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Category: Articles

  • Front Yard Food takes off

    The Generator’s Front Yard Food project is up and running with the first garden going into Lennox Heads in August. Ina Gooley is now the proud owner of 12 square metres of vegetable seedlings on what was once her front lawn, protected from the summer sun and salt breezes by a screen of native food plants.

    Ina Gooley in her front yard

    Before

    After
    Before the work started Voila! Front Yard Food

    Volunteers came to help build the garden and local businesses donated generously to make the project possible. Mark Duncan of Lennox Sustainable Gardens designed and managed the project helped by Breens Gardens and Team Generator. Early Risers organic seedlings donated the seedlings, North Coast Landscapes donated the native food plants, Lennox Landscape Suppliers provided the soil, and Murwillumbah Worm Farms provided compost and food. Charlie Starrett provided the macadamia compost and construction materials.

    Building a path In go the boxes for the garden beds Planting the garden
         

     

     

  • Guerrilla gardeners get organised

    Part beautification, part eco-activism, part social outlet, the activity has been fueled by Internet gardening blogs and sites such as GuerrillaGardening.org, where before-and-after photos of the latest “troop digs” inspire 45,000 visitors a month to make derelict soil bloom.

    “We can make much more out of the land than how it’s being used, whether it’s about creating food or beautifying it,” says the movement’s ringleader and GuerrillaGardening.org founder, Richard Reynolds, by phone from his London home. His tribe includes freelance landscapers like Scott, urban farmers, floral fans and artists.

    “I want to encourage more people to think about land in this way and just get out there and do it,” says Reynolds, whose new handbook for insurgent planters, “On Guerrilla Gardening,” is out this week.

    The activists see themselves as 21st century Johnny Appleseeds, harvesting a natural bounty of daffodils or organic green beans from forgotten dirt. It’s a step into more self-reliant living in the city,” says Erik Knutzen, coauthor with his wife, Kelly Coyne, of “The Urban Homestead” to be released in June. The Echo Park couple have chronicled “pirate farming” on their blog, Homegrown Evolution. Guerrilla gardening, Knutzen says, is a reaction to the wasteful use of land, such as vacant lots and sidewalk parkways. He’s turned the parkway in front of his home into a vegetable garden.

    One of a slew of DIY gardening currents, such as permaculture (design of highly sustainable ecosystems), urban homesteading, composting and free fruit movement, guerrilla gardening is a response to dwindling green space, limited land and suspicions about food sources, say experts. It’s also part of a time-honored American tradition of gardening public spaces.

    “It reminds me of the Vacant Lot Cultivation societies,” says Rose Hayden-Smith, a Food and Society Policy Fellow with UC Cooperative Extension. In the wake of the economic meltdown of the 1890s, many American cities, from Detroit to Philadelphia and Boston, formed Vacant Lot Cultivation associations to encourage residents to grow food on public land. The Liberty and Victory garden campaigns of World Wars I and II, respectively, also exhorted Americans to raise food on untended public land.

    “If the federal government was paying attention, they’d be encouraging this right now,” with the price of food and fuel,” adds Hayden-Smith.

    “Guerrilla gardens can serve the same purpose as the Victory gardens,” says Taylor Arneson, editor of the Los Angeles Permaculture Guild newsletter and a proponent of sustainable food production. He and a friend raised a farmers market worth of crops — corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, lettuce, watermelon, cucumber and more — in a guerrilla dig at a large planter bed in front of an office building on Bundy Drive in West Los Angeles. Farming in broad daylight, they got support from office workers and kids excited to see real cornstalks.

    Arneson’s approach is to plant first and make arrangements with sympathetic locals to hook up to water taps later. Keeping a guerrilla garden irrigated is one of the trickiest parts of the game. Arneson, a graduate student in village-scale permaculture design, says he rules out 99% of the vacant lots he scouts because they don’t have a reliable water source. He looks for some elevation or berm that will let the plants catch water.

    After more than a year of growing crops at the Bundy site, he and his friend planned to live on the produce grown there last winter. They planted garlic, potatoes, radishes, carrots, lettuce, onions and more, but in January the owner of the property, after first leaving a cease and desist letter, rototilled the whole plot.

    Property owners who don’t take kindly to others gardening on their land have laws on their side. But most freelance growing is done in the nooks and crannies of public land, where the law is murkier. Spokespersons at the Los Angeles city departments of Public Works, and Recreation and Parks were unaware of laws proscribing citizen gardening in public spaces. A patch of wildflowers on a city-owned lot wouldn’t be removed until it dried up and became a fire hazard, according to the city’s Street Services’ Lot Cleaning Division.

