This site has been inspired by the work of Dr David Korten who argues that capitalism is at a critical juncture due to environmental, economic and social breakdown. This site argues for alternatives to capitalism in order to create a better world.
Re-Greening a Mountain video trailer. See the full version on Geofflawton.com
When Geoff Lawton says this is the best Permaculture demonstration site on the planet, then you have to stop and listen.
“Where is it exactly?” I asked, as I’ve never heard of this place. I didn’t know the Chinese were even into permaculture.
“Kadoorie Farm” he said and he insisted we go there and film. “It’s in Hong Kong on a massive mountain. The whole place has been redeveloped. You gotta see it”.
Geoff was teaching there four years ago and was blown away by what they managed to achieve. He described it as a “Permaculture Disneyland” that was very neatly manicured.
It had been completely re-vegetated into a food forest with numerous water falls, ponds, rare turtles, terraced gardens on steep slopes, a compost and biochar system, a waste-water treatment plant and wetlands and so much more. It is an amazing site that was built so far ahead of its time with an emphasis on teaching local people.
Two brothers, Lawrence and Horace Kadoorie in 1951 took on an idea to redevelop a trashed and degraded mountainside on 148 hectares with the emphasis on helping people to help themselves through training, supply of agricultural inputs and interest-free loans.
The end result of our trip is a 16 minute video you can watch on GeoffLawton.com that has Geoff as your tour guide, take you down the mountain slope, from the very top, through a forest system where the water is captured and irrigated down the steep terraced slopes, to the very bottom of the wetlands and nursery system.
The Tasmanian government this month released a draft of the revised management plan for the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, which proposes rezoning certain areas from “wilderness zones” to “remote recreation zones”.
The changes would enable greater private tourism investment in the World Heritage Area and allow for logging of speciality timbers.
At the centre of the debate is how we define wilderness - and what people can use it for.
For wildlife or people?
“Wilderness quality” is a measure of the extent to which a landscape (or seascape) is remote from, and undisturbed by, modern technological society.
High wilderness quality means a landscape is relative remote from settlement and infrastructure and largely ecologically intact. Wilderness areas are those that meet particular thresholds for these criteria.
The word’s largest wilderness areas include Amazonia, the Congo forests, the Northern Australian tropical savannas, the Llanos wetlands of Venezuela, the Patagonian Steppe, Australian deserts and the Arctic Tundra.
The Amazon rainforest is one of the largest areas of wilderness in the world.CIFOR/AAP, CC BY-NC-ND
Globally, there are 24 large intact landscapes of at least 10,000 square kilometres (1,000,000 hectares). Wilderness as a scientific concept was developed for land areas, but is also increasingly being applied to the sea.
Legal definitions of wilderness usually include these remote and intact criteria - but the goals range from human-centred to protecting the intrinsic value of wilderness. Intrinsic value recognises that things have value regardless of their worth or utility to human beings, and is recognised in the Convention on Biological Diversity to which Australia is a signatory.
In the NSW Wilderness Act 1987, for instance, one of the three objects of the Act is cast in terms of benefits to the human community: “to promote the education of the public in the appreciation, protection and management of wilderness”.
The Act also states that wilderness shall be managed so as “to permit opportunities for solitude and appropriate self-reliant recreation.” Examples of formally declared wilderness areas in New South Wales are the Lost World Wilderness Area and Wollemi National Park.
Intrinsic value is evident in the the South Australia Wilderness Protection Act 1992 which sets out to, among other things, preserve wildlife and ecosystems, and protect the land and its ecosystems from the effects of modern technology - and restoring land to its condition prior to European settlement. South Australia wilderness areas include the Yellabinna Wilderness Protected Area.
Indigenous custodians
Our understanding of wilderness and its usefulness has changed over the last century as science has revealed its significance for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. We have also accepted the ecological and legal realities of Indigenous land stewardship.
The world’s rapidly shrinking areas of high wilderness quality, including formally declared wilderness areas, are largely the customary land of Indigenous peoples, whether or not this is legally recognised.
Significant bio-cultural values, such as Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of biodiversity (recognised in Australia’s federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act), are dependent on these traditional relationships between people and country.
In many cases around the world, wilderness areas only remain intact because they are under Indigenous stewardship. In Australia, these facts were regrettably ignored in the past and were the source of much loss and harm to Traditional Owners when protected areas were declared without their consent.
Australian deserts are among the world’s largest wilderness areasBrian Yap (葉)/Flickr, CC BY-NC
Lessons have been learnt, some progress is being made, and the essential role of local and Indigenous communities in the conservation of wilderness areas is now being recognised and reflected in Australian national and state conservation and heritage policy and law.
For example, in 2003 the Northern Territory government agreed to joint management with the Traditional Owners of the Territory’s national parks.
What is wilderness good for?
By definition, wilderness areas exclude modern industrial land uses and intrusive infrastructure. Commercial logging and mining are typically not compatible because they have negative environmental impacts on wilderness quality, reducing an area’s remoteness and ecological intactness.
Nature and culture-based tourism and education can be broadly compatible with wilderness. This, however, depends on what type of supporting infrastructure they need which can range from simple walking trails through to the Skyrail Rainforest Cableway in the Wet Tropics of Queensland’s World Heritage Area.
Encouraging more people to visit a wilderness area - even for the best of reasons - can ultimately detract from its wilderness quality as this can lead to, among other things, increased demand for roads, accommodation and other facilities.
Consequently there is some tension between the competing management objectives of presentation and protection and conservation of World Heritage areas, as required under Article 5 of the Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, when such areas have high wilderness quality.
Queensland’s Wet Tropics Skyrail is one way to see wilderness areas but at a cost to wilderness qualityNiklas Morberg/Flickr, CC BY-NC
Why do we need wilderness?
