From scotsman.com: Wild boar the ground force team to revive forest.

Wild boar have returned to an area where their ancestors once foraged to help efforts to restore the ancient Caledonian pine forest.

A project has started in Glen Affric in which wild boar are now living and breeding within two large enclosures in the forest. It is hoped that the "original ground disturbance force" will eat invasive bracken and help increase the number of tree seedlings to regenerate the forests.

The project is unique in using wild boar to manage a native pine wood and the eight sows, one boar, called Boris, and 40 young will soon be rewarded for their efforts by moving from a test plot of just over an acre to a larger home of about 10 acres.

Munching on the exposed tubers, the animals eat young bracken shoots as they emerge in spring. It is hoped that the patches of well turned soil left behind will provide a fertile seed bed for the regeneration of native species such as pine, rowan and birch, and the project will monitor seedling establishment over the next two to three years. [continue]

Hey! Maybe Berlin's Jagdreferent could send some of Berlin's wild boars off to Scotland.

From Wired: A P2P Network for Bikes

Thousands of commuters in Lyon, France, are using pedal power instead of gas, under an ambitious new program that lets people rent bikes from public racks at low cost.

It's kind of like peer to peer for public transport.

The rent-a-bike scheme, called Vélo'v Grand Lyon, is open to anyone armed with a credit card. It costs 1 euro ($1.20) an hour, but there is no charge for the first 30 minutes. Since 90 percent of trips take less than half an hour, most subscribers pay nothing.

In just three months, the program has signed up 15,000 subscribers who take 4,000 trips a day and travel over 24,800 miles a week on 2,000 public bikes at 150 bike stations. [continue]

From RenewableEnergyAccess.com: Development Yields Antifreeze from Biodiesel.

In addition to topping off your gas tank with biodiesel, a new advance could let you fill your vehicle's cooling system with a biomass-derived antifreeze.

A new process developed at the University of Missouri-Columbia (MU) creates a valuable secondary product from the biodiesel manufacturing process that makes the production cycle both profitable and affordable.

Galen Suppes, chief science officer of the MU-based Renewable Alternatives, developed a process for converting glycerin, a byproduct of the biodiesel production process, into propylene glycol, which can be used as nontoxic antifreeze for automobiles. Suppes said the new propylene glycol product will meet every performance standard, is made from domestic soybeans and is nontoxic. [continue]

Link found here at makezine.com.

From the CBC: Wind from Highway 401 could help power campus.

A college in Toronto is exploring the idea of harnessing the power of Canada's busiest highway to create electricity.

The wind-tunnel effect created by the hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks that travel Highway 401 each day makes Centennial College's Scarborough campus an ideal location for a small wind turbine to feed power back to the school. [continue]

From the CBC: City turns to goldfish to test water quality.

A school of goldfish in Edmonton has the important job of testing the cleanliness of the city's water.

Currently, wastewater is held at the plant. No one knows if it is safe to release into the city's waterways or if it needs further treatment first.

To find out, researchers are turning to goldfish. If the fish go belly up, then there's a problem.

"It might not actually kill them," said Greg Goss, a biology professor at the University of Alberta. "It likely won't."

Goss and his team want to see if wastewater is safe to dump into the North Saskatchewan River.

The goldfish will live in tanks for the next six months, where they'll undergo regular physical checkups to see if the contaminants, pharmaceuticals, herbicides and heavy metals in the water have any effect on life. [continue]

From National Geographic: Dolphins, Seals at Home in London's Reborn River.

More than 130 seals have been spotted in the Thames since last August, according to the Zoological Society of London. Bottlenose dolphins have been seen upstream of London Bridge. And last summer the first sea horse was recorded in the Thames estuary in 30 years.

With 120 fish species, hundreds of thousands of birds, and a thriving fishing industry, the river now ranks among the cleanest metropolitan tideways in the world.

Ecologists say the Thames owes its revival to pollution control, which has vastly improved water quality. [continue]

I've been interested in green roofs for a while now (see links below) but I had no idea that there's a rooftop garden on top of the Vancouver Public Library. From the VPL's Central Branch FAQ:

Does Central Library have a rooftop garden?

Yes. Our rooftop garden was designed by Cornelia Oberlander, and is planted with ornamental grasses (blue and green fescue bunch grass) and kinnickinnick in a pattern that replicates the flow of the Fraser River. The final construction budget for the building did not include a public rooftop garden and, as such, the roof is not accessible to staff or the public at this time.

"The benefits of green roofs are multiple. They increase biomass and bird habitat in our cities, help to reduce airborne pollutants, improve the micro-climate, store and delay stormwater runoff, provide opportunities for urban agriculture and therapeutic gardening, reduce heating and cooling requirements for buildings, and aid in the reduction of the urban heat island effect."

Irwin, John "Green Roofs: A Sustainable Option for Greening Our Cities" - Sitelines (April 2002): 6-7.

Why are there no photos of this garden on the library's website? Why, oh why?

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Green roofs
Campaign for rooftop gardens

I've seen some strange bike racks over the years, but nothing even comes close to the Bike Tree. Treehugger reports:

Rather than hitching your bike to a post at street level, swipe a smart card, enter your PIN, and your cycle is taken up the "trunk" of the tree to a dome that protects it from thieves and the elements. [continue]

Weird. Looks interesting and fun, but I bet those Bike Tree things cost a fortune.

related:
Bike Tree website

From the CBC: Brazil reveals first commercial jet running on ethanol.

A Brazilian company has unveiled the world's first commercially-produced, ethanol-burning aircraft, opening the way for more ethanol planes.

Neiva Aeronautic Industry has just delivered the first single-engine, single-seat EMB 202 Ipanema to a crop-spraying company. It has orders for another 70.

The Ipanema uses ethanol produced from sugar cane, a resource abundant in Brazil.

Ethanol fuel is less polluting than gasoline, about five times less expensive and is renewable. [continue]

From csmonitor.com: Now, bioengineered trees are taking root.

Scattered across at least seven provinces in China are more than 1 million common poplar trees with an uncommon bite. They can kill the insects that nibble their leaves. Their unusual defensive system is a genetically engineered bomb: Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, a naturally occurring toxin inserted into the tree's DNA. Other such transgenic species, such as the larch and walnut, are in the works, Chinese researchers report.

Such moves are shaking up the twin worlds of forestry and environmentalism. Transgenic trees are reaching the threshold of commercialization - a point bioengineered crops reached in the 1980s, observers say. This time, though, it's not the United States leading the charge, it's China. [continue]

From the New York Times: An Alpine Ski Resort Aims to Leave No Tracks.

The future of European ski resorts - or so some environmentalists hope - may well be found in five eight-foot-high white geodesic-dome tents perched 5,600 feet up a mountain in the Swiss Alps.

Accessible only on foot or on skis, and anchored to wooden platforms, these one- and two-person insulated tents are designed to leave absolutely no trace when they're pulled up in the spring. They have no plumbing or electricity, but each has a highly efficient wood stove. They're grouped around a restored 19th-century farmhouse that has a solar shower and generator-powered electricity for just a few hours each day. [continue]

Need a password?

From Reuters: Careful Flooding May Restore Iraq Marshes -Experts.

Wetlands that once sheltered Marsh Arabs and a host of wildlife in southern Iraq are being partly restored and could offer a haven once again if it is done right, experts said Saturday.

Luckily, water coming into the area from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is unexpectedly clean, washing away toxic salts that built up when the area was drained under Saddam Hussein's regime, the international team of experts reported.

Bird species are starting to return, including pelicans, cormorants and wading species. The area was also important for spawning fish and shrimp and, with only 20 percent of the marshes restored, these animals have along way to go, the experts reported.

"The future of the 5,000-year-old Marsh Arab culture and the economic stability of large portions of southern Iraq are dependent on the success of this restoration effort," they write in next week's issue of the journal Science. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Marsh Arabs' ancient homeland to be restored
Marsh Arabs reclaiming wetlands
Marsh Arabs, modern Sumerians

From the BBC: Eco-Islam hits Zanzibar fishermen.

The Koran is not widely known as a source of guidance on environmental and conservation issues, but that has not stopped one development organisation in Tanzania from using it to help conserve an island marine park.

Religious leaders have been asked to promote conservation messages using the texts of the Koran - an approach which has proved a great deal more successful than government regulations. [continue]

From csmonitor.com: Hybrids? Some opt to go all-electric.

Not long after Dan Kroushl got his new 2004 Toyota Prius, he began to wonder about the mysterious button on the dash. It didn't seem to have any function. Didn't boost the turbo or engage an ejector seat. In online discussions with other Prius enthusiasts, Mr. Kroushl soon discovered the button did have a hidden function: It could turn the gasoline-electric hybrid into an all-electric car - for a mile or so on limited battery power.

This "stealth mode" button works fine in Japan and Europe where it's handy for drivers to roll politely about densely packed subdivisions in the early morning and late evening. But the button has been disconnected for North America's Priuses.

Now, scores of Prius owners in the United States are activating the button on their own - despite company warnings that altering the car will void its warranty.

Some drivers, including Kroushl, are going even further: adding battery capacity - and a plug. The hoped for result: a high-tech commuting car that plugs into a socket at night and gets amazing gas mileage the next day.

In effect, these backyard mechanics have turned the hybrid car's appeal on its head. Instead of emphasizing gasoline over electric power and the convenience of today's cars, they're aiming to create less polluting higher-mileage vehicles that emphasize electricity over gasoline - even if it's a bit less convenient.

"One guy I know plugs his Honda hybrid into a windmill for power," Kroushl says. "It costs him practically nothing to drive." [continue]

London's in for a new traffic experiment. Csmonitor.com explains: The cure for traffic chaos? Remove the signs, lines, lights.

... local authorities are planning to unveil a radical solution Monday: remove the conventional insignia of the road - traffic lights, white lines, guardrails, sidewalks - and create a single "shared space" for everyone, motorized or not.

At first glance, the idea seems a little reckless. After all, it is only the presence of the crossing signals on Exhibition Road that seems to keep the bewildered, stray tourists from a nasty accident. And governments the world over have long since concluded that the safest way to avoid catastrophe on the roads is to segregate vehicles from pedestrians.

But the experience from Europe would suggest otherwise. The Netherlands in particular, has pioneered a completely new approach to traffic and public space. [continue]

From Treehugger: Bikestations: Commuting Facility of the Future.

Seattle-based firm Place Architecture has come up with a concept for venues called Bikestations that could change the way we think about our commutes — and maybe even getting around in general. Already popular in Europe and Japan, bike stations are facilities where people can park their bikes, stow their riding clothes, clean up, and emerge ready for work, all in a city that will have cleaner air and easier mobility due to them. Place’s Bikestations would also be social spaces, where people could take a coffee, pick up a newspaper, or get a new inner tube. To be built along the existing commuter rail lines, the stations would provide services from simple covered parking to full multi-modal transit hubs that would eventually integrate a variety of clean transport options, giving commuters the opportunity to connect with electric vehicles, FlexCars, and rental bikes... [continue]

What a brilliant idea! I commuted to work by bicycle for years; a bikestation would have been a big help.

From Reuters: Iceland's Hydrogen Buses Zip to Oil-Free Economy.

Hydrogen, tested in buses from Amsterdam to Vancouver and used in the rockets of the U.S. space shuttle, is a clean power that promises to break dependence on oil and gas — at least in Iceland.

"Sometimes I have to explain to passengers that it's just water vapor," the driver said of white clouds trailing after his bus along the streets of the capital, Reykjavik. "When it's very cold there's a lot of white steam."

With almost unlimited geothermal energy sizzling beneath its surface, Iceland has an official goal of making the country oil-free by shifting cars, buses, trucks and ships over to hydrogen by about 2050. [continue]

From Delhi Online: ‘We can tell a tsunami from its amplitude, frequency’.

They do not memorise the laws of simple harmonic motion. But they know how to judge the frequency and amplitude of sea waves, a knowledge that saved around 266 Jarawas when the killer tsunami wrecked havoc on the "civilised world".

For Pramod Kumar, a research scholar from the school of linguistics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, talking to the tribals, who inhabit Kadamtalla and Bara Tang in the Middle Andamans, after the disaster, was a revelation. Over the past one year, he has been working with the Jarawas, trying to draw up a written text of Jarawa grammar, his Phd topic. Kumar returned from his "workplace" in the Middle Andamans on Wednesday night.

"Immediately after the tsunami, we interviewed several tribals in an effort to find out what exactly had forewarned them. An elderly Jarawa man called Chew, explained that there is a stark contrast between the amplitude and frequency of normal tidal waves and those of a tsunami. The moment the first wave was spotted, the tribals knew what was coming and fled to the highlands," Kumar recounts. [continue]

From Channel News Asia: Tsunami calamity highlights key protective role of coral, mangroves.

Long-term environmental lessons must be drawn from Asia's tsunami disaster, especially the consequences of ripping out mangroves and destroying coral reefs that help protect coasts from sea and storms, experts say.

"Places that had healthy coral reefs and intact mangroves were far less badly hit than places where the reefs had been damaged and the mangroves ripped out and replaced by beachfront hotels and prawn farms," said Simon Cripps, director of the Global Marine Programme at the environment group WWF Internationational.

"Coral reefs act as a natural breakwater and mangroves are a natural shock absorber, and this applies to floods and cyclones as well as tsunamis," he said in an interview from Geneva.

He compared the outcome of the December 26 tsunami in the Maldives, the low-lying archipelago which emphasises good coral management in its policy of upmarket tourism; and the Thai resort of Phuket, where mangroves and a coastline belt have been replaced by aquaculture and a hotel strip.

Both places were swamped and suffered severe economic damage. In the Maldives, just over 100 people have been counted as dead and missing in a populace of 270,000; in Phuket, where there is a roughly similar size of population at peak season, the toll is nearly 1,000. [continue]

Link found here at the wonderful WorldChanging, which has lots more information.

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Restoring mangroves
Electricity revives coral reef

From an Associated Press article at CBS News: Tsunami Affects Ancient Tribes.

Two days after a tsunami thrashed the island where his ancestors have lived for tens of thousands of years, a lone tribesman stood naked on the beach and looked up at a hovering coast guard helicopter.

He then calmly took out his bow and shot an arrow toward the rescue chopper.

