By Nneka Nwogwugwu
Proposals to extend Paris Metro Line 1 are meeting fierce pushback from a local environmental collective, which says the project would destroy part of the capital’s Vincennes forest and permanently destroy biodiversity in the area.
The collective Touche pas à mon Bois de Vincennes (‘Don’t touch the Vincennes Forest’) says the project to extend Paris’s Line 1 Metro would result in a “massacre” and an “irreparable” mutilation of the wooded public park on the eastern edge of Paris.
“When we talk about the trees being cut down, it’s not just the trees. All of these trees are home to protected species,” explains Marie Noelle Bernard, a member of Touch pas à mon bois. “The environmental impact is enormous. Ecocide is not yet recognised in French law, unfortunately. But this will be an ecocide.”
Metro Line 1 cuts straight through the centre of Paris, running from the business district of La Défense in the west to the Château de Vincennes in the east. The project would add three new stops to the eastern end of the line, extending the Metro to two Paris suburbs: Montreuil and Fontenay-sous-Bois. Île-de-France Mobilités, the transport authority that oversees transport links and the different companies operating in the Île-de-France region, estimates that 95,000 new travelers would pass through the three new stops every day.
For people living in those areas, the extension would provide an alternative way of getting into central Paris, thereby relieving motorway congestion and overcrowding on busy public transport links. The RER A, a commuter train line that also connects central Paris with La Défense and Fontenay-sous-Bois, is the busiest rail line in Europe.
But despite the advantages, locals are sounding the alarm about the catastrophic effect the plan could have on the environment.
A petition launched by Touche pas à mon bois, which has gathered over 60,000 signatures, says that “thousands of trees, some of them hundreds of years old, will be cut down” to make way for the €1.3 billion project.
Plans for the development show that the use of a tunnel boring machine would necessitate the deforestation of 20,000 square metres. Touche pas à mon bois says that the damage “will be irreversible”, adding: “None of us, in our lifetimes, will ever again see the wood as it is today.”
Source: Yahoo news
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