SLOW Movement

NY Times: Radiation, Once Free, Can Follow Tricky Path

 

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March 21, 2011

Radiation, Once Free, Can Follow Tricky Path

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Ten days after an earthquake and tsunami crippled a nuclear plant in Japan, officials are detecting abnormal levels of radiation in what may seem like a scattershot assortment of foods: milk from Fukushima Prefecture, where the reactors sit; spinach from Ibaraki Prefecture to the south; canola from Gunma Prefecture to the west; and chrysanthemum greens from Chiba to the south. Shipments of the milk and spinach have been banned.

Experts hesitate to predict where the radiation will go. Once radioactive elements that can harm health are released into the outdoors, their travel patterns are as mercurial as the weather and as complicated as the food chains and biochemical pathways along which they move.

When and where radioactive contamination becomes a problem depends on a vast array of factors: the specific element released, which way the wind is blowing, whether rain will bring suspended radioactivity to earth, and what types of crops and animals are in an exposed area.

Research related to the 1986 Chernobyl accident makes clear that for decades, scientists will be able to detect the presence of radioactive particles released by the crippled Japanese reactors thousands of miles away. Scientists and doctors in Japan and abroad will be monitoring the results to see if those measurements reach dangerous levels. So far there is no indication that anyone has been harmed by eating contaminated food.

“It’s natural that people worldwide will be monitoring for this — just in case it is far worse than we now expect,” said F. Ward Whicker, a professor emeritus at Colorado State University who developed a leading model for following radiation through the food chain.

When radiation is released with gas, as it was at the Japanese reactors, the particles are carried by prevailing winds, and some will settle on the earth. Rain will knock more of the suspended particles to the ground. “There is an extremely complex interaction between the type of radionuclide and the weather and the type of vegetation,” Dr. Whicker said. “There can be hot spots far away from an accident, and places in between that are fine.”

The principal elements that have been released from reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant are iodine 131 and cesium 137. Cesium is dangerous because it is long-lived and travels easily through the food chain, continuing to emit particles for centuries once it is released.

More than 15 years after the Chernobyl accident in what is now Ukraine, studies found that cesium 137 was still detectable in wild boar in Croatia and reindeer in Norway, with the levels high enough in some areas to pose a potential danger to people who consume a great deal of the meat.

While iodine 131 is much shorter lived — its radioactive potency is halved every eight days — it is dangerous because it concentrates in the thyroid gland, resulting in high radiation doses to that vulnerable organ. The thyroid is such an iodine magnet that Dr. Whicker recounts that a week after a nuclear weapons test in China, iodine 131 could be detected in the thyroid glands of deer in Colorado, although it could not be detected in the air or in nearby vegetation.

Initially, some plants will collect more radiation than others: those with big leaves like lettuce, spinach and other greens will naturally collect more radiation than apples, oranges or potatoes, he said. Foods like rice and corn whose edible portion is protected by husks or leaves are relatively safe in this early stage.

But over a period of weeks, the radioactivity particles enter the food chain when they are ingested by animals or settle into dirt where they can be absorbed by the roots of growing plants. Soils with high clay content tend to bind radioactive elements and hinder their travel, while sandy soils allow more of the radiation to pass into growing food.

Long-lasting particles of cesium 137 can cycle through an ecosystem for decades, entering plants when they are taken up by root systems and returning to the earth when the plant dies.

For the first time on Monday, Japanese nuclear officials said that some of the water used to douse and cool the damaged reactors had reached the ocean, raising the possibility that seafood might eventually be at risk, too. The officials said they would monitor the situation. Scientists generally measure radioactivity of local mussels and seaweed to assess the level of contamination.

Experts suggest that levels would have to be watched closely because cesium 137 concentrates in fish muscle much as mercury does when it moves up the food chain from plankton to small fish to big fish. “I would definitely be monitoring fish populations in the area, since there may be certain items that should be avoided,” said Nicholas Fisher, a professor of marine sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

In a worst-case scenario, said Paul Falkowski, a professor of marine sciences and geology at Rutgers University, a major ocean current that travels up the coast of Japan, across the Pacific and into the Gulf of Alaska could carry radiation to Alaska fisheries months from now. He said the International Atomic Energy Agency should monitor such movements, although he and other experts considered it highly unlikely that the current would take the radiation to Alaska unless the leak became far worse.

Many fish and the oceans already contain radiation, both naturally occurring and as a result of prior nuclear testing, said Dr. Fisher, who said that added current levels from the damaged reactors were not likely to be significant in terms of human health.

But he and other experts say that vigilance is crucial because problematic levels of radiation can turn up unexpectedly.

After the Chernobyl accident, some relatively distant villages were contaminated with fallout of iodine 131, and local cows ate grass that contained the radiation. Children who drank milk from those cows ended up with high rates of thyroid cancer.

Nuclear Boy

うんち・おならで例える原発解説

A rather light hearted piece amidst the chaos of the nuclear incident...

Pray and hope that it will soon be over.

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ST: Biodiversity and cities

Review

Home > Review > Others

Oct 25, 2010

Biodiversity and cities

This is an edited excerpt of a speech by Professor Tommy Koh at The Third Linnaeus Lecture in Nagoya, Japan, on Friday. The lecture series is named after Swedish father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus.