It was a signal the Sentinelese have sent out to the world for millennia: They want to be left alone. Officials believe that isolation — and ancient knowledge of signals in the wind and sea — combined to save the five indigenous tribes on the Indian archipelago of Andaman and Nicobar islands from the tsunami that hit southern Asian coastlines on Dec. 26. [continue]

Similar news articles:
Arrows bring tribe tidings The (Calcutta) Telegraph
Tribals safe in Andaman; fire arrows at CG choppers - The Hindu
Reading the Waves, Smelling the Winds May Have Saved Tribes - The Scotsman

Background information:
Andaman Islands - Wikipedia
People of the Andamans - andamant.nic.in

From Scotsman.com: Kites Could Generate Power.

High-altitude kites could be used to generate clean energy at a cost comparable with that of polluting power stations, researchers claim.

The "Laddermill" is a chain of controllable wing-like kites attached to a looped cable stretching more than five miles into the sky.

Strong high altitude winds acting on the "kitewings" produce as upward force on one side of the loop and a downward force on the other, causing it to rotate.

The slowly-turning cable drives a power generator in the Laddermill base station.

Although the concept sounds far fetched, its developers at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands hope to build a working model in the next four years. [continue]

Update: Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing mentioned this story, and he was bright enough to add a link to the Laddermill website.

From WorldChanging: Restoring Mangroves.

A half-century ago, if you approached a point on the shore along the rim of Indian Ocean, you probably would have come upon endless acres of mangroves. Swampy rainforests hugging the edges of both land and sea, Indo-Pacific mangroves are storehouses of biodiversity, home to the world's richest variety of salt-tolerant trees, ferns, and shrubs. Hundreds of different birds live in the trees, which also shelter migratory species. Mangroves are rich in sea life — from plankton, to mollusks, to shell and fin fish — and well-populated with crocodiles, monkeys, wild cats, lizards, sea turtles, and more.

Mangroves also insulate coastlines and coastal communities from the abuses of the ocean — erosion, storms, and waves.

Fast forward 50 years: on December 25, 2004, if you approched the shore along the rim of the Indian Ocean, you would have been much more likely to come upon a shrimp farm, urban landfill, or tourist resort than a rainforest. In the past half-century, over half the world's mangroves - estimated to have covered 22 million hectares (54,340,000 acres) of tropical and subtropical coastlines in the middle of the last century - have been lost to development, oil exploration, pollution, inland irrigation, and especially shrimp aquaculture, an export industry frequently underwritten by international development lenders like the World Bank and the Inter-Asian Development Bank.

From Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta to southeastern India's Goadavari-Krishna mangroves, to the Sundarbans mangroves along the India-Bangladesh coast (home to nearly 700 endangered tigers), small pockets of mangroves have hung on, sometimes as protected areas, all highly endangered.

But in this terrible time after the tsunamis, place, environment, ecology and economics have combined to illuminate the simple sense of reforesting the mangroves. [continue]

Related:
Mangrove Action Project

Solar-Powered Wallpaper? Yup. From treehugger.com:

Yet another bright idea from the innovative brainiacs at NYU. The Solar Powered Wallpaper project is smart lighting powered by the sun. By embedding electroluminescent materials into the design pattern of the wall paper and incorporating a built-in light sensor, design students have created a wallcovering that can respond to the lighting requirement of a room, acting as a decorative element when a room is naturally bright, and as a flat wallpaper light when the room requires more light. With power supplied from a solar charged battery, it can also be manually controlled to increase or decrease luminosity. [continue]

This entry brought to you by insomnia.

From Reuters: Donkey Power for Green Grass Cutting.

An Italian town is setting donkeys to work mowing the grass on the side of its highways in an effort to save money and reduce pollution.

Fed up with paying some 100,000 euros ($132,800) a year to cut the grass on its out-of-town roads with tractor-mowers, the local government of Treviso, near Venice, said on Tuesday it had bought six donkeys to do the work instead. [continue]

Now this is an interesting house!

The Cardboard House represents the reduction of technology and the simplification of needs. By demonstrating that we are able to recycle 100% of the building components at extremely low cost, the Cardboard House is a direct challenge to the housing industry to reduce housing and environmental costs. [continue, see photos]

Link found here at Slashdot. Also note the cardboard school mentioned on the same Slashdot page. Wow.

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Cardboard shelter for street people

From the University of Warwick site: Researchers compost old mobile phones and transform them into flowers.

Researchers at the University of Warwick's Warwick Manufacturing Group, in conjunction with PVAXX Research & Development Ltd, have devised a novel way to recycle discarded mobile telephones - bury them and watch them transform into the flower of your choice. (...)

The University of Warwick team, led by Dr Kerry Kirwan, have worked with hi tech materials company PVAXX Research and Development Ltd and Motorola to create a mobile telephone case or cover that when discarded can simply be placed in compost in such a way that just weeks later the case will begin to disintegrate and turn into a flower. [continue]

Link found here at Slashdot.

What you didn't know about sardines, courtesy of The Guardian. Mind boggling.

Related:
Earth's Uncanned Crusaders: Will Sardines Save Our Skin? - New York Times (password here)
Sardines to the Rescue - Biological Research Information Center, Korea

From The Tyee: A Salmon Sleuth's Disturbing Find.

"You want to do what?" asked an incredulous plant manager.

"I would like to look through all the guts taken out of the Atlantic salmon, please." By now I was used to being considered odd.

He gave me a chair and a hair net and instructed the forklift operator to place each tote beside me. A wealth of information lay in those heaps of intestines and hearts and I didn't have to go chasing off after it; it was all here, immobile and available. The age and sex of the fish could be read from the condition of the gonads, the crispness of the spleen's edges reported some measure of health, the stomach gave up the fish's last meal and the adhesion of one organ to the other revealed whether that fish had been vaccinated or not. Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and industry stated that escaped farmed salmon were too domesticated to eat wild food; here was the proof one way or the other. [continue]

Now here's an article about an interesting invention. From National Geographic:

A decade ago Rod Sprules was designing a heated suit for search-and-rescue technicians. He was flipping through a reference book to look up the energy content of propane when he came across an interesting tidbit about coffee.

It said coffee grounds release more heat than wood when they're burned. Sprules, a mechanical engineer by training and an entrepreneur by heart, wrote down the fact in a book of ideas that he keeps and went back to work.

A few years later, while Sprules and his wife, Joanne Johnson, were living in Paris, he scoured his notebook for promising business ideas and rediscovered the coffee entry.

He went down from his apartment to a small café to ask the perplexed proprietor for some coffee grounds. Back upstairs, he dried the coffee grounds in the oven, stuffed them into an old cigar tube, added some candle wax, and set it on fire.

"It burned really well," Sprules recalled. [continue]

Those of you who've been reading Mirabilis.ca for a while know I'm interested in alternative fuels, and you might remember that I once blogged about biodiesel in Vancouver. Well, more news on that front. Mike McArthur wrote to say:

Ecofuels Canada has opened Vancouver's Biodiesel Coop:
www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=4877
www.ecofuels.ca

I personally am a member, and use biodiesel in my car. So if you or your blog's audience have questions, let me know.

Also, the City of Vancouver is switching to biodiesel in an effort to reduce their emissions.
www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/sustainability/coolvancouver/

Mike is at triton-env.com, by the way; the first part of his email address there is mmccarthur. Thanks, Mike!

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Automobile fuel from french fries
The power of leftovers
Biodiesel powers coffee delivery
Imagine these adverts
Tidal power in Norway
VW on biodiesel
Chicken-powered car
Bio cars
Biodiesel for Brampton buses
Cooking oil fuel in Wales
Trees could fuel cars
Denmark's eco-car
Biodiesel in Candada
Biodiesel for boats
Fill 'er up with Krispy Kreme
Anything into oil
Electricity from grapes
Biodiesel in Canada, update
Race car runs on alternative fuel
Sunflower oil to boost car future
Bananas could power Aussie homes

Elsewhere:
New Association Launches a Sustainable Energy Vision for BC - Globe.ca
BC Sustainable Energy Association

Triton Environmental Consultants: Mike McArthur
Triton Environmental Consultants: contact

From the BBC: ‘Europe's biggest mushroom’ found.

Swiss scientists have found what they say may be Europe's biggest mushroom - covering an area about the size of 35 football pitches.

The fungus was discovered in a national park near the eastern town of Ofenpass, said the Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Countryside Research (WSL).

Spanning 35 hectares (86 acres), the mostly underground fungus is believed to be 1,000 years old, the WSL added.

The Honey Mushroom (Armillaria ostoyae) is edible, but it can kill trees.

"The majority of the fungus is an underground network that looks a bit like shoelaces," WSL's spokeswoman Muriel Bendel said.

"The surface mushrooms look like the normal type you would pick, and are brown to yellow," the spokeswoman added.

Although harmless to humans, certain species of the vast underground organism can colonise trees, gradually strangling them, scientists say. [continue]

From csmonitor.com: A Frenchman who can see water beneath the Sahara.

IRIBA, CHAD — Out here in the sandy moonscape of eastern Chad, you don't expect to see a diminutive Frenchman with an Indiana Jones hat marching around, muttering, and staring at his global-positioning device.

But Alain Gachet has come here to outdo generations of witch doctors, water diviners, and PhDs. He aims to pinpoint, with scientific certainty, the right places to dig the costly wells that pull precious water from beneath the sand.

And this isn't some academic exercise. About 200,000 refugees have fled to Chad from Sudan's violent Darfur region. They each need four gallons of water a day, the United Nations says - or a total of about 25 swimming pools in a land that gets no rain for months on end. At a time when nearly 1 out of every 5 people in the world is without adequate drinking water, Mr. Gachet could help save countless lives.

Gachet says he's up to the task, due, oddly enough, to the space shuttle and the end of the cold war. Working in his 15th-century chateau in France, he fused together an unprecedented set of maps, including newly released topographic ones from the shuttle and previously unavailable radar ones that peer 20 yards underground. Now he's put the data into his GPS device. When he says, "Dig here!" aid workers listen. [continue]

From National Geographic: Armenia's Lesson in Street Life.

A small experiment in Gyumri, Armenia has shown how easy it is to turn an urban dead zone into an appealing, living place.

Gyumri boasts two Soviet-era monumental, lifeless city squares. You know the type: asphalt deserts walled by concrete office facades, beloved by urban planners and hated by travelers on foot. In a remote corner of one square, a Gyumri company recently installed just three things: a park bench, a street lamp, and a seesaw.

According to the New York-based Project for Public Spaces, magic resulted. Kids flocked to the seesaw, parents in tow. Parents began to chat with each other. Soon street vendors set up stands next to the bench, drawing more people. Three tiny seeds had bloomed into a garden of street life. Any visitor entering that square would automatically gravitate toward the lively corner. [continue]

Do you have worms in your kitchen? On purpose? A National Geographic article mentions a worm composting program that we've had in Vancouver for the last decade or so.

For environmentally minded urbanites, no kitchen is complete without an accessory that treats hundreds of wriggling, red guests to dinner — a worm bin. Inside the units, worms munch kitchen scraps into rich, soil-like humus and help reduce the amount of waste reaching landfills.

Worm composting has become so popular in Vancouver, Canada, that the city has established a telephone hot line.

So is your kitchen complete without one? [continue]

Related links:
Composting with red wiggler worms - City Farmer, Vancouver
City Farmer - Vancouver, Canada
Tips to reduce your garbage - City of Vancouver
Worm Composting (Vermiculture) - MasterComposter.com
Worm Composting - Region of Peel, Ontario

Related book:
Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof - Amazon.ca
Mary Appelhof's website (She's the author of Worms Eat My Garbage.)

From the BBC: Architects urged to copy India.

Renowned Indian architect Charles Correa has said housing designs from his home country offer the key to eco-friendly buildings of the future.

Correa, who is famed for design principles based on low-density, low cost architecture at a reduced environmental cost, wants architects to examine low-rise, high-density urban areas such as Rajasthan as a way of best using natural and local resources.

"The basic principle of housing in a country like India is that you have very limited resources," Correa told BBC World Service's Masterpiece programme.

"Therefore you have to use great ingenuity. That's when you really learn to respect what traditionally is done.

"If you look at a village in Kerala, everything is re-used and recycled. Leaves which fall from palm trees are used again for the roofs.

"There's nothing like poverty to be the mother of invention. As an architect, looking at those solutions, I was absolutely stunned by it." [continue]

I meant to mention something I saw in the print version of a local newspaper yesterday: an article about Vancouver architect Peter Busby and the sustainable condo he has designed. Unfortunately the article isn't on the web, but look - busby.ca has details about The Sustainable Condo Project:

The Sustainable Condo illustrates and promotes practical solutions and addresses the challenges of urban sustainability. A dynamic and interactive "green" condo, it features leading edge green building concepts that reduce environmental impacts and resource consumption.

There's also a project website at SustainableCondo.com. Both sites include photos, details on design and material, and so forth.

From the BBC: Bananas could power Aussie homes.

Australian engineers have created an electricity generator fuelled by decomposing bananas, and hope to build a full size fruit-fired power station.

At present, much of Australia's annual banana crop goes to waste, because the fruit are too bruised or small.

But rather than just letting them rot, the researchers would like to put the rejects to good commercial use.

If all goes according to plan, a banana-fuelled power plant capable of powering 500 homes could be built. [continue]

Related content on Mirabilis.ca:
The power of manure
Chicken powered car

From the BBC: Sunflower oil boost to car future.

UK scientists have developed a process for making hydrogen from sunflower oil which could prove an important future source of eco-friendly energy.

A University of Leeds team says the development could make hydrogen-powered vehicles a more realistic proposition.

The researchers envision a small unit inside a car that would pull hydrogen out of the oil to drive a fuel cell. [continue]

From Wired: Electricity Revives Coral Reef.

PEMUTERAN, North Bali -- As the late afternoon sun bathes the beach with a soft warmth, gentle waves lap quietly at the shore -- and strollers occasionally stumble over a thick wad of white cables embedded in the fine, black sand.

The cables seem to disappear into the sea, where large blue plastic balls bob in the waves. And they seem to come out of nowhere, sprouting like a nasty growth on the face of this stretch of tropical paradise on Bali's northwestern coast.

The wires are part of highly original and ambitious underwater experiment: the use of low-voltage electrical current to stimulate regrowth in a badly damaged coral reef. Conceived by coral expert Tom Goreau of the United States and German architecture professor Wolf Hilbertz, the project began four years ago and has already achieved remarkable results.