Wilderness areas support important biological, cultural, scientific and recreational values. Biologically, wilderness areas provide refuge for species and ecosystems from many threatening processes including habitat degradation and the spread of disease and weeds.
Large, intact landscapes provide the best chance for species and ecosystems to persist in the face of rapid climate change.
Ideally, protected areas should be large enough to absorb the impacts of large scale disturbances, including fire and the changes to fire regimes resulting from global warming.
Large, intact areas have greater resilience to external stressors, provide more options for species in space and time, sustain critical ecological processes such as long-distance biological movement, and maximise the adaptive capacity of species.
Wilderness areas are also important for climate change mitigation as, for example, protecting the dense carbon stored in primary forest ecosystems avoids significant carbon dioxide emissions. The human population, now at 6 billion, is projected to rise this century to over 9 billion, and with it ongoing industrialisation to meet growing demand for food, water, fibre, energy and habitation.
Given this reality, we can be sure that large, intact landscapes and seascapes of high wilderness quality will become an increasingly scarce asset.
Whether we conceive of wilderness protection in terms of its intrinsic value or, within the framework of inter-generational equity, in terms of its value for future generations, there is a strong imperative for today’s generation to protect wilderness areas from incompatible activities.
The following article (by David Suzuki, entitled Energy Shift Requires Shift in Conversation)
has been circulated by email by the David Suzuki Foundation. “Where is
the political leadership and will to confront climate change?” asks
Suzuki. I’m pleased to publish it on BoomerWarrior (Rolly Montpellier,
Managing Editor).
Shift in Conversation
Abundant, cheap fossil fuels have driven explosive technological,
industrial and economic expansion for more than a century. The pervasive
infrastructure developed to accommodate this growth makes it difficult
to contemplate rapidly shifting away from coal, oil and gas, which
creates a psychological barrier to rational discourse on energy issues.
The ecological and true economic costs of energy use force us to
scrutinize our way of living. And because our infrastructure doesn’t
allow us to entirely avoid fossil fuels, we must face the contradiction
between how we should live and constraints against doing so.
Canada has no national energy plan, other than governmental desire to
be a fossil-fuelled energy-export superpower.
Given the consequences of
human-induced climate change already hitting home, you’d think the
highest priority of governments at all levels would be to decide on the
lowest-emission energy path. But politicians focused on election
intervals have difficulty dealing with generational issues.
Real, important conversations and decisions are instead delayed by
diversionary and often irrational arguments and tactics: accusing
critics of being hypocrites, claiming foreign money drives environmental
agendas and labelling activists as eco-terrorists or enemies of Canada
among them.
In place of true progress, we get consolidated political
power and greater corporate profit and control. Enough already!
Sustainability requires conservation and abundant energy employed
with minimal ecological upset. Yet the inability to consider the need to
shift quickly from fossil fuels means governments and industry look to
mega-technologies like carbon capture and storage to
justify inaction on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while dismissing
solar and wind as impractical, too expensive or unable to meet energy
needs.
Nuclear power may be an alternative to GHG-emitting fossil fuels,
but it’s extremely expensive and would not be online were it not for
enormous subsidies. Nuclear fuel is also finite, so costs will rise
while the problem of radioactive-waste disposal remains unsolved.
As
a northern country, Canada is especially vulnerable to climate change.
Polar regions heat faster than temperate and tropical zones - Inuit have noticed the growing impacts for decades.
With the longest marine coastline of any country, we’re also subject to
sea-level rise.
And our economy relies on climate-dependent activities
such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, tourism and winter sports, all
of which are already feeling climate change impacts.
Where is the political leadership and will to confront climate
change? We’re seeing some from individuals, grassroots organizations and
municipalities. But what about our provinces?
Just as the catastrophic
loss of northern cod off Newfoundland warned against unsustainable
practices, the destruction of $65 billion worth of B.C. trees by mountain pine beetles - once kept under control by winters with temperatures below -30 C for a week or more - should make the province take notice.
Where’s the leadership? Once lauded for policies such as the carbon
tax and energy agreements with California, B.C.’s political leaders have
now embraced liquefied natural gas,
claiming industry expansion will create hundreds of thousands of jobs
and add billions of dollars to provincial coffers - never mind that no
one in power now will be held accountable for these promises because
they’re several elections from being realized.
LNG should be labelled LFG: liquefied fracked gas. Hydraulic
fracturing - fracking - requires pumping millions of litres of
chemical-laced water deep underground to shatter shale and liberate
embedded gas.
It’s a short-term way to get energy with long-term
ecological impacts on water and whatever organisms might be down there
(it was once thought life disappeared at bedrock, but we now know
bacteria are found at least 10 kilometres down).
Fracked gas is mostly methane, a greenhouse gas more than 30 times as
potent as carbon dioxide. Studies reveal leakage around fracking sites
may be high enough to affect climate change more than coal! Calling it a
“transition fuel” between coal or oil and renewables is nonsense. And fracking is known to cause seismic activity.
If our leaders are serious about long-term health and prosperity,
they need to stop focusing on short-term profits from rapid fossil fuel
development and export and start engaging in serious conversations about
our energy future.
Author
Rolly
Montpellier is the Founder and Managing Editor of BoomerWarrior.Org.
He’s a Climate Reality leader, a blogger and an Climate Activist.
Rolly
has been published in several online publications - Climate Change
Guide, World Daily, Examiner, The Canadian, 350Ottawa, ClimateMama,
MyEarth360, GreenDivas, The Elephant, Countercurrents, Georgian Bay
News.
Some of Rolly’s articles have also appeared in newspapers such as The Hill Times and the Kingston Whig. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.