 

INSTEAD of viewing cities as the enemies of biodiversity, let us change the paradigm and focus on how cities can contribute positively to conserve biodiversity. Cities - such as Nagoya in Japan, Curitiba in Brazil, Montreal in Canada, Bonn in Germany, and Stockholm in Sweden, and Singapore - are part of the movement.

The Singapore story is important to the world because it shows that a city need not be an enemy of nature and biodiversity. On the contrary, it demonstrates three propositions:

 

that achieving economic prosperity need not be at the expense of care for the environment;

that a small, densely populated city can still be clean, green and nature-loving; and

that a city can play a positive role in the conservation of biodiversity and in our campaign to reduce the loss of biodiversity.

Singapore is a very small island, with a total area of 710 sq km. It is smaller than the city of Tokyo. Our population has exceeded five million, making us one of the most densely populated cities in the world. It was a British colony from 1819 until 1963, when it became a state within the Federation of Malaysia. It became an independent state in 1965.

From 1819 until the 1970s, the imperative was to clear the original forest cover, mangrove forests and to level the hills, for development. As a result, Singapore has lost more than 95 per cent of its original forest cover, about 50 per cent of its animal species and 25 per cent of its vascular plants. Yet, when we look at a Google Earth satellite photograph of Singapore, we see that half the island is green. Forests cover 9.2 per cent and dense vegetation covers 14 per cent of Singapore.

How did Singapore, which is so densely populated, become so clean, green and nature-loving?

I think the secret is that we have one of the world's first green political leaders, Mr Lee Kuan Yew. Mr Lee insisted that Singapore would accept no investment proposal if it did not have the support of the anti-pollution unit. The unit was located in the Prime Minister's Office and was empowered to overrule the economic agencies. Mr Lee believed that nature has economic value and that our clean and green environment would give us a comparative advantage in attracting foreign investment to Singapore. His successors have taken the vision to another level.

Singapore is fortunate to be located within the world's richest biodiversity region. Although we have lost a significant percentage of our biodiversity, what remains is not insignificant. We have more than 2,900 species of plants, 360 species of birds, 270 species of butterflies, 120 species of reptiles, 75 species of mammals, 25 species of amphibians, 200 species of hard corals, covering 55 genera and 111 species of reef fish belonging to 30 families. One of our four nature reserves - the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, only 163ha in size - is home to more species of trees than the whole of North America.

Let me now share with you a few of the best practices which Singapore has undertaken to protect and enhance our biodiversity. First, the government's lead agency on biodiversity, the National Parks Board (NParks) has been proactive in leading the way. Last year, it launched the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan. Apart from championing a wide range of conservation projects, the plan also aims to give voice to biodiversity issues in policy and decision-making. NParks also has an admirable attitude of seeking to work closely with the civil society, the corporate sector, students and volunteers.

Second, I must praise the contributions of our universities, research institutions and scientists. At the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, at the National University of Singapore, visitors can learn about the region's plants and animals, through an extremely comprehensive collection of preserved specimens. It is also training the next generation of the region's scientists. They are also planning to build a new museum of natural history which will showcase the natural heritage of South-east Asia.

Individual scientists have been extremely active in their research, teaching and publications, on Singapore's biodiversity. Next year, the National University of Singapore will launch a new multi-disciplinary bachelor's degree in environmental studies.

Third, we have an active and responsible civil society. The Nature Society (Singapore), for example, is a blue-chip NGO. Its members conduct guided nature walks, bird and butterfly watching, talks as well as undertake conservation projects and surveys. Working closely with the Singapore Environment Council, the Nature Society (Singapore) works with schools and community organisations to promote the appreciation of nature and biodiversity.

Fourth, one of Singapore's best practices is our ability to bring government, academia, civil society and the corporate sector to work together. The business community in Singapore is increasingly supportive of the environment and biodiversity. In one project, the Nature Society (Singapore), NParks and the private sector decided to do something which has never been done in the world.

Singapore's main shopping street, Orchard Road, is like the Champs-Elysees in Paris. In a 4km stretch linking the Singapore Botanic Gardens, on one end, and Fort Canning, on the other, we have trees and shrubs planted by volunteers along Orchard Road which are either host plants for butterflies or plants which provide them with nectar. When the plants mature and the butterflies arrive, the shoppers and pedestrians along Orchard Road will have the unique experience of being accompanied by butterflies.

Prof Koh is Singapore's Ambassador-at-Large and patron of the Nature Society (Singapore).

ST: Eco-tourism package deal

Singapore

Home > Singapore > Story

Sep 27, 2010

Eco-tourism package deal

S'pore and Malaysia are in talks to link Sungei Buloh with 3 Johor sites rich in biodiversity

By Amresh Gunasingham

Migrant whimbrels perch on trees on Pulau Kukup - a protected site in Johor which, with Tanjung Piai, Sungai Pulai and Singapore's Sungei Buloh, is being studied to find out more about the environmental impact of visitors and best modes of transport between sites. --ST PHOTO: KEVIN LIM

 

THE sleepy seaside village of Kukup, a short hop across the Causeway, stirs to life only on weekends when tourists descend on its famous seafood eateries.

But all that could change if an eco-tourism project combining the lure of Malaysia's biodiversity spots with Singapore's Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve takes off.

The two countries are in talks to look at how three gazetted nature sites in Johor - Pulau Kukup, Tanjung Piai and Sungai Pulai - can be marketed with the popular Sungei Buloh wetlands, to tap the burgeoning eco-tourism market.