    Back at that median oasis in Long Beach, Scott is making introductions. “This is Aloe nobilis. Put them in the ground and in five years you could turn out 10,000 plants,” he says. Scott may not have title to the land, but he tends it as if he did, weeding and pulling out trash — he’s found such debris as car parts and condoms in there. He’s bummed when he spots a bare patch. “It’s kind of depressing when I see how much work needs to be done,” says the Norwalk resident, who works for the government. “This whole section, there’s something in the dirt. This is old landfill and they probably just used that dirt.”

    He built the garden up over a period of years, planting early in the morning to avoid detection. Police have questioned Scott at his traffic island during early morning plantings, part of the uncertainty that comes with guerrilla gardening. Several of his unsanctioned gardens along the San Gabriel River have been wrecked by agave thieves, who, he thinks, steal the leaves to make tequila. “You just take a deep breath and go back to it,” he says.

    But homeowners in Long Beach have encouraged his work on the median. Today the garden is a veritable nursery. He’s taken out hundreds of plants incubated here, some of which he moves to unapproved gardens he’s planted and tends in Norwalk and Whittier. Why does he bother with all the work, expense and dodging authorities? “I’d like to show cities that they can use plants like these, not have to water as much and cut down on landscaping costs. Within two to three years, a site like this can generate thousands of plants.”

    Scott sees his Long Beach garden as a showcase for drought-tolerant, low-maintenance city landscaping. But he’s in a bind. How does he broach the subject, given his unsanctioned status? “I wish I could get together with the city,” he says. “But I’m apprehensive and pretty much keep under the radar.”

    Meanwhile, over at landscaping headquarters for the city of Long Beach, superintendent of grounds maintenance Ramon Arevalo waxes on about one of more than a dozen gardens done by “road planters,” as he calls guerrilla gardeners. “It’s like an underwater scene, a cactus garden that looks like a corral reef. It’s beautiful. It’s been there on Loynes Drive for 10 years, and we don’t know who did it. You should see this place!”

    It’s Scott’s garden. I tell him I have seen it and know the mystery man who planted it. Arevalo is ecstatic. “I can’t wait to know him! He’s been the talk of this place for 10 years. He’s like the 007 of gardening,” says Arevalo, laughing heartily. He says a homeowners association has complained that their medians are ugly. Why can’t theirs look like that cactus island?

    Arevalo is impressed by Scott’s use of drought-tolerant plants and assures there will be no repercussions if he comes forward. There is no law against planting on city landscaping, except for ficus trees, whose roots wreck roads and sidewalks. The city discourages unapproved gardening but tries to work with road planters it discovers. “If you want to do this, my advice is to contact myself or the council person,” says Arevalo. “We want to partner with people who care about where they live.”

    At a time of shrinking city budgets and skeletal landscaping staffs, it’s a hint at where guerrilla gardening could go — to approved brigades of citizen gardeners helping cities turn wasted space into food and flowers. After years of looking over his shoulder, Scott can come in out of the cold dawn plantings. He has Arevalo’s phone number and attention.

    “I’ll do whatever he wants,” says Arevalo, chuckling. “I want to buy him a coffee.”

  • Hear about the mechanics of shark bite

    Dr Wroe's modelSr Stephen Wroe of the University of New South Wales, backs up Valerie’s observations in the field with evidence from computer models that mimic shark bite. Hear him interviewed on the Generator by Rosy Whelan.

  • Sea Shepherd takes on shark finners

    Paul Watson in Sharkwater This compilation of interviews about life with Sea Shepherd mainly refers to Paul Watson’s work with whales. Of course, Watson has been actively involved in saving sea life in general and is central to Sharkwater, the film made by Rob Stewart. Find out more about Sharkwater .

    Listen to The Generator talking to Paul Watson himself and people who have sailed with him. 

  • Village goes local in supermarket protest

    Of the 164 families who live in Martin, 101 have signed up as members of Future Farms for an annual £2 fee, although the produce can be sold to anyone who wants to buy it.

    The "community allotment" sells 45 types of vegetables and 100 chickens a week, and is run by a committee which includes a radiologist, a computer programmer and a former probation officer.

     

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    The Good Life

    In The Good Life, Tom and Barbara (played by Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal) try to live a self-sufficient lifestyle by converting their garden into allotments

    Nick Snelgar, 58, who came up with idea in 2003, said the project was gradually "weaning" villagers off of supermarkets.