As he
watched other ’60s activists become political insiders and dealmakers,
Peter Berg held fast to one belief, even through his dying days: only
radical change can save our planet.
“I don’t want to beat it,” Peter Berg says. “I want to seduce it.”
It’s
March 2011, and the ’60s radical-turned-ecological visionary is dying. A
tumor has paralyzed one of his vocal chords, leaving his voice scratchy
and distorted, sounding, in his words, like a gravel truck unloading.
"I want to seduce it into leaving,” Berg repeats. “Get it drunk and
leave it in the gas station bathroom."
Berg
sits at the dining room table of his green house in Noe Hill, a steep
residential neighborhood in San Francisco, sipping chai tea. He still
has long silver hair despite months of chemo and radiation treatments,
and wears a brown long-sleeved shirt over several layers in the chilly
spring air.
He
can feel the tumor pressing on his nerves, low in his throat. "It
starts usually in the left scapula, in that shoulder, the left side of
my chest, then the other side comes on," he says. "It can be so strong
that I can't walk." Despite the pain, he refuses opiates, citing a
history of drug use that left him wary. "Doctors don't know what
withdrawal is, really. They don't know what it's like. I do."
Peter
Berg spent his life fighting - for civil rights, to end the war in
Vietnam, and for cleaner, more holistic use of the earth's natural
resources. Stage three lung cancer would be one battle too many, and he
passed away shortly after this interview, on July 28, 2011, at the age
of seventy-three, leaving behind his longtime partner Judy Goldhaft,
their daughter Ocean and two grandchildren.
Intense,
charming, abrasive, driven, Berg was known by friends and adversaries
for never giving up and never compromising, no matter how big the
opponent or how insurmountable the odds. His mission: To save humanity
from its pathology of self-destruction.
"I'm
an extreme personality. I tend to think in extremes," he says in March.
"It's a planet-wide natural disaster we're living through."
Is
he daunted by the enormity of the challenge? Berg leans forward in his
chair, squinting hard at the absurdity of the question. "No, I'm turned on by it," he answers firmly. "It is the challenge. Oh no no, small groups of people cause enormous changes. I've done it."
* * *
Born
in Long Island in 1937, Berg grew up "up and down the East Coast."
After he dropped out of the University of Florida and served a
three-year stint in the Army, he hitched out to San Francisco in the
early 1960s and joined the Mime Troupe, a counterculture theater group
focused on civil rights and social justice.
He
and Goldhaft lived together in their tastefully cluttered house
beginning in the early 1970s. The interior is filled with potted plants,
trinkets, bottles, candles and art from around the world, masks from
Mexico, bowls from Asia. Out back is a messy yard with a small vegetable
garden, flowers, apricot trees and a beehive.
Goldhaft
carries herself with grace, her wispy gray hair pulled up in a bun. She
cares for Berg in his illness, just as she's been by his side for
decades, less of a public persona than Peter but a quiet partner in his
life's work. She pops a cassette into the television in their the
sun-filled living room.
Onscreen appears footage of the Diggers, their
guerrilla street theater group that Berg co-founded in 1966 to oppose
arbitrary authority, oppression of drug users and the Vietnam War. The
film shows the Diggers taking over the San Francisco City Hall steps,
playing music and messing with the suits.
A young Peter Berg with
shoulder-length brown hair and a thin mustache confronts a Jehovah's
Witness who was insulting the guitar player. "Who's a creep?" Berg asks
him, staring with an intense squint.
The
present-day Berg leans forward in his chair, an oxygen tube in his
nose, watching his past with a grin. "I always told people that we were
acting out the possibility of everything being free," he says.
The
Diggers were behind the famous “Free Store” in Haight-Ashbury, and the
group provided gratis food and shelter to the influx of pilgrims to San
Francisco, striving for a society that functioned outside the confines
of capitalism.
The film continues with scenes of the Diggers hanging off
trolleys and tossing money to passersby, getting arrested and
congregating at a "free theater convention" where Janis Joplin sings and
the crowd dances, smokes pot, walks around naked, does whatever they
feel like.
"I don't know whether you caught it so far, but this is anarchism," Berg says. "This is what anarchism is."
The
scene crumbled when hard drugs and violence overtook idealism, and the
Diggers carried a casket through the city streets to represent the
"death of the hippy" in 1967. Berg left San Francisco and returned to
the land, at the Black Bear Ranch in Northern California.
"A rather
infamous place - free land, free sex sort of thing," he remembers.
There, his thoughts turned to ecology - not a huge leap from street
theater and activism, says former Digger David Simpson, seventy-four.
"One
of the things that the Diggers really stood for is turf," Simpson says.
"We could delude ourselves without a huge stretch that we were taking
responsibility for our neighborhood and the place that we lived. That
sense of responsibility for the place where you lived carried over."
Berg's time on the ranch sprouted the roots for the idea that he spent the rest of his life pursuing - bioregionalism. "Bioregionalism
happened to correspond to the back to the land movement," Simpson says.
"What we lived in, what we ate, wore and worked with was more a part of
the natural land."
Berg
took a road trip east across the United States, visiting various
communes and creating an informal network of like-minded souls. In 1972,
he traveled to Sweden to crash the first United Nations Environmental
Conference, purporting to represent land-based communal groups.
Disappointed to be excluded from formal proceedings because he wasn’t
representing a nation-state, he returned to California determined to
pursue his own vision. Through collaboration with Berkeley professors
Raymond Dasmann and James Parsons, the idea of a bioregion was born.
They defined it formally: “A distinct area with coherent and
interconnected plant and animal communities, and natural systems, often
defined by a watershed. A bioregion is a whole 'life-place' with unique
requirements for human inhabitation so that it will not be disrupted and
injured."