The 647ha Kukup island, a five-minute boat ride from the mainland, is one of three Ramsar-accredited nature reserves in Johor state teeming with rich

biodiversity such as flying foxes, bearded pigs and long-tailed macaques.

The title is granted by the Swiss-based Ramsar Convention Bureau to identify wetlands of international importance.

In total, Sungei Buloh with the three spots in Johor will mean more than 1,300ha of lush green reserves, full of flora and fauna, that can be managed holistically and can attract tourist dollars.

The tourism agencies of both countries are conducting a feasibility study, separated into four phases, which includes looking at the environmental impact of visitors on these sites and the best modes of transport between the spots, said Ms Jeannie Lim, tourism concept development director at the Singapore Tourism Board.

She added that Malaysia and Singapore are now studying examples of cross-boundary eco-tourism products overseas.

The collaboration, first mooted last year as part of Singapore's involvement in the Iskandar Malaysia development region, was reiterated during talks between the two countries' prime ministers last week.

The talks secured a historic land swop deal to settle the issue of Malayan Railway land in Singapore, and the leaders also agreed to cooperate on projects such as a rapid transit system link between Johor Baru and Singapore, and an iconic wellness project in Iskandar.

While the feasibility study is on, the lure of Kukup remains a cheap weekend getaway where a mere RM85 (S$36) gets a night's stay and three meals at one of the sprawling holiday chalets overlooking dozens of fish farms dotting the sea.

Fishing remains the main source of income for most locals here, but for years Kukup has crumbled under the weight of a declining fish industry. The busy Strait of Malacca is riven by pollution that has dwindled the supply of red snappers and garoupas in the waters. The issue has been compounded by soaring food prices and a weakening economy.

Kukup is expected to benefit greatly if the eco-tourism plan succeeds. So, too, is the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve here.

Already, more than 140,000 visitors passed through its gates last year, more than three times the number visiting the three Johor sites.

Tourism experts such as travel consultant Subaraj Rajathurai, 47, who for the past 20 years has toured the nature sites in Johor, sees the initiative between the two countries as a 'win-win' situation.

Singapore can leverage on its world-class hotels and efficient transport networks - attributes that already make it a strong tourist hub regionally, while tapping a market dominated by neighbours with bigger and lusher green spaces, he said.

'Many of the roads in Johor are narrow and riven with potholes. A lot of work must be done to make it more attractive to international tourists,' he added.

Experts point to a largely untapped market of eco-tourists who can be wooed - estimates put the number of bird watchers in the United States, for example, in the millions.

Then there are the environmental benefits. Protecting wetlands which are separated by small stretches of water could also slow the loss of mangroves and allow birds to migrate back and forth, noted Assistant Professor Edward Webb from the department of biology at the National University of Singapore.

He said: 'The old school way of managing ecosystems, in which each country takes care of its own spaces, is outdated.

'Ecosystems do not respect national boundaries.'

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Singapore

Home > Singapore > Story

Sep 27, 2010

Biodiversity boost to sleepy spots

Amresh Gunasingham susses out the three Johor sites, which may be linked with Sungei Buloh if an eco-tourism project between Malaysia and Singapore takes off.

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MAP

A park will soon be built surrounding the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve, which teems with flora and fauna. There are concerns about excessive public exposure, with 140,000 visitors going to the reserve last year. --ST PHOTO: AIDAH RAUF

 

SUNGEI BULOH

THREE decades ago, a visitor to the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve would be greeted by a smattering of prawn ponds situated within acres of wasteland.

Today, through a concerted effort to protect the 138ha green space, which was gazetted as a nature reserve in 2002, the area now teems with a variety of flora and fauna, including more than 220 species of birds.

Concerns have been raised about the need to protect the site from excessive public exposure.

Some 140,000 visitors walked through the reserve's gates last year. To try and alleviate the crowds, the authorities want to lower the number to 100,000 by channelling some of them to a 38ha park that will be built soon surrounding the reserve.

Linked to the nearby Kranji trail, the new park will be replete with facilities such as observation pods, coastal boardwalks and wireless learning trails.

The prospect of developing a cross-border tourist attraction involving the reserve and the three Ramsar green spaces in Johor has caught the attention of researchers and nature enthusiasts alike.

'It makes both economic and ecological sense,' said Assistant Professor Edward Webb from the department of biology at the National University of Singapore.

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SUNGAI PULAI

JOHOR is a state blessed with an abundance of natural wonders and Sungai Pulai is a good example.

Spanning 9ha, it is the second-largest mangrove area in the state and was gazetted by the state government in 1923, the first mangrove forest to receive that distinction.

For years, the reserve has played an important economic role in supplying wood products such as timber.

It is also home to the rare small tree, Avicennia lanata, and animals such as the smooth otter and flat-headed cat. Threatened bird species like the mangrove pitta are known to live there.

The reserve, much of which remains protected and open only to environmental groups and researchers, sits at the mouth of a lowland tropical river basin, teeming with animal life.

Yet over the years, the mangroves there, like those in the rest of Malaysia, have fallen victim to illegal logging, the clearing of upland vegetation and land reclamation.

It is estimated that, between 1980 and 1990, 12 per cent of the country's mangrove forests disappeared.

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TANJUNG PIAI

LOCATED at the southern tip of Malaysia, the Tanjung Piai National Park is home to more than half of the 40 known freshwater mangrove species in the world.

Named after a local fern known as 'Paku

Piai', the park supports many threatened species, such as the pig-tailed macaque, and birds such as the mangrove pitta.

