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Committee scrutiny not good enough: Allison said: "Typically that committee does not undertake a thorough examination of the sorts of issues that have already been raised by Senator Milne and which I will raise as well. It is doubtful that that could be in any way a thorough going over of this agreement, so why not refer it to a committee for proper examination?"

Why now? "I would also ask why it is that we have to have this deal with Russia right now. This is a major departure from the previously cautious approach that Australia has taken to who gets to have its uranium. At the end of an electoral cycle why is it that suddenly this agreement needs to be renegotiated and signed? I think that is something of a mystery. It is also questionable whether, with an election looming, even the treaty process which is being promised will have any effect at all".

Russia has enough of its own uranium: The first point I want to make is that we are being sold something of a pup, because it is not clear to me how the government can justify Russia needing our uranium. Russia has its own uranium. Even if Russia were to install 30 reactors over the next 30 years, there would be no need for us to rush into an agreement with Russia to hand over our uranium to it. It does not need it at this point in time. In fact, Russia has 700 tonnes of highly enriched uranium which was extracted from the nuclear weapons that it dismantled in the 1990s. That highly enriched uranium is required to be mixed with uranium in order to make a substance which is then exported to other countries, notably the United States".

What’s really going on: "The real issue here seems to be not so much that Russia needs our uranium but that Russia needs our uranium so that it can pass a product off to the United States. At least half of the United States’ supply of reactor fuel has been sourced from Russia over recent years. But there is, as I said, 700 tonnes of highly enriched uranium still sitting there. Not only that but there are 10,000 weapons. It has been said that Russia needs to be congratulated for reducing its armaments, its nuclear weapons arsenal. It did; it got rid of mostly obsolete weapons, and that presumably did not pose a problem, but it still holds 10,000 nuclear warheads—probably enough to blow up the planet as we know it. Why Australia has not taken the opportunity to leverage out of Russia an agreement to a time frame within which it will dismantle the remainder of its weapons is anyone’s guess".

Reference: Lyn Allison, Senator for Victoria, Leader of the Australian Democrats, Commonwealth Senate, 17 September 2007 (on Committees: Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee Reference)

Opposition result of misunderstanding: "The other users of the lower aquifer are industrial or township users," said Hanna. "There are not many industrial users in the area, but there are one or two townships that use it. This just makes it all the more important that we get this bit right, because we do not want that underground aquifer to be diminished unduly when communities actually rely on it for their drinking and household water.

Grape growers and irrigators fearful: A lot of concern was expressed by farmers and other water users in the Penola region about the significant water allocation to the mill. Some of that concern was based on a misunderstanding that the allocation of water was from the top aquifer, which is where the grape growers and irrigators generally get their water.

Top already overallocated: "In respect of the top aquifer, there are a number of areas around Penola where the water is already overallocated (in other words, there is an unsustainable drawing of water), and there are also a lot of bores where the trigger levels have been reached.

Bores have tried out: "These trigger levels are simply measurement points where the sustainability of the bore is threatened. There are many bores in the region not far from the mill where those trigger points have been exceeded. In other words, for some water users around Penola, and around the area where the mill will be situated, there are real problems in drawing sufficient water for their crops, their orchards, etc".

Problem of possible aquifer interconnection: "The problem really arises if, indeed, there is some sort of interconnectivity between the upper and lower aquifers," Hanna said. "If there is heavy additional use of the lower aquifer, and if there is a connection or a leakage between the two, there will be additional pressure on the upper aquifer. There was some evidence of such interconnectivity. Mr Glen Harrington, a long-time public servant and now independently an expert consultant in relation to water resources, acknowledged some interconnectivity. However, our science is simply not at the level where we can determine what or even where it is. But there is probably some sort of leakage between the upper and lower aquifers in the region not far from where the mill will be and where Kalangadoo, for example, draws its water.

