in the Creuse, more than 2,000 people demonstrate against two industrial “mega-projects”

After a good-natured mobilization in Guéret, the police used tear gas at the end of the route.

Around 2,000 opponents of two industrial projects accused of “destroy” the forests of Limousin demonstrated in Guéret, in Creuse, on Saturday October 5. The demonstrators strolled through the center of this city of 13,000 inhabitants, in a good-natured atmosphere punctuated by brief moments of tension with the CRS, who used tear gas at the end of the march.

Before the departure of the procession, the demonstrators erected a “surveillance lookout” made of wood, on the site where a pellet factory is to be established by 2026 on the outskirts of the city. According to its promoter, Biosyl, one of the largest French manufacturers of wood pellets, this factory, supported by the forest cooperative Unisylva, should make it possible to heat 70,000 homes using “important forest resources” but today “underexploited”And “strengthen sustainable forest management”.

But for the opponents, led by the local collectives Canopée and Syndicat de la montagne limousine, as well as France nature environment and the CGT, this project, like that of an extension of a sawmill in Egletons (Corrèze), to make it the largest in France, embodies “industrialization of the forest”. “These are real deforestation machines, which only feed on wood from clear-cut deciduous trees and which will release carbon into the atmosphere”exclaims one of the spokespersons for the demonstration.

“Biosyl = Biocide”, “For living forests”, “the wood industry has a future without mega-projects”could we read on the signs brandished by the crowd, surrounded by a strong police presence. Present in the procession, the leader of the LFI deputies, Mathilde Panot, denounced the fact “that there be no democratic debate on the question of the forest”.