To
truly live bioregionally would mean eating only local food, produced in
a way that harmonizes with, rather than damages, local ecology:
building with local materials. A dramatic reduction or elimination of
fossil fuels. Reintegrating waste into the ecological cycle. Never
compromising sustainable living in the name of profit.
"Bioregionalism
is as fundamental as you can get," Berg says. "Restore and maintain
natural systems. Find sustainable ways to satisfy basic human needs.
Food, water, culture, energy, materials for producing, building and to
support the work of becoming native to the place.”
In
the 1970s, mainstream environmentalism was mostly focused on lobbying
Washington D.C. for policy change, so Berg went grassroots instead. He
funneled his vision through the Planet Drum Foundation, the organization
he founded with Goldhaft in 1973 to promote ecological justice in San
Francisco and around the world.
He started sending bundles of literature
to the network he had formed on his trip across the country and created
a newsletter, "Raise the Stakes,” which resulted in a small but
dedicated group of North American followers who hold bioregional
congresses every few years.
"It just sort of spreads the whole
ecological movement, getting people hooked up to the things they need to
know," says Mary Meyer, fifty-six, a congress organizer from the Ohio
River Valley watershed. "It's almost spiritual, too, learning to connect
with place. Looking at where you live as not just a zip code but
relating to the flora and fauna of where you are."
Would-be
allies weren’t always on board and funding was always difficult.
"People who support our point of view don't have any money," Berg says.
"Some people don't want it, because it's too far out, it's too
disruptive of a middle class lifestyle to live bioregionally."
He has
been called a “thorn in the side of the environmental movement,” a label
he was proud of. "Lots of people in the environmental movement say
Peter Berg's a fool," Berg says earnestly. “The environmental movement
needs a couple thorns."
The
bioregional movement never gained much traction under its own name, but
its principles have distilled into a sustainability ethos that has
gained popularity since the turn of the century.
"A lot of
twenty-somethings, young folks starting families, are very receptive to
the idea of building sustainable communities, growing their own food,
making those connections to place," says Ken Lassman, fifty-nine, a
founder of Kansas Area Watershed Council, one of the oldest bioregional
groups in the country. "That message is very fertile for what all is
going on these days.”
Berg with colleagues at the Planet Drum office in the 1990s.
Berg's
philosophies even found their way into electoral politics after a Green
Party committee met during the first Bioregional Congress in 1984,
planting the seeds for the political party. That's despite Berg's take
on politics: "If you're gonna do something alternative, you have to do
it outside society. You can't do it in the society. That whole thing of
reform from within is bullshit."
He
also found willing ears around the Pacific Rim. The Australian
government created a map outlining the nation's bioregions as official
policy. In Nagano, Japan, in 1998, Planet Drum worked with local
communities to mitigate the disastrous effects of Olympics-related
construction on the environment. And his greatest opportunity came in a
small coastal town in Ecuador.
* * *
Peter
Berg got one big chance to help build a sustainable city from the
ground up. In 2009, he marched through the streets of Bahía de Caráquez,
Ecuador, leading hundreds of residents walking with ecologically-themed
floats.
Spectators watched from the roadside while Berg started a chant
of “Viva la Eco-Cuidad!” He led the procession to a stage, and lauded the town for its progress - but warned that much work remained.
Berg
and Planet Drum arrived in the small city of 20,000 residents in 1999.
With gleaming white condos overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Bahía de
Caráquez was once a thriving resort town for wealthy Ecuadorians, but
was nearly obliterated in the late 1990s when a 7.1 earthquake toppled
buildings and triggered massive mudslides on the steep hillsides, wiping
out entire neighborhoods.
Newly homeless residents huddled in tent
camps in the streets. "It was one of the worst-hit cities in all the
West Coast of South America," says Patricio Tamarez, fifty-four, a
native to Bahía. "We had seventy meters of mud in our highway."
Tamarez,
an organic shrimp farmer, led a group to ask Berg to help rebuild Bahía
as an eco-city. Planet Drum set up a volunteer hostel and transformed
an unsalvageable barrio into a park.
To prevent future mudslides,
ecologically-minded volunteers from around the world planted trees on
hillsides in and around the city. Keeping with the principles of
bioregionalism, only native species were used, like the thin but
resilient Algarrobos, the massive and spiky Ceibos and the fruit-bearing
Pechiches.
"Revegetation
with native plants - that's a hell of a thing to do," Berg says,
insisting the work not be called reforestation. “I really want to
distinguish it from that crap. Reforestation serves the industrial
logging interest. You're gonna plant nothing but pine trees because
they're gonna grow fast and you can cut them down?”
Berg while working on a Planet Drum project in Ecuador.
Once
or twice a year, Berg visited Bahía to check up on the work and meet
the volunteers, greeting them with his particular abrasive style. One
traveler wrote online, "I came to the conclusion that he must be
mentally ill or a diabetic with extremely low blood sugar or something
like that," after Berg insulted her when she wouldn’t commit for a set
period of time.
Berg
furrows his brow when reminded of the feedback. "I love it," he
declares. "I hope it discourages anyone like her not to come. People
don't understand the luxury of being able to volunteer. They come down
thinking they're Jesus Christ."
In
addition to revegetation, Planet Drum established a bioregional
educational curriculum for local youth and a study abroad program for
college students, and in 2007, Bahía was named one of the fifteen most
ecological cities on the planet by Grist.
However, local officials still show little appetite for codifying
ecological practices in policy, beyond what volunteers and concerned
citizens are willing to contribute.
"It's
gonna take some time before our country will look toward bioregionalism
as a main source of planning and being able to sustain development and
sustain life for future generations,” says Tamarez. “At least we're
starting out now."
* * *
On
March 20, 2011, Berg, Goldhaft and some friends drive out to the beach
at sunset to welcome the vernal equinox, as they've done for decades.