Covering a total length of nearly 1,000 feet, the Karang Lestari Project -- "coral preservation" in Indonesian -- is the world's largest coral nursery ever built using this technology.

"You can really see the difference in the reef in just a short time," said Chris Brown, owner of Reef Seen Aquatics Dive Center, which co-sponsors the project along with local hotels and shops committed to preserving the reef. [continue]

The Pemuteran Artificial Reef pages at GlobalCoral.org have more information, and lots of photos.

From nature.com: Species mix across Panama Canal.

When the Panama Canal opened in 1914, it was a tremendous boon to the shipping industry. But research shows that it is not only boats that have taken advantage of the shortcut: several of Central America's fish species have also made the journey.

The canal links the Rio Chagres and Rio Grande rivers, which are on opposite slopes of the Isthmus of Panama. When the waterway opened, the once-isolated fish communities of the two rivers were given the chance to intermingle. [continue]

From the CBC: Lake Ontario water cools downtown Toronto office buildings.

TORONTO — A new environmentally-friendly air conditioning system that uses frigid water drawn from the depths of Lake Ontario to cool downtown Toronto office buildings was officially launched Tuesday.

The system, in the making for seven years, was developed by Enwave District Energy Limited, which is jointly owned by the City of Toronto and the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System.

It draws water from 83 metres below the surface of Lake Ontario through a pipeline jutting five kilometres out from the city shoreline to a downtown pumping station.

The 4 C water chills the coolant which is used to air condition 20 downtown buildings, including the Air Canada Centre, the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Royal Bank Plaza and Steam Whistle Brewing.

When running at full capacity, the company says the system will cool nearly 100 buildings or seven million square metres of office space and reduce electricity use by 75 per cent, eliminating 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air. [continue]

From NewScientist.com: Ancient Rome's fish pens confirm sea-level fears.

Coastal fish pens built by the Romans have unexpectedly provided the most accurate record so far of changes in sea level over the past 2000 years. It appears that nearly all the rise in sea level since Roman times has happened in the past 100 years, and is most likely the result of human activity.

Sea-level change is a measure of the relative movement between land and sea surfaces. Tide-gauge records show that the sea level has been rising 1 to 2 millimetres a year since widespread measurements began around 1900, but do not pinpoint when the trend started.

Earlier sea levels can be estimated from geological data, but the accuracy is limited to about half a metre, which is not enough to precisely chart the history of sea-level rise.

So Kurt Lambeck of the Australian National University in Canberra turned to fish pens on the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy for a more accurate record of ancient sea level. [continue]

From National Geographic: African Trees May Be Tied to Lemurs' Fate.

On the African island nation of Madagascar, only primates called lemurs are big enough to move the seeds of many trees around and thus improve the chances of the trees' survival.

"Lemurs are very important seed dispersers in Malagasy rainforests," said Chris Birkinshaw, a biologist with the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis who is an expert on lemur seed dispersal. [continue]

From The Independent: Marsh Arabs' ancient homeland to be restored to former glory.

The marshlands of southern Iraq, long regarded as one of the nurturing grounds of civilisation but turned into an arid salt bed under the regime of Saddam Hussein, are to be restored by the United Nations.

Saddam drained much of the Mesopotamian waters between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers - home of the celebrated Marsh Arabs - by building dams, dikes and canals after the inhabitants supported a Shia Muslim rebellion following the 1991 Gulf war. The reed beds were also burned and the waters poisoned.

As a result, more than 500,000 people were displaced. By 2001, satellite images showed that 90 per cent of the original wetlands had been lost, and experts feared they could disappear altogether by 2008.

The largest wetland ecosystem in the Middle East, the marshes have enormous cultural significance. They have been identified as the site of the Garden of Eden and the Great Flood, and the birthplace of Abraham. Nearby lie an array of world-famous archaeological sites including Ur.

The marshes were home to an enormous range of wildlife. They were also vital to the fisheries of the Persian Gulf, filtering polluted water from northern cities and purifying it before it reached the southern rivers and the city of Basra. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Marsh Arabs reclaiming wetlands
Marsh Arabs, modern Sumerians

Brazil wins the race on alternative fuel. From Aljazeera:

When the slick green and black racing car slammed across the finishing line at the world's most famous race last month, the Le Mans 24 Hours, it may have finished only in 17th place but the team knew it had won a remarkable first.

The Nasamax DM139-Judd had passed what is known the world over as a fiercesome endurance test - running not on petrol but on bio-ethanol, an alcohol fuel distilled in northern France from sugar beet and potatoes.

If it hadn't been for an engine misfire, says Nasamax team manager John McNeil "we know what lap time we could have had, and we know it would have put us safely in the top ten - even the top six. We have still shown that this fuel can be competitive in the top level of international motorsport."

The achievement is just one example of how booze-fuelled cars are lining up for poll position. Or, as in Brazil's case, merely returning.

Brazil became the centre of alternative fuel production in the 80s spurred by the oil shocks of the 1970s. The experiment reached its peak in 1985 when an astonishing 91% of cars produced that year ran on sugar-cane ethanol - the same fuel as the national spirit cachaca that makes the popular cocktail caipirinha. [continue]

The Guardian has a good article on car sharing, which includes this:

What people like Chas Ball, who runs the car club company Smart Moves, would like to see in the long term is the sort of scheme already being pioneered in parts of Germany and Switzerland, in which car use becomes incorporated into the public transport system.

Here's how it works: you mostly get around on the train during the week to commute to work, but you need a car at weekends and for occasional trips out of town. At the moment you buy a season ticket for the train and own a car that spends most of the time sitting outside your home or at the station. In the new scheme, along with your season ticket you can buy cheap add-on credit that enables you to take part in a car pooling scheme. Now instead of owning the car you need at weekends, you book it on the internet, collect it from the car pool parking spaces near your home or office (guaranteed parking always available, another plus) and away you go. [see full article]

I love car sharing; I've been a member of Vancouver's car sharing network for ages now. But you know, I've never thought of integrating car sharing with public transit. That, if properly done, could be just brilliant.

Related:

Car Sharing Canada
Car Sharing.net
Car Sharing.org (Europe)
Smart Moves (UK)

From the BBC: Phones power bike rental scheme.

Public transport is part of the daily routine of millions of people, but few are actually delivered right to their final destination.

All too often journeys involve a frustrating combination of buses, trains or tubes - all punctuated by lengthy waits for a service to arrive.

Then there's the issue of what can be a long walk from your stop to the place you actually want to go.

One solution might be Oybike, a new mobile phone-operated bicycle rental scheme designed to make getting around easier and faster.

It is being trialled in Hammersmith and Fulham, west London, where a number of rental stations have been set up, but its inventors hope it will soon be extended.

Anyone wanting to use an Oybike signs up and pays a £10 annual fee, then uses their mobile phone to unlock a bike for as long as they need. [continue]

Related:
OYBike.com

From The Economist: Hunter-programmers .

What really goes on in Africa's remote national parks? Though satellite imaging and aerial surveys give a rough idea of changes in animal and plant life, the most detailed data still have to be collected on foot. This is all very well for those places where skilled botanists and zoologists swarm in the undergrowth, but what about everywhere else?

When Ebola fever struck Lossi sanctuary in eastern Congo two years ago, the zoologists who were studying the gorillas there noticed that 139 of their apes had disappeared, presumably killed by the disease. As an aside, they also recorded chimpanzees, antelopes, bush pigs and other species that were struck down, suggesting Ebola is more deadly than once thought. The toll elsewhere was unknown.

The useful extra data were collected only because the zoologists in question had a convenient system for doing so. They were testing the prototype of CyberTracker, an invention of Louis Liebenberg, a self-taught animal tracker who lives in Nordhoek, near Cape Town. CyberTracker is a hand-held device that lets users record what they see quickly and easily, and then plots maps showing exactly where the observations were made, using the Global Positioning Satellite navigation system.

Mr Liebenberg's invention is designed to allow currently untapped expertise to be used when trained scientists are not around to note things down. Rangers, park guards and even well-informed tourists could use it to record handy data as they work or play. There are other advantages, too. Many expert trackers are illiterate, so CyberTracker uses only symbols and pictures. And it is cheap. The software to run it, which is now available for general use, can be downloaded from CyberTracker's website for nothing. All that is needed to run it is a mass-produced hand-held computer. [continue]

Thanks to Lawrence for telling me about this article.

Related:
CyberTracker

Canadians Against Pesticides offers 10 Simple Steps to a Healthy Lawn — a pesticide-free healthy lawn, of course. They also have several suggestions for alternative groundcovers; using clover as a groundcover sounds like a particularly fine idea. According to this .pdf brochure, clover is hardy, tolerates foot traffic, is competitive with weeds and dandelions, and (best of all) is low-growing, so mowing is optional. Sign me up!

Related book:
How to Get Your Lawn and Garden Off Drugs: Pesticide Free Gardening for a Healthier Environment - Amazon.com

Wow. Reuters reports that Paris might ban SUVs.

PARIS (Reuters) — Bulky four-by-fours could be banned from clogging up the chic streets of Paris after a top official in the capital's left-wing government described them as a polluting "caricature of a car" unsuited to city life.

An anti-sports utility vehicle (SUV) resolution passed by the city council could lead to a ban on the popular vehicles in about 18 months if it is included in an overall project to improve traffic flow in the city, Deputy Mayor Denis Baupin said Wednesday.

"You have to wonder why people want to drive around in SUVs," Baupin, a Greens party member, said on Europe 1 radio.

"We have no interest in having SUVs in the city. They're dangerous to others and take up too much space." [continue]

This reminds me of the "I'm changing the climate! Ask me how!" bumper stickers, which are intended for SUVs. The stickers (and information about the associated campaign) are available at ChangingTheClimate.com.

Related:
4x4s into Paris won't go — if SUV ban works- Guardian
Paris Considers SUV Ban - Kuro5hin
SUV - Wikipedia
Before you buy an SUV - pbs.org
Harper's Magazine article on SUVs - prelinger.com
Crunch time for Sports Utility Vehicles - NewScientist.com

From National Geographic: Himalaya Honey Hunters Cling to Cliffside Tradition.

Twice a year high in the Himalayan foothills of central Nepal teams of men gather around cliffs that are home to the world's largest honeybee, Apis laboriosa. As they have for generations, the men come to harvest the Himalayan cliff bee's honey.

The harvest ritual, which varies slightly from community to community, begins with a prayer and sacrifice of flowers, fruits, and rice. Then a fire is lit at the base of the cliff to smoke the bees from their honeycombs.

From above, a honey hunter descends the cliff harnessed to a ladder by ropes. As his mates secure the rope and ladder from the top and ferry tools up down as required, the honey hunter fights territorial bees as he cuts out chunks of honey from the comb. [continue]

Ancient whalers leave their mark on the north. From Stories In The News:

The high arctic is one of the farthest places from most of the 6.3 billion people on Earth, but Canadian researchers have found that the far north holds some of the oldest evidence of people altering a lake's ecosystem.

John Smol of Queen's University in Ontario is a frequent visitor to Canada's high arctic, a treeless world of tundra, lakes, and constant winds. The Thule people — descendents of the Native whalers of northern Alaska — lived in the area from about A.D. 1200 to A.D. 1600, making homes out of rocks, peat, and whalebones. Though the Thule people left the area about 400 years ago, Smol and his colleagues found that the ancient people have changed the water chemistry of local lakes and Thule homesites are still affecting lakes today. [continue]

Related:
Inuit changed Arctic ecosystem long before Europeans: study - CBC
John Smol - Department of Biology, Queen's University

From Chapter 1 of Ghost Town, which is the account of a woman named Elena who rides her motorcycle through the Chernobyl area.

I have ridden all my life and over the years I have owned several different bikes. I ended my search for a perfect bike with a big Kawasaki Ninja that boasts a mature 147 horse power, some serious bark, is fast as a bullet and comfortable for a long trips.

I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations is through the so called Chernobyl "dead zone", which is 130kms from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there and not see any single car or any single soul.

The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes.

In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago - except for an occasional blade of grass that discovered a crack to spring through. Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again........ a few centuries from now. [continue]

Thanks to Marja-Leena Rathje for writing to tell me about this site.

Update, May 27th, 2004:
"Girl Photoblogs Chernobyl on Motorcycle" thing a fraud? - BoingBoing.net

Well, finally! From the CBC:

TORONTO - An Ottawa company opened Canada's first gas pump offering environmentally friendly biodiesel fuel to the general public.

Topia Energy unveiled the station Tuesday, which is located on Main St. in Unionville, Ont.

It is offering a vegetable-based fuel at a slightly higher price than regular diesel fuel, but at about the same price as regular gasoline.

Biodiesel is a renewable fuel made from vegetable oil that can be used in any diesel engine.

It is most commonly made from canola and soy, and significantly reduces harmful emissions.

Over the past several years a few municipalities have converted to biodiesel for their vehicles, but individuals who wanted to use it have had to go to great lengths—such as filtering cooking oil themselves.

Potential biodiesel customers should be warned; one side effect is that it makes your exhaust smell like french fries.

Biodiesel only smells like french fries if it's made from oil that was used to cook french fries. People who run cars on used cooking oil from Indian restaurants report exhaust that smells like Indian food, which seems like a far nicer thing to me.

Related:
AboutBiodiesel.com (Topia Energy's domain, topiaenergy.com, forwards to this site.)

Previous Mirabilis.ca postings on biodiesel:
Fill 'er up with Krispy Kreme
Biodiesel for boats
Biodiesel in Canada
Cooking oil fuel in Wales
Biodiesel for Brampton buses
VW on biodiesel
Biodiesel in Vancouver
Biodiesel powers coffee delivery
Automobile fuel from french fries
Trains run on biodiesel and generate electricity

From The Telegraph: Stalin's last army - hordes of gigantic crabs on their way to invade Europe.

Millions of giant Pacific crabs, whose ancestors were brought to Europe by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, are marching south along Norway's coast, devouring everything in their path.

The monster crabs, which can weigh up to 25lb and have a claw-span of more than three feet, are proving so resilient that scientists fear they could end up as far south as Gibraltar.

Energised by a mysterious population explosion a decade ago, whole armies of the crustaceans - known as the Kamchatka or Red King Crabs - have already advanced about 400 miles along the roof of Europe, overwhelming the ports of northern Norway. [continue]

Dear heavens!