Scientific basis for caution: So there is a scientific basis for some real concern about additional large allocations of water from the underground aquifer. Water has only been cautiously allocated from that aquifer. I set out all that information because of the real concerns of a number of existing water users, particularly of the upper aquifer. If we find out in future that there is substantial leakage from the upper to lower aquifer, we will have to revise the allocation policy for the lower aquifer, including that for industrial users such as the mill, in future. These are the concerns that led the committee to recommend that the government have the ability to reduce water allocation to the mill but not increase it."

Reference: Kris Hanna, Member for Mitchell, Political Party, Independent, House of Assembly, South Australia, 11 September 2007.

Erisk Net, 16/9/2007

No observers from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) were on hand, so the flight may not officially break the previous record of 30 hours, 24 minutes, 1 second set by Northrop Grumman’s RQ-4A "Global Hawk" on March 21, 2001.

But the FAI is currently reviewing a second test flight of the Zephyr that lasted 33 hours, 43 minutes.

The Zephyr is an ultralight aircraft made of carbon fiber. Though it has a 60-foot (18-meter) wingspan, it weighs just 66 pounds (30 kilograms) and is launched by hand.

During the day, the plane draws on power supplied by paper-thin solar arrays mounted on its wings, while simultaneously charging batteries used for night operations.

With further improvements, it’s hoped that not everything that goes up has to come down. The solar-powered aircraft could stay in the sky indefinitely, acting as a permanent surveillance source or temporary communications relay during an emergency.

"Both flights were achieved in the face of thunderstorms and debilitating heat in the hostile environment of the New Mexico high desert in the summertime," Paul Davey, Zephyr business development director at QinetiQ, said in a press release.

"They have proved that an autonomous UAV can be operated on solar-electric power for the duration required to support persistent military operations."

Definitions: The Minister said: "The following definitions are relevant to the operation of this Division:

• domestic customer means a customer—(a) who acquires electricity primarily for domestic use; and (b) who satisfies other criteria (if any) prescribed by the regulations for the purposes of this definition;

• excluded network means a distribution network that supplies electricity to less than 10 000 domestic customers;

• qualifying generator means a small photovoltaic generator — (a) that is operated by a domestic customer; and (b) that complies with Australian Standard AS 4777 (as in force from time to time or as substituted from time to time); and (c) that is connected to a distribution network in a manner that allows electricity generated by the small photovoltaic generator to be fed into the network, other than where the distribution network is an excluded network; and

• small photovoltaic generator means a photovoltaic system with capacity up to 10kVA for a single phase connection and up to 30kVA for a three phase connection."

Reference: P.F. Conlon, Minister for Energy, House of Assembly, South Australia, 12 September 2007.

Erisk Net, 16/9/2007

The river bed of the River Murray was running dry just across the border in Victoria and water had been kept upstream of South Australia as part of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission’s management plan to ensure flow across the border in coming months, reported The Advertiser (10/9/2007, p. 8).

River impassable to larger craft: "Within weeks State Cabinet will consider plans for Adelaide’s first desalination plant to reduce reliance on the river," The Advertiser reported. "The river flow has been checked at Lock 7, between Renmark and Mildura, reducing it to barely a trickle over the past week. A small channel on one side of the river allows for the passage of small boats through the lock but houseboats are unable to navigate the shallow waters."

September dry unusual: Riverland photographer Glenn Milne said "a couple of garden hoses" would squirt more water past the lock. "There’s a huge sand bar that’s three-quarters the way across the river and the rest of it is only very shallow," he said. Lock masters said the river bed often dried out in June when river flows were reduced but it was unusual for the river still to be dry in September when irrigation water usually was released.

Less than 25pc of monthly average flow: Monthly inflows into the River Murray had been below average for the past 23 months. In August, 360 gigalitres flowed into the river, compared with the long-term monthly average of 1570 gigalitres. The release of water from Hume reservoir has been as low as possible in winter.