    He said: "I like to think of it as a large allotment in which there are lots of Barbaras and Toms working away.

    "There are also Margos as well, but everyone can get involved.

    "The nearest supermarket is six miles away. Of course people still have to go there for things like loo roll and deodorant and fruit you can’t grow in Britain.

    "So we aren’t boycotting supermarkets entirely but we are gradually weaning people off them and as a result are reducing our carbon footprint by not using carrier bags and packaging."

     

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    village of Martin

    Every Saturday the produce is sold at the village hall

    so much that last year it had a turnover of £27,000 – most of which was ploughed back into the scheme.

    He said: "We began with vegetables and we found that all the skills we needed were here in the village.

    "After the vegetables we introduced chickens and then pigs and we learned inch by inch.

    "We have other producers whose goods we sell and they include a sheep farmer and someone who has honey.

     

    The farm sells 20 pigs a year as well as chickens and lambs and is now starting to sell beef

    "It has been a fantastically interesting experience and we now have four plots of land covering eight acres.

    "There are 164 families in the village and they include about 300 adults and 100 children, so there are about 400 creatures to feed.’

    Every Saturday the community comes together with their produce which is sold at the village hall.

    Mr Snelgar added: "The most popular thing we sell is carrots.

     

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    The majority of families have signed up to the scheme, but anyone can buy the produce

    "People love the smell of fresh carrots, and we pull them out of the ground the day before we sell them.

    "We don’t yet do dairy, but we hope to include that in the future and we also intend to grow raspberries and strawberries.

    "We set the prices by working out how much the food costs to produce. We then add 20 per cent.

    "Our pork sausages, for example, are sometimes cheaper than sausages you buy in the supermarkets. We break even and all money gets ploughed back in.

     

     

    "When we started some people thought it would fail and we’d never last, but as the years have gone by more and more people have become involved.

    "It is also a talking point in the village and it’s great to see people walking to the village hall on a Saturday morning talking to each other. It has created a sense of belonging."

  • Wall Street plays carbon trading

    OXFORD, England — Marc Stuart and Pedro Moura Costa have become multimillionaires in a booming new market designed to fight global warming.

    Now, their empire is under attack.

    Their firm, United Kingdom-based EcoSecurities Ltd., helps companies in the industrialized world meet their obligations to pollute less by selling them "credits" that fund clean-air projects in poorer nations. Last year, some $9.4 billion in these credits were traded, up from almost none four years earlier.

    The market’s anything-goes early days now appear to be ending. United Nations officials who regulate the trade have started questioning scores of proposed projects, from hydroelectric plants in China to wind farms in India. The issue: whether they provide real environmental gains, or are just padding the pockets of middlemen like EcoSecurities.

    [Marc Stuart]EcoSecurities’ woes are a prime example of how tough it is proving to be to launch a coordinated world-wide attack on global warming. The carbon-credit industry’s growing pains come just as Congress is considering similar pollution-cutting rules targeting U.S. industries.

    EcoSecurities is one of the main players in an international market that was created as part of the Kyoto Protocol to combat global warming. A key premise of the system is that, because greenhouse gases damage the atmosphere no matter where they originate, society should attack them first where the cleanup is cheapest, in the developing world. But policing that far-flung market has proved to be tricky because it involves valuing a commodity, climate-warming emissions of gas, that is far less tangible than oil or gold. [Go to map.] See a map with photos and details on some of EcoSecurities’ top credit-generating projects world-wide.

    The "credits" sold by EcoSecurities and its rivals are supposed to fund clean-air projects in the developing world that otherwise wouldn’t get built. But the U.N. is worried that players in the market may be gaming the system by putting a green imprimatur on some projects that would have happened anyway, defeating the intent of the U.N. program.

    The tougher U.N. scrutiny is necessary to "ensure the environmental integrity of the system, because otherwise it’s not achieving its purpose," says Kai-Uwe Barani Schmidt, the top administrator for the U.N. board that referees this trade.

    EcoSecurities is one of the largest and most aggressive of a dozen or so major firms that scour the globe for projects like these, then profit by selling credits to help fund them. The main buyers are companies in Europe and Japan, whose governments have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, a global agreement imposing pollution caps on industrialized nations. Like EcoSecurities, most of the project developers are based in Europe.

    That business is now in turmoil. Late last year, EcoSecurities said it would fail to deliver one-quarter of the credits it had promised. Its stock has fallen nearly 70% since that write-down — and 80% since its peak last summer. The firm’s two co-founders, Messrs. Stuart and Moura Costa, have lost about $147 million on paper due to the stock’s overall decline.

