If the mill goes ahead you can just about guarantee
1) unapologetic breaches of air and water quality standards
2) plundering of forests when plantations fail to deliver.
The excuse will be preservation of jobs in a difficult competitive environment.

"The 128 scientists who propose further studies might not be “green opponents” as stated by Gunns, they might instead be well informed experts with opinions that are worth hearing." AND PIGS MIGHT FLY.

"Community and business groups might not be “misinformed” or “extremists” but rather people saying something that the company could turn to advantage." AND PIGS MIGHT FLY.

Let me get this straight. Some sort of post Y2K, IT change management onanista raises the POSSIBILITY that there might be some minimal substance to the anti-mill scarenario floggers and then has the gall to present it as fact that it is all Gunns fault for failing to achieve harmony with substance impaired econazis. And then he throws in a mess of barely rudimentary economics to garner some minimal credibility. AND PIGS MIGHT FLY, fella.

Perseus, wait until you lose your water as a result of plantations sucking it out of the catchment before it can reach the streams. I had to give up my career as a farmer because the river I drew water from virtually dried up four years after Forestry chipped the myrtle forests in the catchment and replaced them with water hungry nitens. Rivers and Water Supply Commission halved our licence the first year then halved it again the next and the river still stopped flowing two farms below me. Where was the protection for me and my family's livelihood then? I should of called myself a timber worker and my job would have been sacred. Mike Bolan is right..open your eyes.

I have noted something very interesting, especially over the last few days. Whenever someone posts an article or comment that expresses some concern about the Gunns pulp mill proposal, derogatory personal attacks are the response from the pulp mill proponents. I am caused to wonder whether this is all a continuation of the Gunns strategy of litigation and smear campaigns against those who dare to question their assumptions and suspect methodologies. Maybe those who use personal affront as a defence measure would do well to listen to people like Mike Bolan, and they might learn how to contribute intelligently to a most important public discourse.

Gosh, Ian D thinks he has discovered a trend to ad hominems by people who support the mill. Well take your head out of the paper bag, fella, and check out all the cheap shots and innuendo dumped by the rabid greens on all the other threads here. Do you seriously think we came down in the last shower?

I actually agree that plantations can seriously deplete groundwater. But so, too, can native regrowth and the vegetation thickenning that takes place over more than 90 million hectares of open woodland in Qld and NSW. But where were the greens with their protests about this impact on stream flows over the past decade?

They were so keen to apply a complete ban on any sort of tree removal that they lumped in the clearing of broadscale native regrowth in the same measures that controlled clearing of climax old growth. The dumb Turdistas were too thick to comprehend that one type of clearing was actually restoring ecosystem values while the other, far less prevalent type, was doing the opposite.

And for what? To prevent salinity? It is now on public record that more than 70% of all recorded salinity in Queensland was mapped and statutorily defined as "Remnant Ecosystem", ie, it was there, in larger extent, before european settlement. So here we are, heading into a hotter dryer climate with millions of hectares of excess vegetation sucking the life out of rivers all over the country. And the ecotrogs have the gall to blame it on farmers.

Everything the green movement has anything to do with is contaminated by fraud and incompetence. So any suggestion that Gunns "might" learn something from their critics is "AAA" rated bollocks.

It would appear, if one believes Perseus, that any information distributed by Pro-Pulp Mill people is not read, not believed, or certainly not given any credence, by the media, scientists or anyone. Whereas any information distributed by lefty greenies posing as academics is believed by all and sundry.

It seems to me Perseus that in general people are intelligent enough to make their own view using their own intelligence etc from the material available and that view is anti-pulp mill.

So perhaps instead of the abuse dished out by Gunns and their fellow travellers, and I include you as one of them Perseus, a little sensible factual debate may have convinced us all that a pulp mill was a good thing.

But now after so much skulduggery and underhand dealing by the Lennon Government and by Gunns, I, like many others I suspect, find it very hard to believe anything that comes from the pro-pulp mill side of the issue.

Ulysses