The Advertiser, 10/9/2007, p. 8

The Origins

The concept of the 100-mile diet started to spread in 2005 when pioneers James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith decided to eat foods produced within 100 miles of their Vancouver home, which is surrounded by mountains, a valley and water. “That was big enough to have the potential to feed us, but small enough to feel genuinely local,” says MacKinnon. They lived to tell about their experience in the book Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, which hit shelves last May. Fiction writer Barbara Kingsolver’s testament to eating mostly homegrown food with her family, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, came out the same month.

Confining “local” to a certain radius is not a new idea. Gary Nabhan, author and founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, a nonprofit organization that preserves heirloom seeds that connect Native Americans with the land, ate foods produced within 250 miles of his Arizona home for a year in 2000.

Although I was inspired by these conscientious consumers, just deciding what I would eat for breakfast made me nervous. I planned to make few exceptions—no coffee, tea or orange juice. I prepared menus and talked to people who had tried the diet themselves, but since my success depended on my locale, out-of-towners’ advice wasn’t very helpful. Still, I became more encouraged as I watched shoppers test for ripeness in the over-stocked stands.

Shopping Around

Leaving Union Square, lugging two bulging bags of produce, I mentally reviewed my purchases: five ears of corn and a cucumber from Migliorelli Farm, $2.50; a half pound of flounder from Long Island Sound, $2.25; and tomatoes, a chili pepper and an eggplant from Oak Grove Plantation, $8.80. Unfortunately, I still needed items like butter and milk—which would have melted or curdled, respectively, if I lugged them home from the market.

At the Union Square market, produce prices ran high, but a new study conducted at the University of Seattle shows that the prices at most farmers’ markets might actually be lower than at traditional grocery stores. Normally, I spend about $125 on food every week. When I totaled all my farmers’ market purchases and added the items I had left to buy, I saw that for me, the 100-mile diet cost about $160 a week—almost 30 percent more than usual.

For milk and butter, I walked to my neighborhood organic market. The cashier explained that they used to carry local dairy, but there was always at least one broken package in the delivery, so they stopped ordering it altogether. Finding local staples was proving more frustrating than I imagined. I tried my luck at Whole Foods. The store’s greeter told me that 80 percent of the food sold there is local and signs above the produce state the food’s price and origin. I even found dairy items that had eluded me at my neighborhood organic grocery, including butter from Ronnybrook Farm Dairy, almost exactly 100 miles away.

But few grocery stores make it easy to learn where their products come from. Raoul, the assistant manager at Steve’s C-Town, a grocery chain near my apartment, said the store buys its produce from many of the 50 merchants that distribute out of Hunt’s Point in the Bronx, the most profitable distribution site in the world.

Pineapples from the Philippines, bananas from Costa Rica and avocados from California travel to Hunt’s Point via truck, train, boat or plane, and then to supermarkets like C-Town. Mean-while, many foods grown nearby are not sold locally. “Most Americans would be surprised to hear that most of the garlic found in most of the supermarkets is from China,” says Brian Halweil, author of the book Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket.

Dining In

My kitchen table was barely visible beneath all the fruits and vegetables. My dinner plan included acorn squash with a pat of butter, brown sugar and cooking sherry. I debated using the brown sugar and sherry—neither are produced locally—and decided to use them anyway. After all, what good is any diet without a little wiggle room?

I’m a terrible cook, but when I smelled the baking acorn squash, I almost called the Food Network. When I tasted my masterpiece, I was in heaven. It was flavorful, filling, and especially comforting, knowing my community and the larger world all benefited from my food choices.

In the weeks that followed, I dined on red onion, cucumber and dill salad; red potatoes with sautéed eggplant, zucchini and rosemary; and tomato and basil with goat cheese, delighting in each fresh dish. Although I no longer eat 100-mile (or 200-mile) foods exclusively, I still incorporate them into my diet—and I always visit the Union Square or Prospect Park Green Markets. A community of epicureans, traditionalists and environmentalists is growing around the appreciation of local fare. As Cheryl Nechamen, an activist who organizes her community to try the 100-mile diet, says, “It touches a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons.”

SUSAN COSIER is a science, health and environment reporter from Brooklyn, NY.

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