Halt the Salt - email friends

How to email friends, colleagues, acquaintances to enlist additional support for Halt the Salt:

Please open a new email in your email software.

Address it to your friends/associates/acquaintances
Enter a subject eg Halt the Salt recommendation
Use your mouse to highlight everything underneath the ruled line below, copy and paste into the body of your email
Put your name or signature
Insert the suggested text below. Change things if you wish

Dear Friends/Colleagues
I've just learnt of a very worrying project for an area that should be World Heritage listed.

This is what I've just supported, here's a bit of information to see if you would share my concerns, here's the web site - www.haltthesalt.org.au, please go for it.

Regards
__________
Send your email

Halt the Salt

We have deep concerns about a salt mine proposed for our precious Western Australian coast. We need your help now to stop this unsustainable project going any further.

Exmouth Gulf - one of Western Australia's most environmentally important areas - is under potential threat from a plan to build one of the world's biggest salt mines which would cover 411 square kilometres.

You can help by signing the submission at: http://www.haltthesalt.org.au/hts_submission/hts_submission.php

Exmouth Gulf is one of the richest marine environments in Australia. It is a nursery for humpback whales, dugong and turtles. The mangrove systems on the eastern margins are areas of high primary productivity feeding and restocking both the Gulf and the famed nearby Ningaloo Reef.
Its World Heritage values have already been identified. It must be protected.

The Halt The Salt campaign and AMCS believe the risks associated with this massive project are too great and the project must be abandoned.

Widespread and deep concern among many organisations has led the State's peak conservation groups to join forces for the first time with peak commercial and recreational fishing interests in the Gulf to stop the project.

Threats include:
Potential loss of mangroves and associated biota such as algal mats in an area of recognised significance for these systems.
Potential shipping and salt production impact on marine fauna such as whales and dugongs and their supporting habitats.
Potential impact on marine and terrestrial nutrient inputs introduced by the presence of the salt field and the significance of this to the Gulf’s wider ecosystem.
Development in an area recommended to be set aside as a marine conservation reserve.

Straits Salts' proposal involves the extraction of huge quantities of seawater via two or more massive intake pump stations. These pumps would also remove vast numbers of weakly swimming prawn and fish larvae and post larvae fish from the Gulf ecosystem and the fisheries.

The proposal will involve the impoundment of enormous quantities of toxic bitterns, the highly concentrated by-product of solar salt product. This material could then enter the Gulf ecosystem through seepage or wall failure, potentially resulting in a major 'kill' event.

While visiting http://www.haltthesalt.org.au you can meet the residents, see the landscape (some excellent photography) and read more about the area and the problems that this proposal will offer the area.

Other ways to help are also suggested on the site.