A year and a half ago, I blogged about London's plan to reduce traffic congestion, which includes a £5 per day fee for those who drive into London's city centre. You can imagine the fuss and controversy this congestion charge caused when it was implemented last year, but ... it worked. From The Guardian: Charge has helped break love affair with car.

More than 400,000 Londoners have abandoned their cars in favour of travelling each day by public transport, thanks to a combination of better buses, traffic restraints and mayor Ken Livingstone's controversial congestion charge.

The mayor's Transport for London authority said the drop in daily car travel had taken place over four years and was in stark contrast to cities elsewhere in Europe, where public transport use is typically either static or falling.(...)

The charge is part of a package of measures introduced by Mr Livingstone in an attempt to revolutionise travel in London, alongside bus lanes, slower traffic lights and electronic ticketing.

According to TfL, an extra 1.1 million people are taking the bus each day, taking the total number of journeys to 4.7m. During the morning peak, bus journeys into the centre of the capital have rocketed by 47% to 103,000 a day.

The capital's notoriously overcrowded trains and tubes have also accommodated an increase, with passenger numbers up by between 5% and 10% since 1999.

Professor David Begg, chairman of the Commission for Integrated Transport, said the findings proved that it was possible to break the British love affair with the car: "A lot of sceptics say that you can't get people out of their cars and on to the buses. This proves them wrong.

"No other city in the world is achieving anything like the shift that London has got." [continue]

Remember the story of Percy Schmeiser, the Saskatchewan farmer who is fighting Monsanto? Percy's case is now before the Supreme Court of Canada. From the Globe and Mail: Small Canadian farmer fights biotech giant.

OTTAWA — The case of a small-time farmer from the remote Saskatchewan plains, now before Canada's highest court, may represent the best chance yet for foes of the global biotech revolution to get the law on their side.

Agribusiness giant Monsanto Co. sued the farmer, Percy Schmeiser, after its agents found biotech canola growing in his fields in 1997. It contends he replanted seeds from those plants without paying a technology fee of about $12 an acre.

But Mr. Schmeiser says the Monsanto canola, originating from neighbours' fields, got onto his 1,400 acres without his involvement or knowledge. The 73-year-old farmer says the contamination of his crops destroyed a lifetime of work improving them, so it's hardly right that he would have to pay for Monsanto's seed. [continue]

Related:
PercySchmeiser.com
More Monsanto stupidity - from Mirabilis.ca, August, 2003
Blowin' in the Wind - shared-vision.com. ("In 1997, wind blew Monsanto’s genetically engineered Roundup Ready canola seeds onto Percy Schmeiser’s farm. His life has been a living hell ever since.")
Percy Schmeiser vs. Monsanto - commonground.ca

My friend Lawrence pointed out an interesting article on the economist.com site: Putting animals to good use.

Attempts to control coyotes have concentrated on culling them. But coyotes have earned the respect they get from those who know them best: despite all efforts to slaughter them, they survive across a huge swathe of North America, munching on sheep with abandon. The country they share with the sheep is often open prairie, and hard to police. (...)

More effective solutions are clearly needed, and a new application of the ancient role of domestic animals as guardians provides one. It turns out that alpacas, llamas and donkeys have plenty of coyote-scaring power. Being herbivores, they eat the same fodder as sheep, and have no desire to dine out on their charges. Llamas and alpacas are naturally inquisitive, and intolerant of intrusion into their space. And the wily coyote is actually a small creature, easily intimidated, which usually hunts alone. Any old llama or alpaca is more than a match for it.

This is no isolated example of the imaginative use of animals in an age that usually seeks a technological solution to even the simplest of problems. In Florida, for example, attempts have been made to press the local manatees into service to devour the water hyacinths that choke the waterways. These amiable sea-elephants, which eat about 10-15% of their weight each day, can be used instead of herbicides, which can do great damage in an environment already fragile and much-abused. It is not a perfect solution: water hyacinths grow faster than the manatees can eat them, they sprout compensatory leaves for every leaf consumed and, alas, they are not the manatees' favourite food. Even so, with proper management, the manatees can do a lot of good.

In other places, too, local creatures have been recruited to do some of the work more usually done by men or machines. In Mozambique a Belgian charity called Apopo has deployed African giant pouched rats to help clear some of the 500,000 landmines that litter the landscape after the country's long years of civil strife. Elsewhere dogs have sometimes been used to clear the detritus of war. But rats are lighter, so less likely to detonate a buried mine, and smaller, so easier to transport. They also work harder and learn faster than dogs. [continue]

From the Guardian: China's Shanghai Bans Bikes on Main Roads.

SHANGHAI, China (AP) - Bicycles were kings of the road in Shanghai for decades, transporting young and old, lofty and lowly, through the city's streets and markets. Times have changed, though, and the automobile now rules supreme.

As for bikes, well, they just get in the way, according to local police.

Already barred from some major thoroughfares, bicycles will be banned altogether from important streets starting next year, newspapers reported Tuesday. To further discourage riders - especially those with a tendency to bend the rules - police are jacking up fines tenfold for infractions such as running red lights.

"Bicycles put great pressure on the city's troubled traffic situation," the English-language Shanghai Daily quoted police official Chen Yuangao as saying. [continue]

They think it'll be better if a few million cyclists switch to space-hogging cars?

Grrr.

From The Guardian: Mini-turbine brings ‘green power for all’.

The winds of change will blow a little stronger this morning when a small Scottish company launches Britain's first wind power system designed to be fitted on almost any roof or wall to supplement electricity from the grid.

Just two days after Britain's biggest offshore wind farm started generating electricity off the north Wales coast, the designers of the tiny domestic unit believe they can provide up to 15% of the annual electricity needs of an average house for a one-off cost of £750 - bringing green electricity into the price range of most families.

The machine, a 3ft by 2ft sealed box with three blades which face into the prevailing wind, is backed by the energy minister, Brian Wilson, who is a paid consultant for Windsave, the company behind it.

Unlike old-style domestic wind generators, which needed a lot of land, sat on top of poles and drove pumps and a few bulbs for farmers and backwoodsmen, the machine does not need batteries to store the electricity. Instead, it tops up the existing mains supply. [continue].

City of Vancouver steers developers to car-sharing. From the Vancouver Sun:

When the Co-operative Auto Network, Vancouver's non-profit car-sharing society, started in 1996, it only had a single Pontiac Firefly -- donated by two of its founders -- and a handful of members.

For many years, it was hard to convince people to forsake their own car for the inconvenience of a shared vehicle that could be several blocks from their homes.

But in the past few years, the popularity of car-sharing has exploded in Vancouver.

In the past four years alone, the co-op's membership has more than quadrupled -- from about 300 members in 1999 to 1,300 today. And the number of vehicles owned by the co-op has more than tripled, from 21 to 69.

And now the city of Vancouver is getting behind the idea. [continue]

Related links:
Carsharing - Mirabilis.ca, August 2002
Co-operative Auto Net - Vancouver's car-sharing co-operative

From the New York Times: Animal-Watching Deep in the Amazon.

We are gliding along the banks of a river deep in the wilds of the Peruvian Amazon, when the Indian guide at the bow of our wooden canoe suddenly shouts "Capybara!" Three furry mounds proceed to rise up and glare at us through eyes eerily placed on the tops of their heads.

Our Indian boatman, who still hunts with a bow, had only contempt for the gigantic rodents, though we had drifted so close to them we could see their sad teddy bear mouths and the flies buzzing around their whiskers. "They eat grass," he spat. "They have a stinky taste."

I'd love to see a capybara. Remember the story about how the Catholic church once classified capybara as fish?

A century ago, a deadly hail of arrows would have greeted us instead of these bizarre snouted creatures, shot by the ancestors of the very Indians who are now guiding us up this jungle tributary. They are members of the Ese Eja-Sonene tribe, once the fiercest of warriors, who massacred missionaries, loggers, and any other white men who ventured into their territory.

Now, although they are still one of the most primitive tribes in the Amazon basin, the Ese Eja, backed by eco-tourist organizations, have recently built and opened a very comfortable jungle lodge in the Manu Wilderness on the border between southeastern Peru and Bolivia. Nestling into crisp sheets and handmade quilts while snakes and parrots held forth in the trees above us, my son, Josh, and I stayed here for four days of a 10-day trip into the region last January. [continue]

From NewScientist.com: Iraqis reclaim their ancient wetlands

The Marsh Arabs of Iraq have given up waiting for outsiders to restore their wetlands. Local people are taking matters into their own hands by breaching dykes and shutting down pumping stations in a bid to restore the marshes drained by Saddam Hussein's regime. But some experts worry that their actions could hamper the region's recovery. (...)

At one time, the marshes covered between 15,000 and 20,000 square kilometres in what the UN Environment Programme described as a "biodiversity centre of global importance". Thought by Bible scholars to be the location of the Garden of Eden and the Flood, the marshes surrounding the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris supported the Madan, or Marsh Arabs, for 5000 years.

But a combination of 32 dam projects upstream and the deliberate draining of the land by Saddam's regime reduced the marshes to five per cent of their previous extent. "The people want their land back," says Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi-American water engineer exiled to California. [continue]

Related links:
Marsh Arabs - from EnviroLiteracy.org
Marsh Arabs Cling to Memories of a Culture Nearly Crushed by Hussein - from IraqFoundation.org
Marsh Arabs - photo gallery - from Tor Eigeland.com
Marsh Arabs ambivalent about returning to their lost paradise - from The Guardian, April 26th, 2003.
Iraq's 'devastated' Marsh Arabs - from the BBC, March 3rd, 2003.
Marsh Arab civilisation disappearing as Iraqi wetlands are drained - from The Guardian, May 19th, 2001.

From Wired.com: Air Car Caught in Turbulence.

Worried about rising gas prices and automobile pollution? Relax. If a European company has its way, cars could soon be running on air.

By the end of this year, Moteur Developpment International, a 12-year-old company headquartered in Luxembourg, says it plans to distribute model fleets of so-called "air cars" in Spain and France.

As the name implies, this is no ordinary car. It runs entirely on a stream of air delivered to a two-stroke engine. No gasoline, no pollution and no costly expenditures at the pump. [continue]

It's been a while since I've seen anything about green roofs in the press, but look what the Guardian has today: Campaign for rooftop gardens.

A campaign to lift scraps of urban countryside on to the rooftops will start today at the first national conference on "green" roofs.

Calls for compulsory roof-garden conditions in the government's drive to redevelop so-called city brownfield sites will be made by some 150 planners, architects and experts on "plants in the sky".

The move follows a London campaign to save the small Black Redstart bird, whose brownfield habitat at Deptford Creek was built more than 10 years ago. Thousands of acres of plants embedded in crushed-brick on top of flats and office blocks provide havens for the birds. (...)

The Green Roofs for Healthy Cities conference at Sheffield University will hear that Deptford Creek became "a fantastic wilderness". Matthew Frith of the Peabody Trust, which has three green roofs on its social housing estates in London, said: "I was at one of our original Victorian tenement blocks this week and up on the roof they've got the only fruiting olive tree I've ever seen in London." [full article]

I thought it was a cool idea to start with, but the idea of a fruiting olive tree in London has me totally convinced. Do you think we could pull that off in Vancouver?

You'd think this would be obvious, wouldn't you? It's cheaper to grow your own clean water.

Big cities such as Melbourne and New York can save the billions they spend on treating water to make it drinkable by keeping their forests instead, a new study has found.

The 114-page report titled Running Pure was released on Monday by the World Bank and the ecology organisation the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-International).

The report found that one-third of the 105 big cities studied, including New York, Tokyo, Barcelona and Melbourne, get much of their water from protected forests. It found that preserving these forests is a cost-effective way to provide clean drinking water because forest reduce landslides, erosion and sediment, improve water purity by filtering pollutants, and in some cases capture and store water.

"For many cities, time is running out. Protecting forests around water catchment areas is no longer a luxury but a necessity," said David Cassells, senior environmental specialist for forest resources with the World Bank. "When they are gone, the costs of providing clean and safe drinking water to urban areas will increase dramatically." [continue]

The Norwich Bulletin reports that three Orthodox priests blessed the Thames River yesterday. (No, not the Thames in England. There's another one.)

NORWICH -- The occasional raindrop wasn't the only thing to ripple the surface of the Thames River Monday morning.

Shortly before noon, the Rev. Charles Simones of the St. Sophia Hellenic Orthodox Community in New London walked up and down the pier at Chelsea Landing, ceremonially blessing the river. A family of approaching swans looked on as droplets of holy water splashed into the Thames.

In Howard T. Brown Memorial Park next to Norwich Harbor, two Norwich priests -- the Rev. Dennis Rhodes, pastor of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, and the Rev. Paul Pantelis of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church -- led 10 people in a chorus of prayers for the protection of the environment.

Over the past four years, the river blessing ceremony has become a Sept. 1 tradition for the three Orthodox churches, which consider the day to be the first of the ecclesiastical year. The practice date backs to the Roman and Byzantine Empires when Sept. 1 was also the beginning of the civil year.

Rhodes said the two themes have been combined since 1989 when Dimitrios, the late patriarch of Constantinople, declared Sept. 1 the Annual Day of the Protection of the Environment. (...)

During his sermon, Rhodes explained to petitioners why the protection of the environment is so important. He described the Earth as "God's sacred creation" and likened it to the Garden of Eden.

"It's still God's garden," Rhodes said. "It's not ours to use up or to do whatever we want with. We are here simply to tend it and take care of it." [continue]

Is it just my imagination, or is the Orthodox church doing a lot more environmentally-related stuff than it used to?

Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Patriarch Bartholomew I, still fighting for the environment
Bartholomew, on the environment

I'm already peeved at Monsanto for their nefarious deeds (see below), including their attempts to bully Percy Schmeiser. And this? I could just sputter. From It's a Mystery:

Roundup may harm wheat [update: link out of order in Jan 2004.]

"Researchers say Monsanto's popular weedkiller might boost blight" [ Saskatoon Star Phoenix - canada.com network ] Well, isn't that special? A disease of wheat that is actually fueled by a herbicide. And Monsanto is producing a genetically modified wheat (which is also creating other problems) that is resistant to this herbicide so you can use even more of the herbicide. And Monsanto owns both the herbicide, Roundup, and the genetically modified wheat. And all the experts are running around trying to do damage control because the information has come out. As I said, isn't that special? Bah!

