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  • Greenpeace calls GM approval corrupt

    Environmental scientist Jo Immig and canola grower Juliet McFarlane, who both sat on the committee, said the go-ahead to plant GE canola should not have been given. They argue that the segregation of GE and non-GE canola cannot be guaranteed and non-GE farmers have no legal protection if their crops are contaminated by GE.

    Appallingly, Primary Industries Minister Ian McDonald’s decision to introduce GE canola into the state is effectively beyond reproach, since he introduced legislation to ensure that his decision to approve the crop could not be challenged in court. This is unprecedented for legislation of this nature and Greens MP Ian Cohen has accused the minister of “treating the parliament as his own fiefdom.”

    The NSW government established the committee to “assess whether industry is prepared and capable of segregating genetically modified (GM) and non-GM food crops”. However, the committee is cloaked in secrecy – with the identity of committee members not being publicly revealed. Committee members can face prison sentences of up to three months for divulging committee discussions. Having such a gag order on a public committee is also unprecedented.

    The government was required by law to record the pecuniary (vested) interests of the committee in a book that could be viewed by the public, however, this is stored in Tamworth.
    On two occasions Mr Cohen unsuccessfully asked minister McDonald to provide the names of the committee and declarations of pecuniary interest. It is clear why the minister did not want to reveal them – the book shows that the majority of committee members have vested interests in GE crops. This is tantamount to letting the fox look after the chickens.

    Immig said that the representatives on the committee were quite clearly very pro-GE people. "It’s hard to imagine that the committee would come up with any other outcome other than to eventually approve, or suggest to the minister that he approve the genetically modified canola,” she said.

  • 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."

  • Business wakes up to peak water

    Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chief executive of Nestle, the foods group, says businesses must wake up to the value of water. He warns of an impending crisis over supply, in the developed as well as the developing world, because of climate change and problems of over-use.

    He says businesses may struggle in the future to find the water they need and will be forced to pay much higher prices for it, if more is not done to conserve the resource and distribute it more rationally.

    These problems are not confined to poor countries, warns Mark Lane, partner at the law firm Pinsent Masons: "[While] it is true that in the developed world most people have access to toilets and a sewerage system … the problem that the developed world now faces is to adapt its waste-water systems to the changing circumstances brought about by climate change, and sudden much more extreme bouts of rainfall."

    Mr Lane points out that in much of the developed world, the wastewater infrastructure has been constructed on the assumption of a temperate climate.

    With global warming, which will bring more storms and floods and intense bouts of rainfall interspersed with periods of drought, that assumption no longer holds good.

    As a result, in many countries the wastewater infrastructure will need to be expanded and upgraded to cope with much greater volumes of storm water. "This will cost huge sums of money," says Mr Lane, "and one key issue, for example in England and Wales, is how such infrastructure improvements are to be paid for."

    Businesses can prepare by using water more efficiently. Some companies have started to take action, and a growing number of technologies are becoming available for businesses to make their use of water more efficient.

    Pepsi Bottling Group (NYSE:PBG) , the drinks company, has managed to conserve 1m gallons of water per year at each of its plants, using new processes for cleaning equipment. The company can save 13,000 gallons a day on certain high-speed lines by using air instead of water to clean packaging. The company also uses 10 per cent less water through its upgraded reverse osmosis purification systems.

    B&Q, the retail chain, has been actively monitoring water consumption since 2003. The company set a target to reduce mains use across UK outlets by 10 per cent by the end of 2008, but found that by the end of 2007 it was saving 20 per cent.

    This has been achieved using methods such as harvesting rainfall for toilet flushing and using "smart water metering", allowing store managers to see in real-time how much water they are using. Monitoring use in this way lets the company quickly identify and deal with leaks, and helps prevent excessive usage.

    Other techniques include recycling water. For instance, Dow Chemical (NYSE:DOW) at its Terneuzen site in the Netherlands has been re-using about 70 per cent of the 2.6m gallons of the municipal waste water produced daily in the area.

    Cutting water use can also help to cut energy use – Dow found its efforts at Terneuzen reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 60,000 tonnes per year.

    But companies and consumers may be unaware of the amount of water they use, and the amount that goes into products.

    Embedded water, also known as virtual or hidden water, is the water used in the production of goods that is invisible to the end user.

    Examining the amount of embedded water in common products can give startling results. It takes 2,400 litres to produce a hamburger, and 11,000 litres to make a pair of jeans, including the water needed to grow the cotton.

    Tim Jones, principal at Innovaro, says companies could attach "water labels", just as some are using carbon labels showing how much greenhouse gas was emitted during production. This would enable purchasers to make decisions based on environmental principles.

  • EU backs off biofuels

    ian Traynor – The Guardian  

    The European commission is backing away from its insistence on imposing a compulsory 10% quota of biofuels in all petrol and diesel by 2020, a central plank of its programme to lead the world in combating climate change.

