The Environmental Cost of One Man & His 4.6bn Friends’ Dendrophilia
And then there were fewer. And fewer. And fewer. And fewer. We’re told that money can’t buy happiness but it does get you a hell of a lot of other things: sex, drugs, cars, houses, shoes, clothes, planes, and trees. Big trees. The best trees. In Georgia, money even makes trees sail the Black Sea. It all started with a century old tulip tree, the liriodendron tulipfera, on its maiden voyage 14 miles up the coast to Shekvetili, where an upcoming privately-owned arboretum was waiting to welcome it “home”. Then came the others: a forest’s worst of gigantic trees, uprooted from Georgia’s western subtropical coastline and forcibly relocated north to provide decoration for a private garden.
More tulip trees, lime trees, magnolias, eucalyptuses, cypresses, have been taken from across western to Georgia over the last two years to Ivanishvili’s garden. Money may not grow on trees but it certainly buys them, a peculiar quirk that allows Georgia’s richest man to wreak untold environmental damage with impunity across this part of the country, destroying centuries of natural beauty. As Giorgi Lomsadze writes for EURASIANET: “Scores of men and heavy machinery have been deployed in the western regions of Adjara and Guria to dig out trees from private properties, roadside shelterbelts and hilltop groves. An entire infrastructure is being built, with roads carved through the woods and new piers protruding into the sea, to facilitate the multimodal shipping process. On occasions, overhead power lines for trains have had to be removed and traffic stopped to let the trees, their massive soil balls potted in girdles of picketed wood and mounted on heavy haulers, pass though to reach the sea.”
Nata Peradze of the green activism group Guerrilla Gardening sheds light on the scale of the damage: “It’s not just about the trees that were transplanted. Others are knocked down to make way to transport them.” Indeed, it all makes for pretty depressing reading, with “minefield-like fields of ruin” now visible on either side of the main highway along the Black Sea coast to the Turkey, writes Lomsadze. Bidzina’s appetite is seemingly insatiable, he continues,
“This month the mass transplantation has moved further south, approaching Batumi, Georgia's seaside capital. Recently released drone footage showed an entire hill ravished of its once lush vegetation. Rising above the shore near the village of Buknari, the hill is being dug out and bulldozed through. Concrete slabs are being laid to create a makeshift road for the haulers to go in and out.”
All the destruction in Buknari was wrought for two liriodendron trees, two magnolias and a eucalyptus, with all other trees “chopped down to clear the way,” Rezo Kharazi, the local representative of the opposition National Movement Party and author of said drone footage, told the EURASIANET journalist. Kharazi has been raging against the dying light in an attempt to stop this madness, engaging himself in a David vs. Goliath battle as he documents the toll of this sick obsession, filming and creating before-and-after satellite map comparisons of the carnage. The numbers are depressing: “By our estimates, about 3,800 trees have been cut down because they stood in the way, and about 150 have been transplanted,” he said.
In a country where you can realistically survive on $2500 dollars a year, 4.6bn friends and an estimated 30% control of the economy gets you, well, quite far. Indeed, it doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out how this is all ‘legal :’ “Generous compensation, dispensed through Ivanishvili’s Cartu Group, have secured cooperation from local, mostly poverty-stricken communities for some time. But public anger has been growing…. Ivanishili and Cartu Group say the transplantation project is causing no environmental damage, and the Georgian Ministry of Environment nods in agreement. Local authorities crank out permits, even police are recruited to help with transportation. Police briefly arrested members of Peradze’s Guerrilla Gardening group when they tried to prevent the removal of that original liriodendron. The exodus of trees continues effectively unopposed,” Lomsadze writes for EURASIANET.
Peradze herself doesn’t see much light at the end the end of tunnel either, with Ivanishvili simply too rich to be stopped, “Environmentalists and geologists on the government’s payroll, and also the useless Green Party, have all been suborned and they all carry water for Ivanishvili,” she said.
Máté Földi