More about Monsanto, those scoundrels:
Monsanto Invades Mexico
GMO Corn Invades Mexico
Monsanto accused of cover-up
Monsanto Hid Decades Of Pollution
Unethical Firms: Monsanto
The Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods: Monsanto Files

My favourite farmer, Percy Schmeiser, is still battling Monsanto's absurd claims. From the BBC: Seed battle heads to supreme court.

A single farmer from the Canadian Prairies is preparing to take on a mighty biotech corporation in his country's Supreme Court.

Percy Schmeiser, a sprightly 72-year-old from Bruno, Saskatchewan, has become a hero to the anti-GM movement worldwide for resisting Monsanto's attempts to enforce its patent rights over the seeds it promotes.

The outcome of the case could have major implications not just for genetically modified crops, but for the patenting of genetic techniques in many other areas.

Mr Schmeiser's battle with Monsanto dates back to 1998, when it accused him of planting the company's genetically modified canola (oilseed rape) on his land without permission, and demanded that he pay it the same fee required of those growing GM crops under contract.

He refused, saying that he had simply followed his usual practice of collecting seeds from his own crop to plant for the following year, and that it must have become contaminated from GM canola grown nearby.

Mr Schmeiser told BBC News Online: "I was very concerned, because we realised that there was contamination of the pure seed we had been developing for half a century.

"We said to Monsanto when we received the law suit, 'if you have any GMOs in our pure seed, you should be liable and there should be a law suit against you people'." [continue]

Percy's own website at www.percyschmeiser.com has lots more information, and a paypal "donate" button, too.

Related links:
Blowin' in the Wind - from CBC.ca
Farmer's Plight Shows GM Trouble - from wired.com

Hmmm. Lots of stuff I didn't know about cork from abc.net.au: Portugal's cork groves under threat from plastic.

Will cork survive the threat from plastic stoppers in wine bottles? It's a question that preoccupies Antonio Jose Boneco as he strips bark from cork trees in southern Portugal, just as he has done every summer for the past 50 years.

But whether his grandchildren will still be stripping the same trees in another 50 years will very much depend on whether new technology and branding embraced by the cork industry can face off a challenge from synthetic bungs.

"It's a question of quality demarcation, just as you prefer to wear a cotton shirt," said Roderick Reynolds, who farms 400 hectares of cork groves near the village of Santana do Mato, 70 km east of Lisbon. "We face the same battle as cotton, silk, linen and wool," he added, giving directions to Boneco and other workers.

Portugal is the world's biggest producer of natural cork, a time-consuming business which could be squeezed out by plastic stoppers that are far easier to make and claim to preserve the taste of wine better. Cork makers estimate synthetic rivals have already eaten away 8% of a market which earns Portugal some 900 million euros a year in exports.

Environmental and wildlife groups have warned that a big drop in natural cork sales could make farmers abandon ancient cork groves, which help prevent desertification in much of Portugal and neighbouring Spain.

Known as montados in Portugal and dehesas in Spain, cork groves are also home to endangered species like the Iberian lynx, the Spanish imperial eagle and rare birds like the booted eagle, black vulture and turtle dove.

"If current trends continue, the wildlife-rich montados and dehesas could disappear within 20 to 30 years," a report by Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said. [continue]

Why build a new water system when you can re-activate the environmentally-friendly one the Romans built centuries ago?

ALEPPO: "Have some water, it's clean enough to drink," say some women of Shalala Saghira (little falls), as they draw water from restored qanats (canals) and carry buckets of it on their heads to their small homes in the hills near Aleppo. The village, located approximately 70 kilometers southeast of Aleppo near the town of Khanasser, is the first in Syria to have its qanats, which date from Byzantine times, reactivated. This program, in partnership with the International Center for Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) and the directorate of the National Museum of Aleppo, gives the locals of Shalala Saghira the chance to use this ancient yet clean and efficient way of getting their water.(...)

The first ancient qanats to be excavated in Syria were found by German archaeologists approximately 100 years ago in northern Syria at Tel Halaf along the Turkish border. Yet large-scale plans to reactivate them for practical use are relatively recent.

The idea of reactivating the qanats comes from the same need the Romans had when they initially built them — to make the most of scarce water resources in an arid region.

During Roman times, these canals connected cities such as Duro Europos, Bosra and Palmyra. The paths of the qanats (basically large tunnels) are so big that one could drive a car through them. The Romans were probably the biggest builders of qanats, though other civilizations also contributed their irrigation techniques to the region. Qanats rely on gravity to carry water and are considered environmentally sound because they do not deplete groundwater resources. [continue]

This looks like fun: a trial program in Leeds is renting tiny electric cars. From the BBC: Going green with the watt car.

Now all the fun of the dodgem cars can be yours in Leeds - minus the bumps - for just £1 an hour.

The city has been chosen for trials for this new way of getting around town.

A company called Goingreen is renting the electric cars as an environmentally-friendly alternative to petrol or diesel-powered transport.

The cars based at the company's offices near Leeds Parish Church are all imported from Bangalore in India where they have become a trendy means of transport. [continue, and see photo]

Related links:
Going Green
Sir George test drives UK's Greenest Car

From the Christian Science Monitor: Noah's Ark for the Internet era.

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA — Have you ever wondered what a Dodo bird sounded like? Or a Carolina Parakeet? Perhaps you'd like to be able to see a Mammoth or Mastodon in motion. Clearly, it's too late to record any of the animals above, but with a worldwide extinction rate estimated at one distinct species every twenty minutes, it's essential that science document as many currently endangered species as possible while it still is possible - and then protects those documents in the event of eventual extinctions. Britain's ARKive intends to serve exactly this purpose, and, in addition to gathering the information, is planning to make the collection available to anyone with an internet connection.

Describing itself as a virtual conservation effort and "Noah's Ark for the Internet era," ARKive plans to collect and post films, stills and even sound files for some 11,000 endangered plants and animals - and a few recent extinctions as well. (Current intentions are to have roughly 1200 species posted by the end of 2003.) With a goal of 6-10 stills and 10 minutes of high quality film footage for each species, it's still the ramp up stage for the site - but there's already a great deal to investigate. (...)

...where else can you find moving pictures of a Tasmanian Tiger?

ARKive can be found at http://www.arkive.org/.

Oh bless him, Patriarch Bartholomew I is at it again. From an Associated Press article:

ATHENS, Greece (AP) - He has cast flower wreaths onto the oil-fouled Danube River. He's warned that the Black Sea is teetering on ecological collapse.

After touring pollution hotspots along the Adriatic coast, he has joined Pope John Paul II in proclaiming a "moral and spiritual" duty to protect the environment.

And Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world's 200 million Orthodox Christians, has gone even further. Years ago, he declared that harming the environment is a sin, and he has been pushing religious leaders and believers to make conservation an integral part of faith ever since.

The so-called "green patriarch" is bringing his message next to the Baltic Sea, with its shores that touch eco-sensitive Scandinavia and toxin-spewing factories in the former East Bloc.

Bartholomew's journey, which begins Saturday in Poland, is his fifth mission since 1995 aimed at uniting clerics, scholars, activists and politicians under the banner of ecological interests.

His efforts and those of other religious leaders could be potentially pivotal in shaping doctrine and ethics surrounding the environment, theologians and others say. [continue]

Related links:
Christian Leaders Discuss Environment While Sailing the Baltic - from zenit.org

Related Mirabilis.ca entries:
Bartholomew, on the environment - June 11th, 2002
Patriarch wins Sophie prize - June 13th, 2002
Bartholomew, the Green Patriarch - June 17th, 2002

From the BBC, Peruvian farmers learn from history.

Agricultural techniques perfected by Inca farmers 500 years ago are beginning to have a dramatic effect on the incomes of today's farmers in Pampachiri, one of the poorest areas of Peru.

An ancient water transport system, developed by the Wira people and refined by the Incas, has been restored by the Cusichaca Trust NGO using traditional methods.

Clay, stone, sand, and a certain type of cactus juice, have restored the system of canals and terraces, in turn helping repair the area's shattered economy.

"This is what we specialise in - rather than using cement or other materials brought from outside," Douglas Walsh, of the Cusichaca Trust, told the BBC World Service's Discovery programme.

"We use locally-available materials to help farmers irrigate their terraced land." [continue]

Update:
Peru Farmers Revive ‘Waru Waru’ System - NewsJournal.com, August 4th, 2003.

From Environmental Data Interactive Exchange: Olive waste — the new mould killer.

Olive oil waste has found a new use — in pest control. A chance discovery by German scientists could lead to an ecofriendly fungicide for strawberry and potato crops.

Olive oil production generates a mound of peel, stones and other waste materials. In their search for ways to recycle this waste, scientists from the University of Bonn discovered a hitherto unknown property of the olive residue — it kills mould.

Link found at Dangerous Meta.

From the BBC, Tech brings buses closer to home.

People living in remote areas of the UK could find a new buses-on-demand scheme offers a fresh solution to the age-old dilemma of rural travel.

The transport system designed at the University of Newcastle uses sophisticated computer technology to provide flexible timetables, influence bus routes and even offer door-to-door services. (...)

Early indications suggest that the Phone and Go scheme is proving a big hit with locals. (...)

Passengers wishing to take advantage of the Phone and Go scheme need to telephone a central base in advance of their journey.

Computer software checks how it fits in with previous bookings and if the dispatcher cannot offer the exact time or pick-up place, several alternatives are offered.

The Travel Dispatch Centre then plots the most efficient route taking into account all the bookings and sends the information to a mini-computer on the bus using text messaging. [continue]

I bet we can all think of rural areas that'd benefit from a scheme like this.

Discover Magazine's May 2003 issue has an article about a machine that can turn just about anything into oil. [Update: article no longer available.]

The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing. [continue]

Link found at Boing Boing.

Today's Fill 'er up with Krispy Kreme article at Salon.com has got to be one of the most timely articles about alternative fuel.

Jeffrey Miottel, 36, of San Rafael, Calif., drives a cream-colored, 1984 Mercedes 300TD that inspires hunger pangs.

If you're stuck in traffic behind him, you won't be choking on diesel exhaust -- instead, you might find yourself wondering if you've left an old restaurant takeout bag under the back seat.

Miottel, a contractor and environmentalist, makes his own fuel from used grease recycled from local Marin County restaurants. "I haven't been to a gas station since last May," he brags.

Fueling up on biodiesel gives his car's emissions the pungent aroma of whichever kitchen the oil came from. "We were using oil from an Indian place one time, and it smelled like cinnamon chai coming out of the tailpipe," says Miottel. "When we use sesame oil from this organic-chip manufacturer, it smells like you're a walking stir-fry." His favorite source to cadge grease from: sushi bars, because tempura grease comes out of the fryer relatively clean, making it easy to work with.

Miottel's Mercedes gets only 25 miles per gallon, but driving it is better for the environment and air quality than using petroleum diesel. Plus, no one ever went to war in the Middle East over French fry grease.

"Biodiesel's a local homegrown fuel that you can make yourself and not have to go fight a war for," Miottel proselytizes. [continue]

It was the Greeks who 'invented' Antarctica, thereby enabling it to be discovered almost 2,000 years later. Everything in the world, so taught the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) has somewhere its equivalent, as if ordained by a law of symmetry. As there was in the north of their imaginary sphere-shaped world, under the starry picture of the Bear (Gr. arktos), a cold zone, the Arctic, there must likewise be a correspondingly cold zone on the southern half of the sphere.

This is from the Chronicle of Antarctica Expeditions page, which is part of the Antarctica, Terra Australis Incognita website. These is the sort of site that could keep a person happily distracted for rather a while. For example, take a look at this incredible photo, or the Antarctica's Wilderness Values page it leads to. Or read about the explorations of James Cook and others, or about the Battle for Antarctica.

Excellent environmental news from the Seattle Times: Boaters discovering clean alternative fuel that has no stink. [Update: article is now in the paper's archives; free registration (or BugMeNot) required]

It cleans out diesel tanks like a hefty dose of paint thinner, is made of renewable products such as soybean oil and gives off an odor more than a little reminiscent of French fries. The clean-burning fuel is biodiesel, and using it is a bit like filling your fuel tank with cooking oil.

It's been powering some car engines for years, but boaters are just catching on to the environmentally friendly energy source. And because most boats have diesel engines, biodiesel is seen by some as a more viable alternative on water than on land. [continue]

Did you know that cow manure can be turned into electricity? Neither did I.

From the Star-Ledger: Sprawl threatens ancient Saharan oases.

GHARDAIA, Algeria -- For miles there are only plains of orange Saharan sand, a dusty empty road, shepherds in white turbans leading camels and sheep to patches of parched grass.

Then the road curves and there's a surprising sight: an oasis of shimmering green palm trees and farmland, and bustling hilltop cities of small houses in the warm shades of a desert sunset.

The outcast Muslim tribe that settled the M'zab Valley in Algeria a millennium ago brought life and civilization to a barren land that nobody else wanted. Under the sun-baked sand, they built a system of canals that turned the valley green by storing and distributing water from the big floods that reach the valley once every three to 10 years.

The ancient irrigation system still keeps the region alive and thriving. But it's increasingly under threat from a modern problem -- urban sprawl, which could one day crowd out the palm groves that make life here livable, and in turn, dry up the water supply. It's a problem in many midsize Saharan oases. [continue]

From How to feed the world at csmonitor.com:

After more than 20 years of weeding his rice paddies by hand, Takao Furuno of Japan of wondered if organic farming was worth the trouble. Then something changed his life.

Ducks.

The wild fowl, floating in his fields, inspired him to try an old Japanese technique of raising ducklings alongside the rice. The results surprised him. The birds ate the weeds and pests he'd worked so hard to eliminate. And their droppings nourished the rice, raising yields. Mr. Furuno, author of "The Power of Duck," has since started rotating crops and has added fish to flooded fields. His system is spreading to other Asian producers.

Furuno's ways are a prime example, observers say, of what could be the future of agriculture. [continue]

Related links:
Duck power and a tale of success: From six acres to an ecosystem
Permaculture books, including The Power of Duck
Symbiotic culture of rice plants with aigamo, a cross-breed of wild and domestic ducks

From Canada Newswire, Federal government helps make biodiesel viable.

The federal government has taken a big stride towards increasing the viability of biodiesel production and use in Canada with yesterday's budgetary announcement of the removal of the 4-cent-per-litre federal excise tax on biodiesel.