The site has been conferred the status of a state park for eco-tourism by the Johor government, meaning it is funded by an estimated RM5 million (S$2.15million) annual budget that is shared with four other such parks.

The park is easy to navigate - a raised boardwalk network runs through the mangroves, while an ample number of maps and directional signs are also provided.

The site already appears to be popular with Singaporean nature lovers and schools alike, with schools taking students on annual nature trails and rubbish clean-ups there. More than 70 per cent of the 35,000 visitors to Tanjung Piai annually are from overseas.

Said Mr Yeo Suay Hwee, a nature guide: 'The reserve supports 23 species of mangroves. Considering there are only 30 known freshwater mangrove species in the region, that is a substantial number.'

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PULAU KUKUP

A CENTURY ago, the seaside town of Kukup in south-west Johor was a famed fishing hub. Yet, just a stone's throw away from its coast, the 647ha island of Pulau Kukup holds the distinction of being the world's second largest uninhabited mangrove forest.

Local legend has it that the island is cursed - it was once home to five celestial princesses until one of them committed the forbidden act of falling in love and eloped with a sailor.

Gazetted as a national park in 1997, the lack of human intervention has seen it become home to more that 70 bird species and 30 mangrove species, crabs and wild boars, while the mudflats are rich with shellfish.

A thriving marine cage industry exists in the coastal waters between the island and the mainland. Its geographical position enables it to shield the mainland from the elements.

'Kukup has huge mudflats, which are important for the stabilisation and maintenance of mangroves,' said assistant professor Edward Webb from the department of biology at the National University of Singapore.

However, the western part of the island has been eroding in the last 15 years, leading to some mangroves vanishing.

FT: The fate of the last giant pandas of China

The fate of the last giant pandas of China

By Henry Nicholls

Published: September 17 2010 22:20 | Last updated: September 17 2010 22:20

A panda cub in the Wolong Valley, China

In China’s rural west, embedded in the crumpled mountain range that rises up to the Tibetan plateau, is a small town called Baoxing. Here, daily life is dominated by the mining ­industry. Rusty trucks bring in vast hunks of raw marble, freshly hewn from the surrounding mountains. Factories along the roadside cut them into ­perfect worktop slabs destined for distant designer kitchens. A thick film of white dust coats everything, including the huge Baoxing River, which carries the dust off through a seemingly infinite series of hydro-­electric dams towards the Yangtze.

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This much is typical of the frenetic pace of industry across China, a country whose economy has been growing at a staggering pace for ­decades. But Baoxing deserves special attention, for the steep, bamboo-clad slopes above the town are part of the best-preserved panda habitat on earth. Roadside artisans reflect this, fashioning miniature pandas from small chunks of marble, stone models of the live animals that dwell in the hills. In Baoxing, two sides of China are on show: one determined to extract prosperity from the natural world and another intent on conservation even at the expense of development.

As an exclusively Chinese animal and one that has, since the 1950s, emerged as the country’s “national treasure”, the giant panda tells us much about the progress of modern China. It was through this valley, in June 1935, that the Communist Party of China’s Red Army passed on its “Long March” to escape the Chinese Nationalist party. One of the few to survive the year-long, 6,000-mile ordeal was Mao Zedong, who carried the CPC to power in 1949. Within a decade, the giant panda was well on its way to becoming a national ambassador. It was perfect for the job: rare, beautiful and, importantly for Mao, it carried no imperial baggage whatsoever.

Painting the panda was not only acceptable during the Cultural Revolution, it was positively encouraged, and by the 1960s its alluring black-and-white form had become synonymous with China. Better still, the west had become increasingly obsessed with the species, thanks largely to animals collected in the vicinity of Baoxing. In 1869, Père Armand David, a French missionary, found specimens there that became the basis for the formal scientific description of this species. In 1936, Ruth Harkness, an American fashion designer, brought the first live panda, Su-Lin, out of China, a 3lb cub who ­captured western hearts.

Edwin Heath visits one of the pandas given to the UK by China in 1974

Mao, quite sensibly, exploited this interest with gusto. Between 1957 and 1983, he gave away more than 20 animals – most of them sourced from the mountains around Baoxing – to foster ties with a string of carefully chosen countries. Most famously, he gave a pair to Richard Nixon, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, after his historic visit to China in 1972. The UK also benefited from panda diplomacy when, following prime minister Edward Heath’s visit to China in 1974, London Zoo received Chia-Chia and Ching-Ching.

Mindful of China’s increasingly open stance towards the west, the World Wildlife Fund requested permission to study the creature which inspired its logo. But during rounds of intense negotiations in late 1979, it transpired that the privilege would cost the charity $1m, money that China put towards the construction of a state-of-the-art breeding facility near the Wolong Nature Reserve, several hours’ drive north of Baoxing. It was a price worth paying, as the research collaboration between China and the WWF, which began the following year, greatly increased our knowledge of the life of the panda in the wild.

At the same time, in keeping with China’s increasingly tough economic stance, the CPC stopped giving away pandas and moved instead to an explicitly commercial model, renting out pandas to foreign zoos on lucrative short-term loans. In 1998 the policy changed and pairs of pandas started to leave China on long-term loans, which improved the chances of reproduction in captivity. Today, China is so self-sufficient that it could happily run the panda show alone, but these loans still make sound financial sense. Most US zoos with pandas, for example, currently pay $500,000 a pair annually to show off these rarities. However confident the Chinese might feel about their own economy, it’s hard to see why they would turn down this revenue.

