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Bjork's mom continues hunger strike The mother of pop diva Bjork said Sunday she was frail but determined after three weeks of a hunger strike aimed at persuading the world's largest aluminum producer to abandon a $3 billion project in the Icelandic highlands. Hildur Runa Hauksdottir stopped eating Oct. 7 to try to persuade Pittsburgh-based Alcoa Inc. to pull out of the scheme to build an aluminum smelter and hydroelectric plant in the wilderness area. Environmentalists say the project will ruin the area above Vatnajokull, Europe's largest glacier, in east Iceland. Hauksdottir, 56, told the Associated Press that she had lost more than 14 lbs (6 kg), had difficulty remembering certain words and felt very tired. "I'm not sure I could go on for another 40 days," Hauksdottir said. "But it is incredible how much support I am getting and this helps a great deal. "When I first started this hunger strike, I thought I'd spend most of the time in bed. But there isn't time for that. There's too much to do." Alcoa and the Icelandic government have already started work building access roads and tunnels for the scheme above Vatnajokull glacier. The state-owned power company plans to build 11dams to create a 22-square mile reservoir, which will provide the hydroelectric power for an Alcoa-owned smelter at Reydarfjordur on the coast. Home to reindeer, rare geese and plants, as well as glacial rivers, snow-covered volcanoes and deep, basalt canyons, the area was the setting for Bjorks video for the 1997 single, Joga. Environmentalists say the project will cause massive erosion and pollute rivers and deltas with glacial mud. Bjork herself criticized the scheme when it was first suggested in 1999, and in June the World Wildlife Fund urged Alcoa and the Icelandic government to think again. Hauksdottir, who has appeared widely in the Icelandic media since starting her hunger strike, said she Bjork's fame had helped gain publicity for the cause. "I've never used her name ever before but in this case it was needed," she said. "What is happening is environmentally criminal and the Icelandic taxpayer will continue to pay for this madness for decades. "It will destroy thousands of square miles of some of the most beautiful and spectacular wilderness on the planet." Hauksdottir is surviving on a homeopathic tonic, taken six times a day, and tea made from hand-picked Icelandic herbs such as thyme, jarrow and angelica. "I am determined, yes," she said Sunday. "Someone has to do something and if that has to be me, so be it. I have told Bjork that I will know when the time has come to stop. But that time has not come yet." Alcoa says the project offers Iceland an opportunity to diversify from traditional - and declining - industries such as fishing. More than 2,000 construction jobs and hundreds of permanent posts will be created in a region that Icelanders are forsaking for work in the capital and elsewhere. When the smelter begins pumping out 295,000 tons (tonnes) of aluminum a year by 2007, 80 percent of Icelands electricity will be devoted to making the metal. Company spokesman Wade Hughes said Alcoa, which employs 129,000 people in 38 countries, was committed to sustainable industrial development and had a good track record on conservation. "This is one of the best hydro projects being planned anywhere in the world," Hughes said. "It will involve no relocation of people, no impact on endangered species, no danger to commercial fisheries and no denial of access by tourists and naturalists to the affected area."
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