Joe Harawira

Harawira died in January 2017. His tangi was held at Pūpūāruhe Marae in Whakatane.

In the 2012 Queen's Birthday and Diamond Jubilee Honours, Harawira was awarded the Queen's Service Medal, for services to sawmillers' health.

Harawira retired from the mill when his health declined in 1982, and suffered near-total paralysis by the 1990s, which he said was due to toxic chemical poisoning from his years at the mill. Many other workers at the mill suffered similar health effects, suffering similar symptoms of fatigue, depression, respiratory problems, heart and liver disease, and high levels of cancer.

SWAP campaigned to have all remaining contaminated sites cleaned up, including 25 dumps in the Whakatane area. For many decades, the mill had dumped contaminated sawdust, bark, scrap timber, and chemicals in and around Whakatane and the Rangitaiki Plains, including the Kopeopeo Canal, which was sometimes called New Zealand's most polluted waterway. Kopeopeo Canal and other constructed waterways were designed to drain low-lying farmlands across the Rangitaiki Plains. Between 1950 and 1989, these canals received point-source discharge containing waste from the timber treatment mill, where PCP had been used as a wood preservative. The PCP was contaminated with dioxin and furan (PCDD/PCDFs), resulting in dioxin-contaminated sediment. Remediation efforts on the canal received international recognition in 2019.

Joseph 'Hohepa' Harawira QSM (13 March 1946 – January 2017) was a Maori kaumātua (elder) and environmental campaigner in New Zealand, prominent for raising issues of dioxin poisoning around Whakatane in the Eastern Bay of Plenty.