. . .

As China’s prosperity has grown, so the environment – with the giant panda as its public face – has been moving up the political agenda. There has been a lot of work to do. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, vast swathes of Chinese forest were felled, including about half of the giant panda’s natural habitat. This deforestation is thought to have played a big role in the devastating floods that spread across the Yangzte River basin in 1998, killing thousands and costing tens of billions of dollars to repair. Without trees to sponge up rainwater, Sichuan’s bare mountainsides funnelled it directly into the river system.

China responded to this crisis with some of the world’s boldest environmental initiatives. The Natural Forest Protection Programme, a nationwide logging ban launched in 1998, put in place tough new measures for the protection of forests and halted most commercial logging in the upper reaches of the Yangtze, the heart of panda country. In addition, ­China’s Grain for Green programme has converted crops on steep slopes to grass and forest. Since 1999, when pilot projects began in Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi (the three provinces that still have wild pandas), China has spent $40bn on the programme.

A marble statue of pandas in the centre of Baoxing addresses the town’s twin concerns of mining and conservation

It’s hard to know how successful these measures will be in preventing more flooding, but they have certainly improved the plight of the panda. Before the nationwide logging ban, loggers were reluctant to acknowledge that the forests they worked in were home to pandas, as to do so would have endangered their livelihoods. With the ban in place, however, pandas ­suddenly became an asset, as the same workers looked for other sources of income. This helps to explain why the number of protected areas dedicated to giant pandas leapt from about 20 before the ban to more than 60 today, with several more being added every year. It also made it possible for China to propose the mountains around Baoxing as a Unesco World Heritage Site, one that occupies one million hectares embracing seven nature reserves, nine parks and almost 30 per cent of the world’s wild panda ­population. With more than 5,000 plant species – about the same number as there are in France – the Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries World ­Heritage Site has richer botanical treasures than those found anywhere else outside the tropics.

But China’s ambitions for its underdeveloped west do not sit comfortably with these impressive green achievements. In 2000, the Western China Development Plan got under way, a huge initiative to pull the western half of the country up to the standards of the relatively developed east. China makes bold claims for its environmental protection as it goes about this massive project, but there are real tensions at play, and the devastating Sichuan earthquake of 2008, which left some 90,000 people dead and at least five million homeless, has made it all the harder to pursue development and conservation simultaneously. China must now rebuild the infrastructure of this fragile region – ruptured dams, fractured roads, entire towns. What impact will this have on pandas?

China is fortunate in being able to avoid the destruction of flora and fauna that characterised the industrial revolutions in Britain and other western countries. There are signs that it is determined not to make the same mistakes. It is in places such as Baoxing, where China’s raw industrial spirit meets its precious, fragile ecology, that we will find out if they ­succeed. Pandas have been living here for thousands of years. At the last official census a decade ago, there were just a few hundred left in the region. The chances of seeing one are virtually nil, so why bother to try to save them? The answer, surely, is the powerful symbolism of the giant panda, which rests on its continued survival outside captivity. Lose the panda in the wild and modern China will have lost its own identity.

Henry Nicholls is author of ‘The Way of the Panda: The Curious History of China’s Political Animal’ (Profile).

What’s your view? To comment on this feature please e-mail the FT Weekend Magazine at [email protected]

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

FT: Alchemist of all baggage

Alchemist of all garbage

By Jonathan Birchall

Published: January 12 2010 23:18 | Last updated: January 12 2010 23:18

Tom Szaky has very ambitious goals for TerraCycle, the recycling company he founded just over five years ago. “I want TerraCycle to become a verb, like Google,” he says of the small company, based in an old factory building in the post-industrial wasteland of Trenton, New Jersey. “We hope to wake up one day and become the new version of recycling, where every waste stream has a solution within the TerraCycle system.”

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The 27-year-old Mr Szaky founded his company with just one waste stream – leftover food from the cafeteria at nearby Princeton University, where he was a student, which was fed to worms and turned into fertiliser and sold in discarded soda bottles.

But after a rapid journey that few start-ups can claim to emulate, he is dealing with the waste flow of some of the US’s biggest consumer companies, including Kraft, Mars, PepsiCo, Kimberly-Clark and General Mills, al­though TerraCycle’s turnover was just $12.5m (€8.7m, £7.8m) last year.

The recycling logo that Mr Szaky says he designed during an uninspiring lecture at Princeton now appears on an estimated 1.5bn familiar consumer packages in stores across the US, ranging from Capri-Sun juice drinks to M&M sweets. “It will be on 20bn to 30bn packages by the end of 2010, on a global basis,” he says.

TerraCycle’s five warehouses across the US receive millions of items of wrapping and packaging, collected by more than 8m people, including schools and charities, who may get 2 or 3 cents per wrapper. Together with other items, such as flawed rolls of packaging material, the waste is ultimately recycled into products such as bins, backpacks and pencil cases.

This year, TerraCycle expanded to open offices and recycling warehouses in Canada, Brazil, the UK, France and Germany – yet it has just 55 employees. The waste it collects is turned into more than 100 different products, including injected plastic made from old foil crisp packets, thanks to a recently developed process.