Biodiesel is a non-toxic, cleaner burning, renewable diesel fuel derived from agricultural commodities such as vegetable oils or animal fats. The Ontario Soybean Growers sees biodiesel as an opportunity to create new markets for Ontario soybean oil, while providing a cleaner burning alternative to fossil fuels. In addition, the use of biodiesel fuel is an excellent opportunity for Canada to meet obligations agreed to under the Kyoto Protocol.

Related links:
Canada's on the road to marketing friendlier fuel - University of Guelph
Biodiesel Information Centre - Canadian Renewable Fuels Association

From National Geographic, "Out of Africa" Phrase in Use Since Ancient Greece.

Out of Africa. The phrase is everywhere; used to title movies, books, magazine articles, art exhibits, conferences, lectures, and travel tours. It's used as shorthand in newspaper headlines and to describe anthropological and medical theories related to Africa.

But where did it come from?

Somewhat surprisingly, the phrase stems from an ancient Greek proverb. "There is always something new coming out of Africa," wrote Aristotle more than 2,300 years ago in his book on natural history.

Writing in The Journal of African History, Harvey Feinberg and Joseph B. Solodow trace the history and meaning of the proverb from its ancient beginnings to contemporary usage.

"It's a phrase even Africanists don't know the origin of, so we were interested in tracing how it got from the ancient world to our world," said Feinberg, who teaches African history at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). [continue]

From the Copenhagen Post, Denmark announces first-ever eco-car. [update: article no longer available]

Denmark's Folkecenter for Renewable Energy has announced the development of a Volkswagen Lupo 3L that runs entirely on rapeseed oil. According to the center's calculations, the new eco-car will run for 35,000 km on one hectare of rapeseed.

Yesterday's news marks the first time ever that Denmark has successfully adapted an advanced, three-cylinder diesel motor with direct fuel injection under extremely high pressure to drive on rapeseed oil. (. . . )

The new Lupo, owned by Thorshavn dentist Erling Simonsen, is the first car in the North Atlantic region to be fully non-dependent on fossil fuels.

From the BBC, EU backs poor farmers' seed use.

The European Union is proposing two far- reaching curbs on the power of the biotechnology industry.

It says companies seeking patents should have to say where they found any natural product they are appropriating.

The EU also says poor farmers should be free to continue their traditional practice of saving and exchanging seeds, even ones already patented. [continue]

I should certainly hope so. The absurdity of having some stooopid biotech company patent seeds, then forbid farmers from growning the same strains of crops those farmers have been growing for generations. . . well, it's outrageous.

From the BBC: Grow trees to drive cars

The best way to make the UK's road transport green could be a massive tree-growing programme, researchers say.

They say there is considerable potential for producing hydrogen and alcohol fuels from fast-growing trees like willows.

A quarter of all the UK's agricultural land would be enough to fuel the country's entire road transport sector, they believe.

But they say it will be several decades before hydrogen is a sensible choice as a transport fuel. [continue]

Meanwhile, there's always cooking oil.

From this week's feature in Your Yukon: Cycling through the snow.

Benoit Godin didn't really plan to become a year-round bicycle commuter. It's just that his car battery died.

That was in the spring of 1997. The weather was fine and his Environment Canada office in Whitehorse was only three kilometres away, so Godin decided to ride his bike. And he kept on riding his bike.

"What happened was, I just didn't miss the car."

By fall, Godin had got into the habit of commuting by bicycle. Since his car was still causing problems, he decided to see if he could keep cycling through the winter.

He missed a few days when the temperature dropped too low, but not very many.

"I tried once at minus 40, and I turned back. The gears just wouldn't move," he says. After that, he decided minus 30 was his limit. When the temperature drops below that, he finds another way to get to work or takes a day at home. But it doesn't happen often. Minus 30 days have been scarce for the last few winters, he says.

So this guy lives way up in the Yukon, and he rides to work every day. Meanwhile, the rest of us pathetic slobs. . . .

From a Guardian article, Fry and drive.

According to Mike Hebson, the manager of Asda's store in Swansea, south Wales, there was no reason to be suspicious that sales of the company's cheapest bottles of cooking oil were running 20% higher than the previous year, way above any other store in Britain. "We just thought it was one of those things," says Hebson.

Why should he and his staff have been remotely questioning, he suggests, if men in overalls and lived-in denims had started buying Smart Price vegetable oil in batches of six, eight and 12 litres at a time. When one customer came in and filled a trolley to the brim with plastic containers of the thin, urine-coloured liquid, the checkout operator barely gave him a second glance. "Naturally, we assumed they were buying on price," says Hebson, an Asda man to the soles of his own-brand brogues. There was another reason that his staff were unlikely to see anything untoward in bulk-buying cheap vegetable oil. "We just thought they were doing a lot of frying," he says. "You have to remember, healthy eating has not hit Swansea in a big way."

It wasn't until the Department of Transport began a series of trial tests in the city last March that staff realised something odd had been going on. In an attempt to take diesel vehicles belching out illegal emissions off the road, department inspectors introduced experimental spot checks on roads in Bristol, Westminster, Glasgow, Middlesbrough, Canterbury and Swansea. It was in the latter that they found something surprising: a car with a fuel tank half full of cooking oil.

"The funny thing was," says Hebson, "the driver told them he had been getting it from Asda Swansea for four or five months, because it was the cheapest around. When we read the report in the local paper we began to put two and two together." [continue]

Related websites:
Make your own biodiesel - from journeytoforever.org
Biodiesel info - from veggievan.org
Grassroots Biodiesel and Vegetable Oil Fuel Homepage - from dancingrabbit.org

Related news stories:
Police impound cars run on cooking oil - BBC
French fry fuel - ABC News
Frying squad foils cooking oil car scam - Guardian
Cooking-oil fuel goes on sale on the west coast - Scotsman.com

Related Mirabilis.ca postings:
Biodiesel for Brampton buses
Automobile fuel from french fries
Trains run on biodiesel and generate electricity

The city of Brampton, Ontario is already using biodiesel fuel in 200 of their municipal vehicles. Now an otherwise boring article quotes Brampton's mayor, Susan Fennell: "Brampton is recognized as the leading community with the introduction of biodiesel fuel and we are moving it into our transit vehicles"

I've got to go bother Vancouver City Council to see if we can get our diesel buses to run on biodiesel. It sounds like such a sensible idea.

Cooking oil could one day replace fossil fuels - mention's Toronto's 400 biodiesel-powered buses
Biodiesel Canada, Inc
Canadian inventors, governments aim to cut costs of biodiesel
Biodiesel.org

From the Norway Post: Bicycling to work tax deductable?

Norwegians may in future be able to earn tax relief by bicycling to work. Bicycles may also be excempt from value added tax.

These are proposals presently being considered by the Highway Directorate, Aftenposten reports.

What a brilliant idea.

From the Bio-cars article [update: article no longer available] at e4engineering.com:

Car body materials are to be grown from plants in a UK project to reduce the environmental impact of vehicles while increasing their safety and fuel efficiency.

The Qinetiq-led Biomat project, which also includes Ford, will develop technologies to enhance the performance of plant fibres for use in injection moulded thermoplastic composites.

Funded by the Department for the Environment, the project aims to reduce the car industry's reliance on unsustainable materials, by using fibres from plants such as flax and hemp to build composite parts.

Under EU legislation, cars must be made from 95 per cent recyclable material by 2015. Plant fibres are relatively easy to recycle, and require low amounts of energy to manufacture. [continue]

From the Polar Bear Tracker website:

Two polar bears. One million nine hundred thousand square kilometers of frozen arctic wilderness. Where are they? It should be like looking for needles in a haystack, but it isn't. The bears are tagged with radio collars, which beam their positions via a satellite to this web site. Go and find Lena and Yana now!

The site has a few gorgeous photos, and lots of information about polar bears: their diet, habitat, characteristics, family, and the problems they face due to climate change and oil exploration. Well worth a visit.

From the Nunatsiaq News, an article about Taming Nunavut’s addiction to fossil fuels.

Most Canadians who live north of 60 depend on imported diesel power. Generating stations are as much a part of life today as seal-oil lamps and dog sleds were a half-century ago.

They burn undying in communities across the Arctic like a vast terrestrial constellation: ungainly, utterly vital shrines to Canada’s fossil-fuel addiction.

In Nunavut, the addiction is total. Nunavut’s 27,000 inhabitants burned a staggering 36 million litres of imported fuel last year to brighten homes, chill food, cook meals, wash dishes, launder clothes, surf the Net and watch television. Even more was burned — 58 million litres — keeping warm. And that’s not counting the three million litres of gasoline used to power the growing numbers of boats, snowmobiles and cars.

In a land of harsh extremes — long, dark winters and brief, brilliant summers — petroleum is like sunshine in a bottle, the great energy equalizer in a nation of uneven strengths. But at what price?

. . .

Some analysts believe that wind energy, a centuries-old source of mechanical power now converted to electricity in many parts of the world, holds much promise in Nunavut, though it has been slow to fire the imagination of public-utility managers. [continue]

From a National Geographic article on a "Koala-Friendly" Subdivision.

On the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, koala researchers, a property developer, and local citizens have joined forces to create the first housing development planned around the needs of koalas.

Koalas and people thrive in the same places, along the fertile east coast of Australia. The native forests are rapidly being cleared and converted to urban landscapes. Because most koalas live on private land, their survival depends on community support.

The six-year-old housing development, known as Koala Beach Estate, is proving to be an example of how human development can be more friendly to resident wildlife. [continue]

From The flake's progress at csmonitor.com.

For Cal Tech physicist Kenneth Libbrecht, the birth and evolution of an ice crystal carries more than enough mystery to keep a lab busy.

The anatomy of ice surfaces and how they influence the growth of ice crystals are "all pretty basic stuff," he notes. "But we are surprisingly ignorant of even these fundamental issues."

His lab has been focusing on growing ice crystals under tightly controlled conditions, then measuring how an ice crystal's size and shape change with time. One intriguing result indicates that while a crystal's growth rate depends on temperature and the extent of supersaturation, other gases in the air may also affect its growth.

Experiments using a vacuum chamber filled with nothing but water vapor yielded crystals that were little more than simple prisms, while in air, the crystals grew in a variety of plate-like and needle-like shapes.

All this is of interest to atmospheric chemists looking to track the life cycle of pollutants and their constituent gases in the atmosphere. [continue]

From the Independent, GM crops are breeding with plants in the wild

Alarming new results from official trials of GM crops are severely jeopardising Government plans for growing them commercially in Britain.

The results, in a new Government report, show – for the first time in Britain – that genes from GM crops are interbreeding on a large scale with conventional ones, and also with weeds.

Well of course they're interbreeding. This is what so many environmentalists have been warning us about for years. Did you see that Seeds of Secrecy article in Mother Jones a while ago? If not, go take a look.

Related link:
What Is Genetically Modified Food (And Why Should You Care)?

What? He ran his car on chicken droppings?

Harold Bate, chicken farmer and inventor from Devonshire, England says that you can power your motor vehicles with droppings from chickens, pigs or any other animal of your choice... even with your own waste! To prove his statement is no idle boast, Harold has been operating a 1953 Hillman and a five-ton truck on methane gas generated by decomposing pig and chicken manure for years. He claims that the equivalent of a gallon of high-test gasoline costs him only about 3d and that the low-cost methane makes his vehicles run faster, cleaner and better than they operate on "store bought" fuel. [continue]

Link found at Boing Boing.

In These furry black animals bear watching, Ruskin Bond describes his encounter with a bear:

Once, while I was sitting in the branches of an oak tree, hoping to see a pair of pine martens that lived nearby, I heard the whining grumble of a bear. Presently, a small bear ambled into the clearing beneath the tree.

He was little more than a cub, and I was not alarmed. I sat very still, waiting to see what he would do.

At first, he put his nose to the ground and sniffed his way along until he came to a large anthill. Here he began huffing and puffing, blowing rapidly in and out of his nostrils, so that the dust from the anthill flew in all directions. But he was a disappointed bear, because the anthill had been deserted long since. Grumbling, he made his way to a nearby plum tree, and, shinnying rapidly up the smooth trunk, was soon perched on the topmost branches. It was only then that he saw me.

The bear at once scrambled several feet higher up the tree and lay flat on a branch. As it wasn't a very thick branch, it left a considerable expanse of bear showing on either side. He tucked his head behind another branch. So long as he could not see me, he seemed well satisfied that he was completely hidden, although he couldn't help grumbling with anxiety.

But, like all bears, he was full of curiosity. And slowly, inch by inch, his black snout appeared over the edge of the branch. As soon as he saw me, he drew his head back with a jerk and hid his face.

He did this several times. I waited until he wasn't looking, then moved some way down my tree. When the bear looked up again and saw that I was missing, he was so pleased that he stretched right across to another branch and helped himself to a plum. At that, I couldn't help bursting into laughter.

The startled young bear tumbled out of the tree, dropped through the branches for some 15 feet, and landed with a thump in a heap of dry leaves. He was quite unhurt, but fled from the clearing, grunting and squealing. [continue]

I'm a sucker for bear stories like this, especially after reading about the Kamchatka Grizzlies project.

Related Mirabilis.ca posting:
Living with grizzly bears

From a National Post article:

"The car in Italy is not just a car," explained a British woman who pleaded for anonymity because she is married to an Italian and doesn't want to risk offending him and his family. "When my daughter was smaller I would walk her to school. Every day the neighbours would beg me to get in their cars and they would drive us the six blocks to save us the humiliation of arriving on foot. It's a status symbol. Having a car is the short form of saying I'm not a peasant."

Since so many people moved to Rome from the villages where they were peasants, the car became a powerful symbol of upward mobility. For them, owning a car is part of the process of reinvention that began when their families took up city life.

"I take the bus to work," says the British woman, "and my colleagues look at me with such pity. I recently told someone that I had a car but I only use it to go out of town. I could see on her face how confused she was that I would choose to sit on the bus when I could be stalled in traffic in my car displaying my status." [continue]

<sigh /> How depressing.

Are attitudes really that pathetic? I know there are way too many cars in Rome, but then, there are way too many cars in most cities. We took the bus all over Rome, and there did seem to be all manner of people on the bus with us.

Now that the first Segway customers are riding around on these things, we're starting to hear stories about them. From an article in Wired, Segway Owners a Small, Happy Club:

When Johnson takes his Segways to the park, kids ask if he's Dean Kamen and beg for a ride. At work, almost everyone at his 40-person company has ridden them around the warehouse.