    Mr. Stuart acknowledges that his firm, in its race to dominate the field, sometimes pushed the envelope. "The first couple of years, this business was a land grab," he says. But many projects, he says, didn’t generate as many credits as originally estimated, leading to last year’s big write-down.

    The firm’s approach "was very successful at first, but it did leave a bit of a mess to clean up," says Mr. Stuart, a former Ultimate Frisbee champion at the University of Pennsylvania, who holds a master’s degree in environmental law and economics from the London School of Economics. He is frank about the problems the industry faces.

    "I guess in some ways it’s akin to subprime," says Mr. Stuart, 43 years old, referring to the subprime-debt woes rattling the U.S. economy. "You keep layering on c- until you say, ‘We can’t do this anymore.’"

    Pushing Back

    EcoSecurities has helped assemble about 10% of all developing-world projects approved so far by the U.N., more than any other player. Its main rivals include Camco International Ltd., which says it, too, has had projects delayed. Another rival, AgCert International PLC, says the tightening of U.N. rules has contributed to the company’s filing for protection from creditors in Ireland, its home country.

    EcoSecurities is pushing back. It notes that the vast majority of its projects ultimately get approved. And it argues the U.N. crackdown hurts the environment more than it helps, since it delays clean-air projects and cuts off a funding source. It says regulators have failed to set clear rules — and now they’re changing their standards midstream.

    One thorny issue: Who should vouch for the quality of clean-air projects? EcoSecurities says the U.N. scrutiny adds bureaucracy because it duplicates work already done by independent auditors who are hired to vet all projects. The U.N. panel should stick to an "executive and supervisory role," EcoSecurities says.

    U.N. officials have questioned whether the auditors have been tough enough. The concern centers on whether auditors, who are hired by project developers, are adequately staffed to police the environmental legitimacy of the swelling number of projects. The auditors strenuously defend the quality of their oversight.

    While that debate rages, EcoSecurities has been busy refocusing on projects less likely to raise red flags. For instance, it is shifting to projects to curb secondary greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxide, produced in obscure industrial processes like nylon making. The problem, as EcoSecurities executives point out, is that targeting secondary gases does nothing to combat fossil-fuel use, which according to the U.N. is the primary man-made contributor to global warming.

    The situation is "extraordinarily frustrating," Mr. Stuart says.

    The trade in developing-world credits results from a provision of the Kyoto Protocol called the Clean Development Mechanism. A 10-member U.N. board vets proposed projects to ensure their environmental legitimacy. The independent auditors accredited by the U.N. act as the board’s field inspectors, traveling the globe to certify whether a project is up to snuff.

    Each credit is essentially a permission slip to emit one ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Currently these credits sell for $16 to $24 apiece.

    EcoSecurities went public in late 2005 and was an immediate market darling. Mr. Moura Costa, 44, a Brazilian forestry expert living in Oxford, recalls that by early 2006 he was telling the firm’s lawyers to ink contracts for new projects at the rate of one per working day. "It was a madhouse," he says.

    Permissive Board

    Over the next 18 months, EcoSecurities contracted more than 200 additional projects around the world — from Nicaragua to Inner Mongolia — promising tens of millions of emission credits. Its stock price nearly tripled. Messrs. Stuart and Moura Costa became multimillionaires on paper.

    EcoSecurities’ rise coincided with a permissive U.N. board. In 2004 and 2005, the board automatically approved 95% of the projects proposed to it, according to U.N. statistics. [A Leader Stumbles]

    Mr. Schmidt of the U.N. says the board was thinly staffed at the time. By its current standards, he says, some proposals "probably went through without" proper scrutiny.

    In mid-2006, there was an early hint that regulators were toughening their stance. The issue: manure.

    Decomposing manure at farms emits methane, a greenhouse gas. The projects involve placing a tarp over the manure to capture and dispose of the rising gas. EcoSecurities expected at least 10% of its credits to come from projects like these.

    But in 2006 the U.N. tightened its rules, requiring animal farms to measure the amount of methane they were capturing rather than simply estimating the number based on a formula — and use the lower number. That move slashed by more than one-third the number of credits a typical animal-waste project would produce for sale.

    Suddenly, the projects no longer made economic sense, Mr. Moura Costa says. EcoSecurities canceled most of them, erasing about $100 million in potential profit.

    Still, investors remained impressed with the company, because it continued to grow. Last July, with the stock near its peak, Mr. Stuart sold 2.2 million shares for about £8 million, or about $16 million, and Mr. Moura Costa sold 1.3 million shares for about £5 million as part of a secondary offering, according to financial filings. The two men remain the biggest shareholders with a 20% stake between them.