It's been a rainy week in San Francisco, but as if to personally
accommodate the group, the sky clears above the ocean as the sun drops
toward the horizon. Choppy waves wash up foam from the Pacific, jiggling
in piles on the sand.
Berg
is bundled in a black puffy coat and complementary black beret to
combat the brisk evening air. Goldhaft wears turquoise, with matching
plastic sunglasses. As the sun descends ever lower, Berg strikes a
Japanese bowl and the chime rings out over the beach, clear and full,
easily audible over the sound of the surf.
Slowly bobbing to the rhythm
of the ocean, he chimes again as the others join in on tom-tom and
harmonica. Berg grabs a conch shell and coaxes out its long, melancholy
tone, then circulates apple brandy for warmth and morale.
Families,
young couples and people walking dogs on the beach barely pay
attention. The musicians are left alone as the sun sinks lower into the
cloud band just above the ocean.
Berg's
focus is on the big picture: where we go from here, what kind of world
can be left to his daughter and grandchildren. "We have the same
conditions imposed on us that all other species have," he says. "We die.
We give birth. We have sex. We eat. We need resources.
Berg by a sidewalk garden of native California plants outside the Planet
Drum Office.
"We're
actually the heirs of a tremendous legacy. Our species has been a
magnificent species. That to me is wealth. That's aristocracy. That's
nobility. Being a good human being is a good thing. That's the highest
you could do. And being a good human being right now requires that you
take a position of a consciousness perspective that's appropriate to
living in the biosphere as a good species."
The dangers are myriad, and urgent: climate change. War. Natural disasters. Food and water shortage. Nuclear meltdowns. “We have to control ourselves. Not for puritanical reasons but for reasons of survival," Berg says. "I want to do that." Save the world. Save humanity from itself. "That's what I want to do with my life."
In
all his battles, he never declared a full victory. Racism,
authoritarianism and imperial wars persist. Our ecological disaster is
ongoing. The eco-city exists more in name than in practice. But Berg
recognized the struggles were far bigger than he was. If he could
provide an example, that was worthwhile.
"We've
got to do it ourselves," he says. "People will do it. Then whatever
society they come up with, that will be the society they get."
Soon,
the sun has disappeared and Peter returns to the car to escape the
cold. Goldhaft drives through the Haight where so much of their young
energy was spent, but which is now filled with apparel and faux-hippie
trinket shops. She notes the serendipity of the weather clearing up for
the equinox, a simple pleasure for the small beach celebration.
"Most solstices and equinoxes aren't too cloudy," she remarks, pulling away from a stoplight. "We usually get a sunset."
Geoff’s new video on Creating Permaculture Designs, see the full version on Geofflawton.com
So you’ve always wanted to design a beautiful plant system in your
garden, but baulked at the idea because, quiet honestly, you can’t tell
a bean from a cactus or a legume from a walnut and don’t have the time
or interest to devote to studying all this plant diversity stuff and
biology bores you, but inherently inside you, you’d know that you would
make a great designer.
Instinctively, you can spot a nice clump of trees
together and you know you could do all this stuff if you could overcome
this one small insignificant minor technical stumbling block - a lack
of plant knowledge!
Well, like everything in the Internet universe, there is probably an app made for you right now. If there isn’t an app, then its time to head down to your friendly
office supply stationary shop and buy yourself one of those little green
plastic template thingy with a bunch of circles cut out for you that
you used to have at school.
Buy that and some graph paper and a few
pencils and a long tape measure, because this week’s lesson is with
Permaculture Designer, Dan Halsey
who swapped a career as a fashion food photographer to a full-time
career as a Permaculture Designer. Dan used to photograph ice in sweet
fizzy beverages. Fake ice was used as real ice melts under hot camera
lights. A minor bit of useless trivia.
Anyway, Dan says, you need to overcome your lack of tree knowledge,
that will always bog you down and the best way to start is by focusing
on your pattern knowledge and work on your assembly of tree shapes.
Start with pattern shapes. Don’t worry what sort of trees you need for
your garden design. Work on your shape clusters, from the big shapes,
down. From the big Diva tree, then to the understory plants and all the
way down to the tiny edging plants that create a nice aesthetic
grouping. The mainframe shapes, the paths, access and water, ponds,
structures and swales come first and then we pattern the landscape with
our trusty little green stencil thingy and a pencil.
When it comes to filling in the small, insignificant minor details,
the real biology of tree species, Dan has a database for you to enjoy - The Natural Capital™ Plant Database.
You need to fill in the details.
What climate zone are you in? What
size of tree are you after, the database will filter the details and
offer you a spreadsheet for you to select a bunch of trees shapes that
will fit your climate zone. Everything from deciduous trees to legumes
are in the database. That’s the theory. The links are in the full video
on GeoffLawton.com.
Watch the full 20 minute video where
Geoff Lawton introduces Dan and takes takes you on a tour of his
property and then explains his theory of Permaculture pattern design.
Last July, the federal environment minister, Greg Hunt, announced the appointment of Gregory Andrews as Australia’s first Threatened Species Commissioner.
His mission: to help avert the extinction of a growing number of native plant and animal species.
On Andrews’ appointment, a team of scientists was commissioned to go to Bramble Cay, an unstable 4-5 hectare coral bank in the eastern Torres Strait off the tip of northern Australia. The team searched for the Bramble Cay melomys, a small rodent recorded nowhere else but here and not seen since 2007.
The team failed to find any trace of this species, suggesting that another Australian mammal has become extinct. Since European colonisation, 30 mammals (more than 10% of Australia’s mammal species) have shared this fate. Australia has one of the worst extinction records of any country.
