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April 16, 2009
Westport on the West Coast of New Zealand was a regional town for a resource based economy---dairy farms, logging old growth native forests, and coal mining. Just like Tasmania it experienced the long battle between logging environmental protection from the 1970s onwards. By 2008 these had been resolved in favour of protecting the environment as wilderness and developing international eco-tourism to grow the economy. The tourist strategy, from what I could see, seemed to be working.
That leaves coal and, more problematically, the energy-based coal-fired power stations, in the warmed up world of climate change. The latter was effecting the West Coast landscape, which was drying out, especially in the northern part of Westland. Coal then became problematic.
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