    Amid a worsening global food crisis exacerbated, say experts and critics, by the race to divert food or feed crops into biomass for the manufacture of vehicle fuel, and inundated by a flood of expert advice criticising the shift to renewable fuel, the commission appears to be getting cold feet about its biofuels target.

    Under the proposals, to be turned into law within a year, biofuels are to supply a tenth of all road vehicle fuel by 2020 as part of the drive to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by the same deadline.

    The 10% target is "binding" under the proposed legislation. But pressed by its scientific advisers, UN authorities, leaders in Europe, non-government organisations and environmental lobbies, the commission is engaged in a rethink.

    "The target is now secondary," said a commission official, adding that high standards of "sustainability" being drafted for biofuels sourcing and manufacture would make it impossible for the target to be met.

    Britain has set its own biofuels targets, which saw 2.5% mixed into all petrol and diesel fuel sold on forecourts in the UK this week. The government wants to increase that to 5% within two years, but has admitted that the environmental concerns could force them to rethink. Ruth Kelly, transport secretary, has ordered a review, which is due to report next month.

    A commission source indicated that the EU executive would not object if European governments ordered a U-turn.

    "This is all very sensitive and fast-moving," said a third commission official. "There is now a lot of new evidence on biofuels and the commission has become a prisoner of this process."

    The target is being strongly criticised by the commission’s own scientific experts and environmental advisers to the EU.

    "The policy may have negative impacts on soil, water, and biodiversity," said Professor Laszlo Somlyody, who led a team of climate scientists analysing the policy for the Copenhagen-based European Environment Agency, which advises the EU. "This can lead to serious problems," he told the Guardian.

    His report, published last week, calls on Brussels to freeze its biofuels policy because of the potential risks to the environment. "The over-ambitious 10% biofuel target is an experiment whose unintended effects are difficult to predict and difficult to control," the scientists found.

    In March last year, European leaders sought to seize the global moral high ground by backing the commission’s climate change package aimed at making Europe the world’s first low-carbon economy. In January, the commission fleshed out the details of the measures, based on a carbon trading scheme which is to supply the bulk of the cuts in greenhouse gases.

    But since then there has been a torrent of expert reports citing biofuels as part of the climate change problem.

    This week, Jean Ziegler, the UN’s rapporteur on the right to food, dubbed biofuels "a crime against humanity" because they allegedly divert food from the poor to provide fuel for the rich.

    "The diversion of crops to fuel can raise food prices and reduce our ability to alleviate hunger," warned a 2,500-page analysis of global food trends from UN agricultural scientists.

    While Germany recently announced a retreat from its biofuel policies, Alistair Darling, the chancellor, asked the world’s wealthiest countries to assess the impact of biofuel development on the food crisis for a G7 summit this summer.

    An ad hoc group of EU experts will meet next month to wrangle over the sustainability criteria to be entered into the legislation. The commission is proposing that the overall impact of biofuels – produced from biomass from rapeseed, corn, sugar cane or palm oil – results in carbon dioxide cuts of 35% compared to fossil fuel equivalents.

  • Rosy talks to Valerie Taylor

    Valerie TaylorOne of the most awarded marine conservationists in the world, Valerie Taylor and her husband Ron have saved many species of fish and set aside many areas of the Australian coastline as marine parks.

    With our current focus on sharks and the negative attention they get on Australia’s East Coast, this cut of the interview focuses on Valerie’s work with sharks.

    Stay tuned for the full interview at sometime in the future.

    Hear Valerie and Rosy on sharks. 

  • Faith Popcorn predicts end of consumerism

    Trend analyst Faith Popcorn believes that many people are shifting away from consumption as the basis of happiness and there will be a trend towards thrift. Here are the actual statements from her web-site

    Reactions to Cashing Out:

    Lagom: From the Swedish, most commonly translated as “just enough”, it’s an approach to both design and consumption that explains the essence of brands like Ikea and Volvo. We see notions of “minimalism” and “sustainability” taking on significant currency, as even Americans reject hyper-consumption as not just excessive, but actually damaging to themselves, others and to the planet.

    KarmaCapitalism:

    As “Cashing Out” rises to this level of prominence, we’ll see a basic shift in the identity/mentality of people, as they make the transition from “consumer” to “citizen”—recognizing that every act of consumption has cost and consequence beyond the transaction, and that every transaction is a “vote” in favor of the offering entity, and against the options not chosen. To compete, Companies are going to have to weave “goodness” as a fundamental intent into their corporate culture. Bringing on a dash of “corporate social responsibility”; whether the mere monetary commitment to a cause, or some other symbolic gesture, will not suffice to curry favor with the citizen. In a world of transparency, where every corporate practice is knowable, they will be watching and exercising that all important vote of the purse.

    Activism is now the new narcissism. People will go from wearing their ‘cause’ bracelets on their wrists to posting their causes and beliefs on their resumes and business cards. Employers and prospective hires will court their perfect (cause) match.