The Tasmanian tiger was hunted to extinction after European settlement.The Wilderness Gallery/AAP
More than 1,850 animals and plants are listed as threatened under Commonwealth legislation (the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act). For more than 800 of these we know what needs to be done to avert extinction.
The problem is, given the limited funds available, which species to prioritise.
How much money
Australia was recently ranked among the bottom 40 countries for the funding of its share of global biodiversity, considering its governance, size and wealth.
Prioritising which animals and plants to save is controversial because it implies triage - giving up on some to save others. But it has to be done. One way would be to prioritise the species most threatened with extinction. However, the inefficiencies of this method have been well-documented. All states and territories have more complex ways of prioritising species.
We really need a national system; this was a key recommendation of the 2008 Hawke review of Australia’s environmental legislation. Commissioner Andrews is charged with developing such a framework.
The conservation challenge
Spare a thought for endangered grasses too.Australian Network for Plant Conservation, CC BY-NC-ND
There’s a tension between iconic species the public would like to see conserved (such as koalas) and critically endangered species that are less well known, but just as important scientifically, such as the mountain mist frog or most native grasses.
For instance, in January 2014 the Australian government committed A$3 million to recover Tasmanian devils, while the Queensland government is investing A$26.5 million between 2012 and 2015 to recover koalas. These investments inevitably draw funds away from other species at risk of extinction.
Iconic animals, such as koalas, often receive the most conservation funding because they are well liked and charismatic.G20 Summit/AAP
There are also other species, such as the dugong, seabirds and coastal dolphins, not listed as threatened but listed under international conservation agreements to which Australia is a signatory. Clearly, these species need attention alongside the ones listed as threatened in Australia.
Three red buckets for threatened species
Conservation funding should be split three ways.João Kim, Milena Kim and Bob Pressey, Author provided
Iconic and non-iconic species require different types of funding. There is also a third category, covered by environmental offsets. In New Zealand, funding for iconic species is explicitly separated from others, which acknowledges the political sensitivity of iconic species.
New South Wales is adopting the same approach. The Australian government could consider doing likewise. Threatened species receive funding from the public and private purse. Another source of funds is offsets. Developments that affect species listed as threatened (or migratory species) must offset the damage by ensuring protection elsewhere.
For instance, current and proposed coal-mining projects in the Galilee basin in Queensland will potentially destroy much of the habitat for the black-throated finch. Almost 170,000 hectares of prime black-throated finch habitat will be required to offset current development approvals.
Offsetting has been used to a limited extent, as in the case of the mallee-fowl in Victoria, and has been suggested for the koala. Using offsets would require a rigorous overhaul of offset policies at all levels of government.
Allocating species to buckets
So how should the different categories of species be funded?
The iconic bilby would ideally be funded from the iconic bucket, containing funds contributed by NGOs, private industry (Pink Lady sponsors Save the Bilby Fund through the sale of its chocolate bilbies), or public-private partnerships.
Not every threatened animal is lucky enough to be made into chocolate.Rose Holley/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
In contrast, many threatened species, such as nearly 1,300 listed plants, are unfamiliar to the general public and so will probably not attract significant private funding. These species could be funded from the non-iconic bucket, filled largely from the public purse.
Threatened species that are often imperilled by development proposals, potentially requiring offsets, are both iconic (koalas) and non-iconic (growling grass frog). Funding from the offset bucket should be directed mainly to non-iconic species or migratory species - the ones most reliant on limited public funding.
The use of offsetting and private funds should not reduce the government’s duty to threatened species. Rather, the level of resources in the non-iconic buckets should reflect the Australian government’s international commitments to threatened species protection.
For instance, Australia is signatory to several international treaties that protect species. These include the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, and the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species and Wild Animals.
Such an overhaul of conservation funding could greatly enhance the prospects for Australia’s threatened species and contribute to halting our disastrous record of species extinctions. The commissioner has many opportunities to make a difference.
Emily Gertz is TakePart's associate editor for environment and wildlife. full bio
It’s
conventional wisdom that most people will change their behavior only
when it saves them money.
That kind of price-consciousness makes Western
consumers a tough sell when it comes to paying a premium for some
environmentally beneficial goods, such as clothes made with eco-friendly
fabrics or electric vehicles.
When researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, asked
participants at the beginning of an energy-use study what information
would probably get them to cut their electricity consumption, the
participants answered that it would be messages on how much money they
were saving.
They said environmental facts, such as how many trees it
would take to absorb all the carbon dioxide their energy demand created,
would be less persuasive.
It turns out, though, that those reminded only that using less
electricity would save them money didn’t turn the lights off and the
thermostat down, according to the study, which was published this week in the journal PNAS.
But those participants who were told that saving energy would cut
toxic air pollution curbed their electricity use an average of 8%. Households with children were even more motivated, slashing
their use by 19%.
“We’re finding that you have to bundle the public good with the
private good,” said environmental economist Magali Delmas, the lead
researcher on the study, in a statement. “Our message about health and
the environment reminds people that environmentalism is also about them
and their kids.”
That suggests that many Americans would use less electricity if
informed of the environmental benefits, not just the economic. Increased
energy efficiency at home alone could cut the United States’ greenhouse
gas emissions by 7%.
Delmas and her colleagues argue that the environmental health message
was motivational because it showed a dual good to reducing electricity
use: lessening air pollution as well as the risks for illnesses
associated with those pollutants.
To figure out how motivational financial versus environmental
information would be in encouraging lowered electricity use, they
created a competitive atmosphere between participating households,
similar to gamification techniques that some energy companies have been
using on their customer statements for the past few years.
After six
months of establishing baseline electricity use, the participants got
weekly updates for four months, showing how their electricity use
compared with that of their most energy-efficient neighbor.
