After several great months with SurfCore I am moving my blog to my own site; please visit http://greensurfing.blogspot.com/ to read on! Thanks to Sam at SurfCore for the blog idea and the inspiration. Here's a teaser of my latest blog:

Tom and I are at the Nueva Aldea pulp mill for a tour. Tom is a surfer from the United Kingdom who is an expert in large factories and their engineering. He's here on a round-the-world trip and offered his services to Save the Waves Coalition. We enter the executive offices of Nueva Aldea and are greeted by a public relations lady in a conference room dominated by a giant wooden table with fresh bottled water, coffee, tea and cookies. The floor-to-ceiling windows look out on a neighboring vineyard and a perfectly manicured lawn. Ivan the plant's public relations manager greets us with two engineers in tow: the engineer responsible for the mill's effluent discharge into the Itata River, and the engineer who oversees for the construction of the mill's 50-kilometer pipeline being built to the sea.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006. The train ride out of Santiago is gorgeous but not very fast. As I sit in my seat I watch skyscraping Andes mountains as a vertical wall to my left; in the foreground are vineyards, small snowmelt rivers, giant monoculture agricultural fields dotted with roaming horses; the distant coastal mountains to my right contain the millions of acres of Oregon pine and Australian eucalyptus that feed Chile's infamous forestry industry. At 7 AM the train is full of affluent agricultural engineers and winemakers talking on their cell phones as they travel to their fields from Santiago for the day. These guys are the scientists and managers behind the mass-produced wines, table grapes, oranges, tomatos, apples and asparagus that arrive jet-set fresh to your local supermarket during the northern hemisphere winter. Their prime export season is just now beginning.

Yes, it's true that I have not updated this blog since August. And you're wondering, what happened to Joshua? Did Celco's henchmen finally catch up to him and send him packing to Antarctica? Has he been paid off by the Chilean forestry industry? Has he finally gotten a real job with a real schedule?

No, no, and no. Things have certainly been busy these past months, and internet access is rather sparse in rural southern Chile, not to mention slow when there is a connection! Please stay tuned over the next week as I will update this blog in delayed segments with my stories and reports of the past three months. Suffice to say that things have been very interesting, including: an international "green" debate with one of the surf industry's largest and oldest brands (they dropped the ball, disrespected the locals and showed the true colors of the surf industry - not very green); a glamorous fashion event; and my visit to the pulp mill itself!

The next step for the Itata water program is now in progress: analysis and an internationally published report by Sandor Mulsow at the University Austral of Chile in Valdivia. The pulp mill has begun its "marcha blanca" testing of all operational systems and is now "cleaning" all operations in preparation for full bleached pulp production to begin in the following weeks.

“The ocean has an infinite capacity to absorb our industrial waste.” – Ricardo Lagos, former president of Chile, February 2005, Santiago, Chile.

Thank the gods of the ocean that Chile barely has petroleum reserves of its own. That's what I'm thinking as I'm sitting in a cafe in Santiago de Chile, between environmental surf missions, reading of chaos in the Middle East, Iraq, Israel... Having to import all of your oil into a remote South American nation makes for high oil prices, angry truckers, and sweet STABILITY. No fundamentalists seeking martyrdom, no foreign armies protecting their "interests", no private-public mega-corporations seeking stockholder fortunes. Or is it so? How stable is this famously heralded economic miracle of Latin America?