After losing $4.5m in 2008, the company is now operating profitably, as it continues to double its turnover every year. This is in spite of tearing up the rule book on expanding a start-up: “Everything we do, you are not supposed to do,” says Mr Szaky. That included signing some early, almost overwhelming, contracts to sell its worm-waste product to Home Depot and Walmart Canada, as well as developing a big range of products, and expanding overseas (see panel).

Mr Szaky’s original idea for the worm business grew out of a start-up business plan he entered for a competition at Princeton. But serendipity rather than MBA science seems to have shaped TerraCycle’s business, mixed with on-the-hoof inventiveness, occasional luck and plenty of ambition. “It’s how I like to do business. I am willing to take some risk, to put some capital down and test an idea,” says Mr Szaky. “I don’t want to sit and debate with anyone whether it’s a good or bad idea.”

The business has undergone two big shifts. The worm-waste operation was bubbling along in 2007, and TerraCycle had begun paying “collection brig­ades” to send in used soda bottles for the packaging. That led to a deal with Danone’s Stonyfield Yoghurt to collect and reuse yoghurt pots.

Then Mr Szaky was approached by Honest Tea, a small ethically focused start-up, which wanted a way to process foil and plastic children’s juice pouches, whose composite nature made them unsuited to regular recycling. Under the deal, Honest Tea’s packages were made into branded backpacks – and into a dress worn by Soyeon Lee, Mr Szaky’s Korean pianist wife, at her Carnegie Hall debut in New York in 2008. This was one example of his ability to win free publicity – which also includes writing a book, Revolution in a Bottle, that includes tales of gunfights between local gangs and fending off venture capitalists.

But the far bigger transformation came later that year, after TerraCycle came into possession of piles of recycled juice pouches from Kraft’s Capri-Sun brand that had been collected in a state-run project in British Columbia. Mr Szaky proposed that Capri-Sun join the Honest Tea programme.

“Tom found us, as opposed to us finding him” says Jeff Chahley, Kraft’s senior director for sustainability, who describes the decision to launch the scheme with a small start-up as “a calculated risk”.

“Capri-Sun signed a million-dollar contract right off the bat, and they basically exploded the programme,” says Mr Szaky.

Other Kraft brands followed, as did more consumer companies. But growth brought new challenges in meeting demand for new products, as TerraCycle was trying both to continue product development and oversee the manufacturing. “Kraft wanted more kids’ products, Aveeno [owned by Johnson & Johnson] wanted its brand around more cosmetic products,” he says. But the costs of developing products and handling the manufacture and merchandising to retailers was too much.

“We could either completely scale back, and focus on a handful of products, which I really didn’t want to do. Or we come up with another solution,” says Mr Szaky.

The solution, launched last year, was licensing, an idea Mr Szaky says occurred to him when he was in California discussing waste recycling with Hollywood studios, in what he calls “a totally random connection”.

TerraCycle tested one licensed product, a billboard bag for Yak Pak, a small New York-based bag company. “It was just throwing an idea against a wall to see if it worked, and the moment it worked, we aggressively said: ‘We’re not making products any more, we’re licensing everything.’

“The effect was phenomenal. We are now profitable, next year we will be high­ly profitable. The number of products we make exploded . . . and the sales of our products tripled overnight. And the risk disappeared.”

But the shift also required an overhaul of TerraCycle’s model. “In 2008 we lost a tremendous amount of money. I went in a direction that many people thought was not a good direction. And the financials tanked, which made it even harder to justify it as the right move. What solved it was the transition to licensing.

TerraCycle now has a head of licen­sing, who was formerly at Disney, to supervise a unique product licensing programme in which the licensor also supplies some raw material.

Mr Szaky believes he has achieved through trial and error the model that will enable the company to become the “Google of recycling”, establishing itself as the global standard setter.

“We’re taking the global expansion very aggressively . . . The gas pedal is pushed as deep as it can to continue growth. The big challenge at this point is managing that growth.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

TIME: The Four-Day Workweek Is Winning Fans

Monday, Sep. 07, 2009

The Four-Day Workweek Is Winning Fans

By Bryan Walsh

In an era when most of us seem to be working more hours than ever (provided we're still lucky enough to have jobs), 17,000 people in Utah have embarked on an unusual experiment. A year ago, the Beehive State became the first in the U.S. to mandate a four-day workweek for most state employees, closing offices on Fridays in an effort to reduce energy costs. The move is different from a furlough in that salaries were not cut; nor was the total amount of time employees work. They pack in 40 hours by starting earlier and staying later four days a week. But on that fifth (glorious) day, they don't have to commute, and their offices don't need to be heated, cooled or lit.

After 12 months, Utah's experiment has been deemed so successful that a new acronym could catch on: TGIT (thank God it's Thursday). The state found that its compressed workweek resulted in a 13% reduction in energy use and estimated that employees saved as much as $6 million in gasoline costs. Altogether, the initiative will cut the state's greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 12,000 metric tons a year. And perhaps not surprisingly, 82% of state workers say they want to keep the new schedule. "It's beneficial for the environment and beneficial for workers," says Lori Wadsworth, a professor at Brigham Young University who helped survey state employees. "People loved it." Those who didn't tended to have young children and difficulty finding extended day care. (See 10 ways your job will change.)

Managers from around the world have gotten in touch with Utah officials, and cities and towns including El Paso, Texas, and Melbourne Beach, Fla., are following the state's lead. Private industry is interested as well — General Motors has just instituted a workweek of four 10-hour days at several of its plants. "There is a sense that this is ready to take off," says R. Michael Fischl, an associate dean at the University of Connecticut's law school, which is organizing a symposium on four-day weeks.