"There's a big smile and they don't want to get off," Johnson said. "They taught us in training class how to get people off: Grab the center post and say, 'Let me show you how to dismount now.' That was a very useful demo." [continue]

Meanwhile, Wired's feedback page has some good comments about the article, like this one from Adrian:

It's interesting to note that some of the early Segway users are under the impression that it's an environmentally friendly form of transport. Sure the vehicle itself doesn't release emissions, but what about the power station producing the electricity used to charge the device?

The best way for a zero-emission two-mile commute? Buy a bicycle. It'll get you fit and save you about $4,000 on the cost of a Segway.

Related Mirabilis.ca entry:
Commuting on a Segway

Organic farming is not only friendlier to the soil and the environment than conventional farming, it's also friendlier to an underappreciated agricultural workforce—wild bees. So indicates the latest research on how well bees distribute pollen across different types of cropland.

The finding has economic implications for farmers, many of whom currently rely heavily on domesticated bees to perform crop pollination, Princeton University conservation biologist Claire Kremen told National Geographic News.

If farmers restored natural habitats near their lands and used more organic cultivating techniques, resulting growth of wild bee communities might reduce growers' dependence on European honeybees, the domesticated variety, and ultimately pay financial dividends, she said. [continue]

From Powerful Pollinators, Wild Bees May Favor Eco-Farms in National Geographic.

Over at a whole lotta nothing, Matthew Haughey explains why he bought a new VW Jetta wagon. Get this:

It can run on biodiesel (actually runs cleaner and easier on the engine), which doesn't contain any fossil fuels at all. That's right, it's fuel you can home brew, without having to extract it from wells deep in the earth (not that I'd make fuel at home, but it's nice to know I don't have to dig up compressed old dinosaurs in Iraq if I needed to top off the tank in a pinch).

A major, mainstream car company is producing vehicles that run better on biodiesel? Excellent.

Phillip Torrone in Seattle has bought himself one of those Segway human transporter things, and he's using it to commute to and from work. This means he's been able to get rid of his second car, and that'll save him about $16,000 a year. On his Book of Seg website, Philip points out that the Segway is cheap to run ("it costs roughly $0.10 to fully charge the unit via a standard electrical outlet") and of course there are no emissions.

Related Sites:
'Ginger': Think And It Will Do
Ginger's Scheme All in the Lean
Impressions after riding a Segway HT
Segway Chat

Related Book:
Code Name Ginger: The Story behind Dean Kamen's Quest to Invent a New World

A biological reactor that converts a slurry of food waste into a biodegradable plastic has been developed by scientists in Hawaii, providing a use for the obscene quantities of food rich countries throw away every year.

The polymer created could be used to make greener packaging, disposable products such as bottles, or even pills that dissolve slowly to release drugs in the body.

From Food scraps make perfect plastic, an article at New Scientist.com.

Well, what do you know? Just the other day I blogged about the two Canadian naturalists, Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns, who spend their summer hanging out with bears in the Kamchatka wilderness. (You did go see those amazing photos, didn't you?) Today the new issue of Maclean's magazine hit the stands, and they've got an article on the topic: Living with Grizzly Bears.

Related Mirabilis.ca entry:
Ruskin meets a bear

Mission: spend summer hanging out with bears in Russian wilderness. Raise orphaned bear cubs. Develop friendship with bears. Fish with bears, hike with bears.

Two Canadian naturalists, Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns, have spent the last six summers doing just that with their Kamchatka Grizzlies of the Far East project. The goal of the research is "to demonstrate that people can live closely and peacefully with grizzly bears while sustaining their respect indefinitely."

Check out their stunning bear photo gallery, and perhaps some of the diary entries (see links at bottom of home page) like this one, which is about trust and fishing with the bear they call Biscuit.

Here's part of another journal entry - Charlie's story about showing Chico the bear a better place to fish:

Of the experiences over the five years we have spent here in our wind swept cabin, I just had the most incredible day of all yesterday. I found Chico in a unfavorable place down the river where she was getting a few salmon but not near the numbers that could be available to her in another creek. This was no big deal because she was likely to soon realize her mistake but I saw it as a chance to push forward our understanding of each other and if you look at our goals on the home page and the 2000 Goals you can see this is what I wanted to spend time doing. If you read the last entry, it was us who showed them the fish in the river.

August is the beginning of a very critical time for all bears to put on weight and Biscuit was getting fat while Chico's feet were getting sore from futilely chasing fish over boulders. I spotted her with the Kolb, landed back at the cabin and then hiked down the river to her and suggested that she follow me to a place she would like much better. After two false starts, she figured out that I was really serious and decided to come. In the process of going to the other creek, we left the river and covered about one and a half miles.

At one place, I had to crawl through some twisted and bent over alder bush on my hands and knees while following a heavily used bear trail and Chico was following with her oversized canines only a foot from my butt. Needless to say I was a bit nervous and thought, this was carrying our trust too far. I rolled to the side and asked her to lead, which she did but rushed through to the clearing ahead and sat waiting for me to extricate myself from the tangle, then we continued across the tundra.

Several times she tried to guess what it was I going to show her and rushed off ahead towards the lake shore or another creek and I had to get her back on track by calling her name in a special way that we have worked out for these purposes. Finally we came to the stream which was full of pink salmon and she could see them but the water was deep there so I called once more and we continued upstream to where a riffle was loaded with spawning fish. She looked at me with her ears up and a wonderful expression of something I could well imagine was appreciation and then jumped in and easily filled up. I saw her eat six salmon in a few minutes before I left.

What an experience.

Charlie and Maureen have written a book, Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka. It's available at Amazon and the usual places.

Related links:
The bear whisperer - Canadian Geographic
Living with grizzlies - Canadian Geographic
Kamchatka Wildlife Tours in the Russian Far East
Kurilskoye Lake Brown Bear Viewing

Related Mirabilis.ca entries:
Ruskin meets a bear
Living with grizzly bears

I'd never thought of encouraging bats as a way to eliminate mosquitos, but it makes a lot more sense than using pesticide-laden bug sprays. Today's Vancouver Courier has an article about a gardener who's building and selling bat houses.

Building a bat house seems pretty easy, and several websites offer bat house building directions. Maybe making one of these bat boxes would be a good project for a rainy winter night.

Related Links:
Bats eat mosquitos
Wild About Gardening - bathouse buiding directions
How to build a bathouse

A few months ago Geoff Hill started making his own biodiesel out of recycled vegetable oil. From a Canada.com article: [update: article no longer available]

An avid mountain hiker and climber, Hill says he "couldn't ethically go out and buy a car that used fossil fuels."

He integrated his biodiesel fascination into his fourth-year studies and simultaneously launched the Biodiesel Project. With support from the UBC Farm, chemical-engineering department and funding from the non- profit, non-governmental Environmental Youth Alliance, Hill plans to produce larger quantities of fuel for campus lawn mowers, emergency generators and even UBC's diesel-powered trucks and tractors.

Better yet, there's talk of making Geoff's biodiesel available commercially.

Ian Thompson, chairman of Bowen Island's sustainable community task force, hopes Hill's fuel may soon be dispensed at a Bowen gas station - - a first in Canada.

"We've been talking to the diesel retailer here and if Geoff can supply him with enough biodiesel at a competitive price, this could be the first retail outlet in Canada," Thompson says.

Related Links:
Finally, grease that's good for you! - SFU.ca
Canadian Renewable Fuels Association - Biodiesel - greenfuels.org
Canada's on the road to marketing friendlier fuel - University of Guelph
University of British Columbia
UBC Farm
Environmental Youth Alliance
Bowen Island - bowen-island.bc.com

In a novel use of clean energy, the world's most northerly town will soon be the first to get electricity from a sub sea power station run on tidal currents tugged by the moon.

Gigantic forces in the oceans - waves, currents and tides - have often proved too costly or awkward to harness, compared to wind or solar power in global efforts to cut reliance on nuclear power or on fossil fuels blamed for global warming.

From late November or early December, however, a tidal current will start turning the blades of a windmill-like turbine standing on the seabed near Kvalsund at the Arctic tip of Norway.

"We will be the first in the world to use tidal currents to generate electricity to be fed into the local grid," Harald Johansen, managing director of Hammerfest Stroem, told Reuters.

Yay Norway!

Here's the rest of the article, Arctic town to get offbeat tidal energy, [update: article no longer available] on the Environmental News Network website.

Related:
Harnessing ocean energy

I came upon this little blurb about green roofs in the paper edition of the University of Toronto Magazine.

"Green" roofs made of an infrastructure that support soil and plants are better than conventional roofs at keeping homes cool in summer, according to preliminary results from a U of T study. Professor Brad Bass of the Institute for Environmental Studies at U of T and Environment Canada's Adaptation and Impacts Research Group, along with colleagues at the National Research Council's Institute for Research in Construction, created an experimental roof - half of it a traditional flat roof, the other half a six-inch layer of soil and wildflowers above a special drainage layer and a root-repellent, waterproof memrane. The green roof maintained a cooler surfact and interior temperature in summer and reduced storm water run-off. "The green roof acts as insulation," says Bass. "The vegetation on the roof also provides shade and returns moisture back to the atmosphere, preventing a dsignificant amount of solar energy from being absorbed by the roof."

This sounds like a far nicer solution than air conditioning, and green roofs have other benefits, too, like improving air quality, providing habitat for birds, and adding beauty.

University of Toronto green roof links:
University plans another green roof
Green roofs cool for summer, environmentalist says

Other green roof links:
Exploring the ecology of organic greenroof architecture - greenroofs.com
GreenRoofs.org
Maintenance of Green Roofs - lid-stormwater.net
Green Roofs - greenroof.co.uk
A National Research Council Canada study evaluates green roof systems' thermal performances - professionalroofing.net
Making green roofs simple - edcmag.com
Extensive green roofs - wbdg.org

Still more links (added during page update)
Northwest EcoBuilding Guild's Green Roof Project - hadj.net
Green roof workshop held in Vancouver - nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
City Farmer's green roof - cityfarmer.org
Green roof research at BCIT - bcit.ca
Green Roof Benefits - roofmeadow.com
Penn State Center for Green Roof Research - psu.edu
A green roof for our cob shed - City Farmer page at mac.com
Sky Gardens - Vancouver Courier artcicle
Rooftops and Urban Agriculture (lots of links!) - cityfarmer.org

I'm a sucker for stories about one person making a tremendous difference in the world. Here's one such story: Lighting up the World, from the current issue of Maclean's. It's about Dave Irvine-Halliday, who used his life savings to bring electric light to remote parts of the world.

His mission began in 1997, when he was travelling through Nepal's Thorung La Pass region. He was distressed to see children as young as six working in the rice fields, with little time for schooling. And since few homes had light, studying after dark was impossible. Irvine-Halliday discovered that by deploying modern technology, virtually anyone could have light, and in 2000 he created the foundation Light Up The World. "It is about giving kids a chance," says Irvine-Halliday, 60, the father of two grown children. "Reading and writing is such a vital part of any successful society. I just felt something needed to be done."

And so he's doing it.

From the Light Up the World Foundation website:

Light Up the World provides, to the world's poorest, solid state lighting systems powered by renewable resources. Our goal is to light up, in an environmentally conscious and long lasting way, the homes of two billion people world wide who do not have the opportunity to read after dark.

Related Links:
Dave Irvine-Halliday's home page at the University of Calgary Engineering Department
Prestigious award will help shine more light on developing world - article from University of Calgary website
LEDs Come to the Developing World - article from the Living on Earth network
article about Dave's pedal-powered lighting system from FFWD Weekly

Researchers in California are using tracking devices and GPS units to learn about snakes' habits.

A red diamond rattlesnake lies motionless on the operating table at the San Diego Zoo hospital. With a quick slit of the skin, a veterinarian opens up the snake and inserts a radio transmitter the size of a double-A battery, then sews up the incision.

A week or so later, the snake slithers back into the wild—broadcasting a signal to researchers about where and how it lives.

That's from a National Geographic article, Radio Transmitter-Fitted Snakes Share Habitat Secrets.

This tracking project helps researchers figure out exactly what kind of land the snakes need, so that some snake habitat can be protected. The article quotes project zoologist Robert Fisher: "We want to protect land that works for the animals."

This is from a salon.com article, An ad George Bush should love.

So how about using the same shock-value tactics the administration uses in the drug war to confront the public with the ultimate -- and much more linearly linked -- consequences of their energy wastefulness? Imagine a soccer mom in a Ford Excursion (11 mpg city, 15 mpg highway) saying, "I'm building a nuclear bomb for Saddam Hussein." Or a mob of solo drivers toodling down the freeway at 75 mph shouting in unison, "We're buying weapons that will kill American soldiers, Marines and sailors! Yahoo!"

It's not just a fantasy. Last week, talking to my friend Scott Burns, co-creator of the "Got Milk?" campaign, I was delighted to hear that he already had two ad scripts ready to go. The first one feels like an old Slim Fast commercial. Instead of "I lost 50 pounds in two weeks" the ad cuts to different people in their SUVs: "I gassed 40,000 Kurds," "I helped hijack an airplane," "I helped blow up a nightclub," and then in unison: "We did it all by driving to work in our SUVs."

Maybe this article will get a few people thinking about choosing more sensible vehicles, using alternative fuels, taking public transit, and stuff like that. But then, that's what other people should do, right?

From the human footprint map page:

Analysis of the human footprint map indicates that 83% of the land's surface is influenced by one or more of the following factors: human population density greater than 1 person per square kilometer, within 15 km of a road or major river, occupied by urban or agricultural land uses, within 2 km of a settlement or a railway, and/or producing enough light to be visible regularly to a satellite at night. 98% of the areas where it is possible to grow rice, wheat or maize (according to FAO estimates) are similarly influenced. However human influence is not inevitably negative impact -- in fact conservation organizations, including the Wildlife Conservation Society, have shown remarkable solutions that allow people and wildlife to co-exist. Nature is often resilient if given half a chance. Human beings are in the position of offering or withholding that chance.

Wildlife Conservation Society scientists developed the map. On the human footprint map site you can read the story of this project, and view the atlas pages.

Related Link:
National Geographic article on the human footprint map.

An Environmental News Network article talks about a Coffee company that uses biodiesel [update: article no longer available] to run its fleet of delivery trucks. An excerpt:

Biodiesel is made from renewable resources like new or used vegetable oils or animal fats. It is nontoxic, biodegradable, and can be used in any diesel engine.