    Having money was a big change for the two men, Mr. Stuart says, recalling that when EcoSecurities was young he routinely charged up thousands of dollars of debt on his credit card to help keep it operating. After the stock sale, Mr. Stuart traded his 1994 Mercury Sable for a $55,000 black Lexus hybrid sedan.

    Around then, the U.N.’s crackdown started in earnest. The U.N. staff zeroed in on projects they had reason to believe might be financially viable even without revenue from the sale of credits. Last year, the U.N. board gave automatic approval to only 57% of proposed projects, down from 95% in 2004 and 2005. Overall, it rejected 9% of proposed projects last year, more than double its rejection rate in 2006.

    One of the proposals blocked was an EcoSecurities project at a grain-processing plant in Uberlandia, Brazil, to replace oil-fired boilers with one using renewable energy like scrap wood. The U.N. said EcoSecurities hadn’t proved that it needed revenue from selling credits to make economic sense.

    EcoSecurities wasn’t surprised the project got shot down: The company’s own calculations showed that replacing the boilers made marginal economic sense even without the sale of credits.

    The project "was in the gray zone" of the rules, Mr. Stuart says. He likens the U.N. panel to the Internal Revenue Service: "You push things as hard as you can, within what you think are reasonable guidelines. But every now and then the IRS will push you back."

    Value Judgment

    The U.N.’s Mr. Schmidt says it doesn’t surprise him that borderline projects like these get submitted. "If I were not to expect such behavior, I would be living in the wrong world," he says. Nevertheless, he says, "I don’t see this particular case as trying to cheat."

    Determining whether or not a project needs carbon-credit revenue is "a value judgment," he says. "It is one of the biggest challenges" of the carbon trade.

    Mr. Schmidt, who has known Messrs. Stuart and Moura Costa for more than a decade, says he respects the company. "We have a very good relationship," he says. "We also know we have certain roles to play."

    U.N. officials acknowledge that calculating whether a project can be economically viable without carbon-credit revenue is subjective. For instance, the calculus can swing widely based on whether oil prices surge, or fall. Similarly, it involves guesstimates of how long a project — whether a hydroelectric generator or methane-recapture effort — will remain operable.

    EcoSecurities has more than 100 projects approved by the U.N., and only a handful rejected. But many of its proposed projects now are being held up by the U.N. for review. That’s bad news for EcoSecurities because it delays its ability to start selling credits. The company originally operated on the assumption that U.N. approvals would take two months, on average. But now they’re taking an average of nine months.

    Obsessed with Detail

    Starting last year, the regulators were "getting more and more obsessed with detail," raising questions that weren’t relevant to projects’ environmental integrity, Mr. Moura Costa recalls. He and other EcoSecurities executives expressed frustration to U.N. officials. The company’s message, he says: "This is ridiculous."

    Last fall, concern about the U.N.’s more activist role boiled over at EcoSecurities’ headquarters here in Oxford. The company uses a computer database it calls "Carbo" to monitor the rate at which its projects produce credits. As the U.N. clamped down, Carbo’s "siren was going off," Mr. Stuart recalls.

    In October, EcoSecurities executives gathered in the boardroom to confront a striking reality: In the space of months, the entire landscape of their industry had changed. Poring over their biggest projects, they debated how much of their business would need to be simply written off.

    A big write-down "would have significant consequences to the company," Mr. Moura Costa recalls warning.

    Ultimately, on Nov. 6, the company announced its write-off of 23% of the credits it had promised to deliver. Its stock fell 47% that day.

    Since then, the stock has fallen further. It closed Friday on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM at 84 pence, giving it a market capitalization of £94.9 million.

    Last month, EcoSecurities, which has 300 employees in 30 offices world-wide, reported a widened loss for last year of €45 million on revenue of €7.2 million.

    EcoSecurities’ largest shareholder, other than the two founders, is banking giant Credit Suisse, which bought an approximately 9% stake last summer when the stock was near its peak. Since then, Credit Suisse has lost two-thirds of its $60 million investment.

    "We don’t believe the market is valuing the stock fairly," says Paul Ezekiel, who heads Credit Suisse’s carbon business and who sits on EcoSecurities’ board.

    Given the lack of clarity in the U.N.’s rules, it’s not fair to fault EcoSecurities for trying to maximize the number of credits it produces, he says. "It’s like saying the speed limit’s going to be between 50 and 90. So do you drive 55 or do you drive 85?"