The advantages of a so-called 4-10 schedule are clear: less commuting, lower utility bills. But there have been unexpected benefits as well, even for people who aren't state employees. By staying open for more hours most days of the week, Utah's government offices have become accessible to people who in the past had to miss work to get there in time. With the new 4-10 policy, lines at the department of motor vehicles actually got shorter. Plus, fears that working 10-hour days would lead to burnout turned out to be unfounded — Wadsworth says workers took fewer sick days and reported exercising more on Fridays. "This can really make a difference for work-life balance," says Jeff Herring, Utah's executive director for human resources.

Of course, in the age of the BlackBerry, fewer days in the office may not make much of a difference in terms of workload. But as energy prices start rising again, it makes sense to be flexible and find savings where we can. 10-4, 4-10.

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1919162,00.html

Copyright © 2009 Time Inc.

FT: This year's Prix Pictet winner

This year’s Prix Pictet winner

By Peter Aspden

Published: October 23 2009 16:52 | Last updated: October 23 2009 16:52

‘Chongqinq IV (Sunday Picnic)’, 2006, by prizewinner Nadav Kander

A Chinese family sits at a table, chatting and drinking tea. Its members seem relatively well-off – there is a tablecloth on the table and they are sitting on smart wicker chairs – and quietly relaxed. Their picnic spot is not particularly appealing, yet rich in symbolism: they are sitting next to the Yangtze River and underneath a concrete-pillared flyover.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Arts - Nov-24

It is the conjunction of the two Chinas, the ancient society that relied on its 4,000-mile-long waterway, and the newly emerging economic powerhouse that is springing to life all around. The flyover provides some shelter from what looks like an indifferent day; the river looks filthy. The family, and millions of their fellow Chinese, are at a crossroads. Will the country’s new orientation bring them the prosperity and happiness that they wish for?

The powerful image is by the Israeli-born, British-based photographer Nadav Kander, who is the latest winner of the Prix Pictet, the international photography prize dedicated to the theme of sustainable development and the environment. Kander received the award from Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations, at a ceremony in Paris on Thursday night for his series of works on the Yangtze.

The works in Kander’s portfolio speak eloquently of a society in transition, and show some of the small tragedies that remain at the margins of China’s breakneck embracing of modernity. More than 3m people have been displaced along a 400-mile stretch of the river in the name of progress. “Common man has little say in China’s progression,” said Kander in his artist’s statement to the judges. It is this attention to the “smallness of the individual” that has powered his award-winning series.

Pictet Prize

Slideshow of artists shortlisted for 2009

This is the second year of the Prix Pictet, founded by the Swiss private bank Pictet & Cie and co-sponsored by the Financial Times. The theme for this year’s prize was “Earth”, following last year’s subject of “Water”. The 2008 winner, Benoit Aquin, was a member of the jury for this year’s prize.

The choice of 47-year-old Kander to receive the SFr100,000 award was a bold one, considering the presence of much better-established “art” photographers such as the German Andreas Gursky and the Canadian Edward Burtynsky on the shortlist of 12. But Francis Hodgson, chair of the judges and the FT photography critic, says the award is “not influenced by traditional career trajectories”.

Kander is best known for his commercial work, which includes advertising campaigns for Nike, Levi’s, Mercedes and John Lewis, and album covers for Placebo and Snow Patrol. He is also one of the world’s top magazine photographers: The New York Times magazine devoted an entire issue to “Obama’s People”, his 52 portraits of President Obama’s inaugural administration.

“He has been a brilliantly successful commercial photographer because he has eschewed having a voice of his own,” says Hodgson. “When he has had art directors, he has been able to do anything for anybody. Now he has had to find his own style, and he has found it consummately well.”

Hodgson admits that some observers may be surprised by the judges’ decision. “But one of the strengths of the Prix Pictet is that we are not much bothered over whether [the candidates] think of themselves as artists, or journalists, or commercial photographers. What is important is their ability to put their message across. Kander has astonishing, virtuoso skills. He is a communicator.”

The photographs shortlisted for the prize are currently on display at the Passage de Retz gallery in Paris. They include Gursky’s giant untitled work that turns a landfill site in Mexico City into a seemingly abstract landscape: “a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional world landscape”, in the artist’s words, “in which the world’s waste assumes the position of the former landscape ideal”.

The images of the Chinese photographer Yao Lu also trick the eye: what seem to be traditional Chinese landscape paintings are in fact composed of green-netted rubbish dumps.

These works capture the art-versus-journalism dilemma that photographers working in this field must resolve. Even the most grotesque sins against the environment can be made to look beautiful; but while the spectator may relish the irony, there is always the danger that the message is diluted.

On the other hand, we are in danger of becoming immune to the hard-hitting messages that bombard us regularly via the news media, each clunky image serving to make us that little less sensitive to the issues at hand.

These are the challenges that face the Prix Pictet jury, which this year included the architect Zaha Hadid and Sir David King, director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at Oxford University and former chief scientific adviser to the UK government. What remains constant is the moral imperative behind the award.

Sir David says that the tools of science and technology are not enough in themselves to effect the change in attitude that is required to combat the perils of climate change. He called for a new cultural “renaissance” that would effectively chronicle the dangers posed to the environment.