Harmful carbon dioxide emissions are reduced by 80 percent, and carbon monoxide emissions are an average 44 percent lower than those of petroleum diesel. When using pure biodiesel, the cancer risk of diesel exhaust is reduced by 90 percent, and the smog-forming potential is nearly 50 percent less than petroleum diesel.

Though more than 200 public and government agencies currently use biodiesel, Thanksgiving Coffee is the first private fleet in the state of California to use B100 — pure biodiesel — in its delivery operations. It joins only a handful of private fleets nationwide using the fuel.

Great news about the coffee delivery fleet. Now, if Thanksgiving Coffee can switch to biodiesel, why can't everybody? Hmmmm. Maybe I'll print that article and mail it to the Starbucks headquarters.

Researchers at the University of the West of England have developed a battery powered by leftover food.

A New Scientist article, Food scraps could help power homes, explains how it works:

Inside the Walkman-sized battery, a colony of E. coli bacteria produce enzymes that break down carbohydrates, releasing hydrogen atoms. The cell also contains chemicals that drive a series of redox, or reduction and oxidation reactions, stripping electrons from the hydrogen atoms and delivering them steadily to the fuel cell's anode. This creates a voltage that can be used to power a circuit.

News on the environment isn't always bad, says the Christian Science Monitor.

In the world of environmentalism, things can often seem rather bleak. Rare species from Barrow to Borneo are likely going extinct before they are even discovered. Rain forests are shrinking. Greenhouse gases, it sometimes seems, are turning the atmosphere into a giant toaster oven.

Then came the news late last month: According to Australian scientists, the hole in the ozone layer – a symbol of human environmental destruction so universal that it became the punch line in an Austin Powers movie – will begin closing in three years. Thanks to international efforts to ban certain chemicals, the opening would shut by 2050.

A Grist Magazine article asks "Is biodiesel the fuel of the future?" It tells the story of Charris Ford's truck, which is "powered by grease, all of it drained from restaurant deep-fryers in the nearby resort town of Telluride."

Ford's truck runs on biodiesel, a fuel that can be made out of virgin oils from plants such as soybeans, corn, canola, coconuts, or peanuts, or by filtering and processing used vegetable oils, principally restaurant grease. Biodiesel is not new; indeed, when Rudolph Diesel first described plans for his engine in 1893, he thought he had designed something that farmers could fuel themselves using peanut oil. (Cheap petroleum hijacked his dream of rural self-sufficiency.)

But if biodiesel isn't new, it is newly popular: Production in the United States is growing fast, from about 15 million gallons last year to an expected 20-25 million gallons this year to as many as 40 million gallons next year. Still, biodiesel comprises just a tiny fraction of the 55 billion gallons of diesel fuel consumed annually in the United States, when it could account for a lot more: The U.S. Energy Department concluded last year that current soybean production and waste grease could produce about 6 billion gallons of biodiesel annually. Major oil companies such as BP and Gulf Oil are getting into the biodiesel business, and the fuel is already used in vehicle fleets across the country, including that of the U.S. Postal Service. (Retail biodiesel is hard to come by; only about 30 drive-up pumps exist nationwide.)

Biodiesel makes so much more sense than oil from the Middle East. (Or from anywhere, actually.)

The Vatican has published the Call of Creation, an overview of the church's teaching on the environment. According to an article at totalcatholic.com, the document concludes that "urgent action is needed to protect our planet from further destruction." The document apparently points out that "faith groups have the specific task of communicating to their governments the spiritual and moral foundations of sustainable living and development."

It seems to me that the church has the specific task of setting a good example of environmental stewardship for the rest of society. I hope that's mentioned in the document as well.

Related link:
Vatican publishes overview of church teaching on environment

Previous Mirabilis.ca posts on similar topics:
Bishops fear for future of planet
Catholic Earthcare Australia
Bartholomew, the Green Patriarch
Patriarch wins Sophie prize
Bartholomew, on the environment

A carsharing program sounds like one of those good ideas that probably won't happen in my lifetime. But surprise, it is happening, and in my neighbourhood, too! Members of the local carsharing network have 24 hour access to a fleet of vehicles which are left parked throughout the city. Drivers don't have to fuss with maintenance, and sharing a car is way cheaper than owning one's own.

There are carsharing networks in Vancouver, Toronto, Montréal, and in lots of other Canadian cities. If your city's not on that list, check the worldwide list of carsharing programs at Carsharing.net, or try the shorter list at Eartheasy.

Related links:
Article about carsharing in Calgary
Share a Car - Save Money and the Environment
GVRD's page on the Cooperative Auto Network
A beginner's guide to the car sharing business

I've seen electric golf carts used instead of cars on a local island, and have wondered why golf carts aren't street legal in BC. Wouldn't they be just perfect for trips to the grocery store?

Looks like somebody in California wondered the same thing, and managed to modify the golf carts and the legislation. Now the modified golf carts ("Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles") can be driven on streets with speed limits of up to 35 mph.

An article in the Christian Science Monitor has more information.

A Total Catholic article reports that:

Unless global action on the environment is taken now, the whole future of the planet is threatened, the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales has warned. And the bishops say Catholics everywhere should pray that the forthcoming Johannesburg summit produces real results.

Catholics everywhere should also get rid of their SUVs, take the bus more often, etc.

A Smart Car was parked on our street today. These are the tiny two-seater cars one sees all over the place in London and in other European cities. I'd never seen one in Canada, so the little silver and blue thing on our Vancouver street was a bit of a suprise.

Transport Canada's website [update: page no longer available] describes the Smart Car as "an environmentally friendly vehicle that uses advanced technology to enhance fuel efficiency, estimated to be 3.5 litres per 100 kilometres."

Update, October, 2004:
Hot Wheels - wired.com
The Smart Car comes to Canada - mcuniverse.com

Starting in January, London motorists will have to buy permits before driving into the central part of the city. A permit will cost £5.00 per day. (That's about $12.45 in Canadian dollars.)

Transport for London [update: link no longer works] estimates that the plan will reduce traffic in the core area by 10-15%. Their website points out that "This will help essential journeys (such as those by delivery vehicles) to be quicker and more reliable. It will also free up the roads, give pedestrians and cyclists a better deal and help vehicles making key journeys to move around the capital much more quickly and with more reliable journey times."

The guy behind the plan is London's mayor, Ken Livingstone. Ken gets my respect for his environmental strategies, which cover everything from air quality to biodiversity. Also, Ken actually gets off his duff and takes the Tube to work each day.

Related Links:

London Congestion Charge
Transport for London: Congestion Charging
Congestion Charging: Introduction
Transport: News: London Congestion Charge
Mayor of London on Congestion Charging
Judge clears £5 charge on drivers -Guardian
Congestion charge to go ahead - BBC
Stand by your Ken - Guardian
Motorists to pay London toll - BBC
Bike outpaces car in London rat-race - Transalt.org
London leads - will rest follow?
Traders angry over congestion charges - Guardian

Oh! I've come across the perfect swimming pool. It doesn't need chemicals, because micro-organisms and plants clean the water. Just imagine having a mini-lake in your back yard, complete with water lilies, rushes, and space for swimming.

So you bicycle here and there, maybe even to work and back. But you absolutely need to drive your car when there are cumbersome things to carry, right? Think again, and take a look at the amazing trailers offered by BikeCartAge. They've got just the trailers you need if you want to carry, say, ten large Rubbermaid boxes.

When you've finished gawking at the photos there, head over to Bikes at Work. Their trailers can carry full size refrigerators, eight foot long sections of lumber, and pretty much anything else you might imagine.

Race along on a bicycle. Help somebody. Repeat. Get paid. Sounds like a great job to me, and it about sums up the work of a bicycling paramedic.

Bicycle ambulances have been in use at least since the mid 1990s in numerous North American cities, and now there are six bicycle ambulances in London, England, as well.

Related links:
The Utilization of Bicycles in the Delivery of Emergency Medical Services: A Preliminary Report
Rapid Access Paramedics (Calgary, Alberta)
Pedalling paramedics

Storks in India have been building nests on skinnier branches lately, due to deforestation. Alas; the wobblier branches have led to lots of baby storks falling 20 or 30 metres to the ground. The solution? Conservationists have been putting up safety nets to catch falling storks.

How have I missed this? There are personal hovercraft scooters, commercially available. A BBC page says

The board floats on a cushion of air just above the ground and is operated by two levers on the handle. One is for lift, the other for thrust. When the rider leans back, a small wheel at the back makes contact with the ground to generate forward movement. When hovering, the rider leans to the left to turn left and to the right to turn right. It's like a combination of flying and skiing.

The personal hovercraft scooter debuts page shows five of these things parked against a wall, just like something out of the Jetsons.

Are they street legal anywhere? I know they burn gas and they cost a fortune. Still, if we could get some of the SUV drivers to use something even remotely sensible for trips to the corner store, it would be an improvement. And you've got to admit that these things do look like they'd be lots of fun. I wonder what other fuels they could use.

personal hovercraft article from nbc today
good close-up photo
Personal hovercraft page from iafra.com
ZAP distributors

Using biodiesel as fuel is a great idea all on its own. When the biodiesel is used to run trains, and those trains generate electricity. . . well! This is even better, and it's what Sierra Railroad plans to do in California with its PowerTrainUSA program.

Today Wired has an article about this program: Choo-Choo Trains on Energy Crunch. Also see Electricity could take different track, published a few months ago in the Union Democrat.

Such excellent news! For years I have been wondering why churches, which presumably see the world as God's creation, aren't doing more to protect the environment. Today one of the headlines at the Environmental News Service is Australia's Catholic Church Embraces Environment. The article mentions the founding of Catholic Earthcare Australia, and quotes Archbishop John Bathersby saying that it's to "to mobilize Australia’s five million Catholics to take decisive action to protect the natural world before it’s too late."

Are Catholic churches in other countries starting similar initiatives?

City of Vancouver council member Fred Bass wants the city to stop giving car allowances to council members. A Vancouver Courier article quotes Fred:
"It's a car-addicted society and it's time we show leadership," Bass said. "We live in a beautiful city. We get beautiful air and to excrete exhaust into it unnecessarily is wrong. If we give a councillor anything, it should be a bus pass. It's just the right thing to do."

The motion also suggests that the City "track and financially reward Councillors' when they travel by foot or by bicycle or other low-impact form of transportation."

Yay, Fred! Now how about ending free parking for City of Vancouver staff, and giving those people BC Transit Fare Cards instead?

An electric car company called eMotion is planning a subscription scheme. From eMotion's program overview page:

"Essentially, the program provides subscribers with convenient access to a fleet of electric vehicles that are linked to urban transit. eMotion Mobility's two-passenger e-cars are safe and dependable, fun to drive, and equipped with advanced communication systems to make your life easier. With a range between 60 and 70 miles and speeds up to 70 mph, they provide all the range and performance necessary for urban mobility. And because they are emission-free and linked to existing transit, they help to alleviate air pollution and traffic congestion."

This sounds both fun and practical, doesn't it? eMotion is starting soon in Atlanta, and has plans to expand to other cities. I hope that eMotion (or anybody) will eventually set up this kind of system in Vancouver.

Here's a short excerpt from Sailing with the Green Patriarch, is a BBC article about Patriarch Bartholomew I.

"In Ravenna, we witnessed the first liturgy spoken by the Greek Patriarch in Italy for over 1,000 years.

The Adriatic pilgrimage aimed to highlight environmental problems. With his sonorous low tenor, his friendly face and an astonishing bejewelled crown, the Patriarch moved several in the church to tears.

It may be hard to grasp, but this was a moment of immense historical significance in ecclesiastical history and a real sign that the two churches are coming closer together after a millennium of hostility. "

(I wrote about Bartholomew when he spoke about the environment at the Ducal Palace in Venice, and when he won the Sophie prize.)

I'm very pleased that Vancouver's trying out electric vehicles for the municipal fleet. But, hmmm, what made them choose vehicles from Ford? According a New York Times article reprinted in the Houston Chronicle, Ford is part of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a group that has been working to against tougher fuel and emissions standards. Like we need that kind of nonsense when the whole planet is at risk. (Honda is the only major automobile manufacturer which didn't take part in that campaign.)

I wonder if anybody at the City considered (or will consider) cars like the Dauphine Electric car, which was launched at the Toronto Auto Show last year. The Dauphine is made by a Canadian company whose name (really!) is Feel Good Cars.

Corbin Motors also sells electric vehicles, and they have some fun single-seater models, like the Corbin Sparrow. Western Driver has a test drive review article about the Sparrow. Would this be an appropriate vehicle for a municipal fleet? Most of the time when I see City of Vancouver cars on the street, I notice that there are no passengers. So, maybe.

Will wonders never cease? The city of Vancouver has added two "fully electric, zero emission vehicles" to its fleet.

"The "Think City" and the "Ranger EV" are fully electric, zero emission vehicles that are being leased from the Ford Motor Company. It’s part of a two-year trial to see how electric vehicles can be integrated into the City’s existing, conventionally- powered fleet."

The press release has a bit more info.

A couple of days ago I wrote about Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, and his comments about the environment.

Now he's won the Sophie Prize for his ongoing environmental efforts. The Sophie Prize website explains that the award is given "to an individual or an organisation that in a pioneering or a particularly creative way, has pointed to alternatives to the present development and/or put such alternatives into practice."

As prizewinner, the patriarch gets $100,000 USD. An article on the BBCs website calls him "the green patriarch" and says that he'll use the money to help "street children in Athens and Istabul, and to preparations for a church-led seminar on the Baltic Sea environment. "

Tonight I discovered Fresh Air Delivery, which is a shopping and delivery service with a difference. They use bicycles! This is such great news. Their pamphlet points out that they "...can do the same job as motorized delivery companies while having the least environmental impact." Fresh Air Delivery only serves the Vancouver area, but I hope to hear of similar services in other cities.

"...we are to practice a voluntary self-limitation in our consumption of food and natural resources. Each of us is called to make the crucial distinction between what we want and what we need. Only through such self-denial, through our willingness sometimes to forgo and to say, "no" or "enough" will we rediscover our true human place in the universe."

This is from an address given today by the Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople. He was speaking at the Ducal Palace in Venice, before signing a joint declaration with the Pope about the protection of the environment.

Do you think the faithful will listen?