelled with a mix of aviation fuel and hydrogen peroxide which will carry 5-ton payloads. The vice-president of Beal, David Spoede, says the company hopes to be launching from the site in Guyana in three to four years' time. Guyana is close to the equator, which is the best place to launch satellites into geostationary orbit above the equator. The European Space Agency's spaceport is in nearby French Guiana. From Guyana, the launch route eastwards will be over open ocean in case of mishaps.

Beal plans to buy, then partially drain, 40 square miles of swamp on the north bank of the River Waini and lease from Guyana a buffer zone three times as large. Hinds calls the site "generally unproductive land never before commercially utilized." But the deal documents acknowledge that up to 54 families living there would have to be moved. Sharon Atkinson of the Amerindian Peoples' Association in Guyana says many others will lose their right to hunt, fish and gather thatch and timber there.

The launch area is part of the homeland of the Warao people, whose settlements date back 7000 years and are only now being excavated. "Building a rocket launch site will very probably destroy the archaeological record here before it has been fully explored," says Terry Roopnaraine, a Guyanese anthropologist at the University of Cambridge. The World Monuments Fund in New York recently placed the area on its list of the hundred most endangered archaeological sites.

The large exclusion zone around the launch site would also disrupt harvesting of the Waini basin's rich supplies of manicole "heart of palm." Natives harvest more than 2 million palm stems from the basin annually and sell them to a French canning company for sale in Europe.

Spoede responds to these concerns by saying that the project will only go ahead if an environmental impact assessment, which is about to start, proves acceptable to both sides. But he adds that drainage work would probably begin in six months, before completion of the assessment. Many Natives have backed the scheme, says Spoede. "They want job opportunities for themselves and their children," he told New Scientist.