One group of participants were also told how many more pounds of
pollution they were responsible for and were reminded about the links
between air pollution and certain diseases, while the rest learned how
much more they were spending on electricity compared with that neighbor.
To help make electricity use more tangible to participants, the
researchers also created an online portal called “Engage” that provided
more information on household electricity use - such as which appliances
used the most power or how their demand rose and fell over the course of
a day - and compared changes in electricity consumption habits over time.
A participant named Victor Pinto told UCLA that he “disliked the
guilt trip” he felt from reading the environmental impact reminders. But
participant Paulina Morales found they motivated her to act. “The
message reminds you that you’re hurting people and the planet,” she
said. “It made me more conscious of the energy I was using.”
“Whenever Chevron
organised anything, we demonstrated,” said Barbara Siegienczuk, 54,
leader of the local anti-shale gas protest group Green Zurawlow in
south-eastern Poland.
“We made banners and placards and put posters up
around the village. Only 96 people live in Zurawlow - children and old
people included - but we stopped Chevron!”
For 400 days, farmers and their families from Zurawlow and four
nearby villages blockaded a proposed Chevron shale drilling site with
tractors and agricultural machinery. Eventually, in July, the company
abandoned its plans.
The Zurawlow blockade influenced the UK’s anti-fracking protests at Balcombe in the summer of 2013, and similar battles have flared across Poland since the country became Europe’s front line for shale gas exploration.
A soon-to-be-updated study by the Polish Geological Institute in
March 2012 estimated that recoverable shale gas volumes under the
country at between 346bn and 768bn cubic metres - the third biggest in Europe and enough to supply the country’s gas needs for between 35 and 65 years.
Bordering volatile Ukraine and heavily reliant on gas from Putin’s
Russia, the promise of secure domestically-produced energy made
politicians sit up. A year earlier, in September 2011, the country’s
then-president Donald Tusk made a bold claim that the shale industry would begin commercial drilling in 2014.
“After years of dependence on our large neighbour (Russia), today we
can say that my generation will see the day when we will be independent
in the area of natural gas and we will be setting terms,” he said,
adding that well conducted exploration, “would not pose a danger to the
environment.”
But things haven’t turned out that way. Plans for a shale gas-fuelled
economic revival appear to be evaporating as test wells have not
performed as expected or have suffered regulatory delays. Foreign
investors have pulled out and sustained environmental protests like that
in Zurawlow have hampered drilling plans.
Officials privately talk of the shale experiment as a ‘disaster’.
In September, 3Legs Resources became the latest firm to call a halt on investments after disappointing results. Six weeks before, its chief financial officer, Alex Fraser, had said they were “potentially on the threshold of a very significant result,” involving “potentially hundreds of wells”.
“Companies’ expectations were very high and now we learn that this
is a long term process,” said Pawel Mikusek, a spokesman for Poland’s
environment ministry. “The experience of the US is that it also took a
long time to reach industrial use - 10-15 years - so we need to be more
patient. We don’t have such high expectations as two or three years
ago.”
But with falling oil prices, continued supplies of cheap coal and EU
pressure to increase cost-competitive renewable power generation, the
shale gas industry needs positive results fast, and less controversy.
2015 will be a “pivotal” year for the Polish industry, according to
industry group Shale Gas Europe.
Multi-billion dollar tax incentives are in the pipeline and a new law
should soon speed up permitting processes that can take years. But this
has already sparked an EU legal action for allowing firms to drill at depths of up to 5,000m without first assessing environmental risks.
Seven of the 11 multinationals which invested in Poland - including Exxon, Talisman and Marathon
- have already pulled out, citing permit delays and disappointing
results. Most shale activity is now being led by Poland’s
state-controlled PGNiG, and by Orlen and Lotus.
Just 66 wells have been drilled to date - 12 involving horizontal
fracking - and permits for a further 27 drills were put on hold in the
southeastern Tomaszów Lubelski region last month, pending the outcome of
a lengthy inquiry.
Analysts blame regulatory hold-ups for fraying investors nerves, but
in Tomaszów Lubelski, which is home to a forest protected under
Europe’s gold-standard ‘Natura 2000’ scheme and a proposed Unesco
biosphere, environmental protestors claim credit for throwing a
pitchfork in the industry’s wheels.
Barbara Siegienczuk, leader of the
local anti-shale gas protest group Green Zurawlow, with her husband and
co-activist, Andrzej Bak. Photograph: Stanislaw Wadas/Demotix
Poland’s environment ministry says that shale gas is hugely popular
but mobilisations against it were impressive and fuelled by claims that
damage had already been done.
“Roads were damaged and destroyed when seismic tests were done with
heavy machinery,” said Slawomir Damiluk, 50, a farmer in nearby Rogow.
“The fact is that people’s houses had cracks in their walls afterwards.
When Chevron tried to start up with their machinery, I was one who was
involved. We blocked the entry roads.”
Supported by urban greens, anarchists, squatters and vegans,
villagers set up a colourful protest camp - complete with a cinema,
online live-streaming, samba bands and installation art - and occupied
the site around the clock.
“The women who lived here began learning how to cook without meat
because during the protest we had agreed that nobody would go hungry,”
Siegienczuk said. “We opened our minds and hearts to people who looked
and ate differently, from another culture.”
Dozens of protesters were arrested in the 14-month campaign, and
many more were filmed by mystery cameramen whose stills were used in
subsequent court cases. Siegienczuk believes that her phone was tapped.
“Once, I heard several people talking on the line and a male voice
asked ‘are we going to tap this woman’s phone too?’ I was terrified and
passed my phone to other protestors who heard the same voices. After
that, my mobile phone turned off,” she said.
Zurawlow, in south-eastern Poland,
where people successfully campaigned against drilling by Chevron. The
protest banner reads: ‘Poland has gas, America has profits.’ Photograph: Stanislaw Wadas/Demo
Sally Jones, a spokesperson for Chevron, told the Guardian: “Chevron
respects the right of individuals to express their opinions, however it
should be done within the law. Chevron remains committed to building
constructive and positive relationships with the communities where we
operate.”
But local people in the area covered by Chevron’s concession, claim
that such relationships went beyond what might be reasonably termed
constructive.
Villagers allege that one woman whose water well became polluted at
the same time that seismic tests were being conducted in the area
received a building renovation paid for by Chevron, and promptly stopped
complaining about the issue.
Shortly after that, a local protest leader dropped out of the
movement and took up work as a Chevron security guard, leading to
accusations that he had been bought off.
Wojciech Zukowski, mayor of Tomaszów Lubelski town, south-east Poland. Photograph: Stanislaw Wadas/Demotix
Wojciech Zukowski, the recently re-elected mayor of Tomaszów Lubelski
town, in Poland’s southeast, said that he saw no conflict of interest
in accepting private or public gifts from multinationals. “I’m not
trying to hide that some forms of sponsoring and support takes place
here,” he told the Guardian.
“We are open for it,” he said, adding that a town sports club with 250 members would benefit from corporate sponsorship. Chevron declined to respond to the villagers’ claims but insisted
that “we comply with laws and regulations in all counties we do business
in.”
The company has donated to several charities in the US and Romania,
where it has also invested in shale exploration. In southeast Poland,
it has provided charity services to villages at Christmas and offered
gifts to residents’ children such as fluffy tigers carrying Chevron
logos, and sweets.
“We demonstrate our commitment to the communities where we operate by
creating jobs, employing local workforces, and developing and sourcing
from local suppliers,” a company statement said.
The Tomaszów Lubelski district has been hard-hit by unemployment and jobs have been a key persuader for the industry.
Close to the exploratory shale drill in nearby Susiec, Jacek, a
40-year-old shop worker said that the shale gas plans “are going to be
good as there will be jobs for us and gas will be cheaper. It’s a jobs
issue. Possibly my kids might have jobs there.”
The town’s pro-shale mayor ran a campaign on the economic benefits
that shale gas could offer the depressed town, hanging a ‘Putinologists –
bugger off!’ banner in the town square. But in a regional trend, he was
deposed in favour of a more shale-sceptic opponent in November, who
advanced an alternative geothermal energy-based plan.
“We don’t need shale gas,” said Maria, a 39-year-old worker in the
same store as Jacek. “It’s one big scam. Nobody informed us about what’s
happening. The ex-mayor was useless. He just promised work for everyone
but there was nothing. We are not going to work on the well. The people
who have agro-tourism businesses know that it’s not beneficial as the
environment will be destroyed and people won’t come here anymore.”
Deer run across an icy field in Majdan Sopocki, a village in Tomaszów Lubelski county, south-east Poland. Photograph: Stanislaw Wadas/Demotix
On the Natura 2000 site that borders the Susiec well, Narnia-style
pine tree forests are frosted in ice and snow. Deers and eagles flit in
and out of the fog like phantoms. But at the fence marking the shale
well, the deer tracks abruptly stop and double back on themselves.
Fears that one of Poland’s last remaining redoubts of biodversity
could be damaged have mobilised local feeling, as polarisation and
bitterness have spread across the Tomaszów Lubelski district. Zukowski
suggested that village protesters were being manipulated by dark forces.
“It could be said that their actions were inspired by the government
of Mr Putin,” he said. “I don’t have such knowledge but [the protests]
went hand in hand with the Kremlin’s intentions.
Gas
and oil are a useful tool for Russia to get involved in other
countries’ energy security. It is a proxy to pressure authorities to
take certain decisions along the Kremlin’s lines. It is like a political
secret. Everyone knows it but no-one wants to name it.”
A shale gas exploration drilling rig near Majdan Sopocki, owned by the Polish state-owned oil and gas company PGNiG. Photograph: Stanislaw Wadas/Demotix
Jones at Chevron described such claims as speculation. But similar accusations have been levelled by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the secretary general of Nato, and by pro-shale officials in Romania and Lithuania, as cold war-style tensions have ratcheted.
But with falling oil prices, continued supplies of cheap coal and EU
pressure to increase cost-competitive renewable power generation, the
shale gas industry needs positive results fast, and less controversy.
But even the patriotic case for pressing ahead with shale gas has
been dented by claims from campaigners in Pomerania that toxic waste
from shale drills was dumped in a rural stream.
Environmentalists believe that water tainted by shale salts may have
entered the Radunia river used for supplying water to Gdansk, the
birthplace of Poland’s Solidarity movement.
T-shirts and caps with anti-fracking messages at the headquarters of the Zurawlow anti-fracking movement.Photograph: Stanislaw Wadas/Demotix
In November, the French water company, Veolia, was ordered to stop
processing shale effluent in a nearby water purification centre because
of permitting infractions.
The Polish environment ministry denies that Gdansk’s drinking water
was ever put at risk, but such allegations undercut the energy
independence case for shale gas, and feed nationalist objections. “The
people of Zurawlow might have liked shale gas investment but the issue
was these were Americans,” Damiluk said. “We don’t want foreign
investors on a land that belongs to us.”
Chevron, the last of the big multinational shale investors is still
holding on to its sole concession in Zwierzyniec, which was extended for
a year in December. However, the decision’s small print limits future
drilling to a small parcel of land the company has already explored.
“If Chevron’s partner PGNiG wins permission to drill in Tomaszów
Lubelski, I hope the people there will use the same tactics to block new
drills that we did,” Siegienczuk said. “We are open and ready to give
any support we can.”