As part of the award’s remit, the shortlisted American photographer Ed Kashi has been commissioned to work in Madagascar, where Pictet & Cie is supporting a sustainability project. Kashi’s portfolio, “Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta” examined the costs of oil exploitation in west Africa.

Consistency demands that next year’s Prix Pictet be based on the theme of fire or air, the other two elements that have posed an increasing threat to the planet as the effects of climate change make themselves felt. Yet, as the organisers acknowledge, so intertwined are all the elements that there is the danger of repetition of subjects covered in the first two years of the prize.

They may need to think more laterally, to ensure that the world’s best takers of pictures retain their ability to shock us into overdue action.

‘Prix Pictet 2009: Earth’ is at the Passage de Retz gallery until November 23. Tel: +33 (0)1 48 04 37 99; www.passagederetz.com, www.prixpictet.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

Economist: Singapore's sand shortage - The hourglass effect

Singapore's sand shortage

The hourglass effect

Oct 8th 2009 | SINGAPORE
From The Economist print edition

Seven maids with seven mops might fail, but Singapore gets close

“LOOKING for sea-sand for reclamation project in Singapore. Prompt reply is greatly appreciated.” Many such pleas can be found on Alibaba.com, a popular Chinese trading-website. Malaysia banned sand exports as long ago as 1997. Indonesia followed suit in 2007 on environmental and, some say, political grounds. Ever since, it has become harder for Singapore to secure supplies for its booming construction industry and sea-fill plans.

AFP

The good old days, when Indonesia’s loss was Singapore’s gain

The ban by Indonesia, its biggest supplier, led to a surge in the price of sand, used in both concrete and land-reclamation. The government averted a short-term crisis by releasing sand from its stockpile and helping contractors find new sources. However, Indonesia’s embargo, followed swiftly by a Chinese ban on sales of sand to Taiwan, set in train a domino effect.

Environmentalists argue that large-scale sand-dredging can deplete fish stocks and cause erosion, risking landslides and flooding. So Singaporean contractors turned to Cambodia, where prices are low and environmental standards almost non-existent. But this May Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister, outlawed exports of sand. Again, environmental pressures were cited, but there may also have been a political motive.

After the Cambodian ban Vietnam’s sand exports surged, achieving volumes seven times as big as last year, with Singapore the main customer. Then last month Vietnam’s construction ministry called for a temporary halt to the trade, to assess its impact on the environment and the local building industry. NGOs in Thailand and Bangladesh have also pressed their governments to reject recent requests to allow sales of sand to Singapore.

Sand prices, which peaked at over S$60 ($43) a tonne in 2007, have fallen during the slowdown. Simon Lee, of the Singapore Contractors’ Association, believes a new regulation requiring sand importers to have alternative back-up supplies will help insulate his members from further turbulence. A spokesman for Singapore’s national-development ministry adds that construction companies have been importing sand from “various” regional countries and claims that “recent restrictions on sand exports have not affected the supply of construction sand to Singapore.” But global demand for dwindling supplies of sand and other materials is mounting. Critics say that Singapore needs to shift faster from building cheap but resource-intensive concrete structures towards more expensive construction techniques that use, say, more steel and glass.

Relying as it does on low-wage, low-skilled migrant workers from South Asia, Singapore’s construction industry is not yet ready for such a high-tech transformation. And in the short term there are still plenty of willing suppliers. Tim Sintop, an American whose trading company wants to export sand from Myanmar and has already secured several contracts in Singapore, is upbeat: “The more bans there are elsewhere, the better for us.”

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

ST: Fans of recycling

Sep 19, 2009

Fans of recycling

Unwanted water tubes and plastic crates are part of the decor of a beauty services shop

By tay suan chiang

About the only thing that is new at the Spa Esprit Group's newest outlet at Wheelock Place may be how you look as you walk out of the beauty services establishment. Little else about the nearly 3,000 sq ft place which houses its three brands - Brazilian waxing service Strip, brow-grooming service Browhaus and facial service Mask - is new. Old furniture and assorted industrial objects such as a sink and plastic pipes have been recycled for the beauty spa's interior decor. A 1950s cake chiller has been turned into a cash register. Discarded kitchen cabinets have had their doors reupholstered with vintage fabric and now store beauty products. Even old copies of The Straits Times were used. Mr Jerry De Souza, the group's creative director and store designer, had initially wanted a display shelf made entirely of papier mache. 'We created three prototypes, which were tricky to build. But they couldn't stand and fell flat,' he says. In the end, the shelf was created using a recycled wooden frame covered with newspaper. Elsewhere, recycled items are purely decorative. The main reception counter is spruced up with repainted old compressor fans that appear like mini windmills. Wooden crates were taken apart then reassembled to create a feature wall. Plastic water tubes make another reception area inside look vaguely like a prop from a science-fiction movie. Mr De Souza has designed more than 30 outlets under the group, including Strip at Suntec City and Raffles Place and restaurants Barracks and Tippling Club at Dempsey. He had all along seen treasure in so-called junk, using recycled material such as reupholstered old chairs in the stores and eateries. This is the first time he is doing it on such a large scale. He says: 'Rather than spend money on new items, I decided to be creative and transform old, disused items.' Going green, however, does not mean going cheap. He says recycling 'definitely costs more as it requires more manpower, such as consultants and contractors to use unfamiliar materials, and more time and effort to get it right'. 'It is challenging to recycle material for commercial uses as the new furniture must be functional and durable for daily use. There are regulations set by the Singapore Civil Defence Force, such as those concerning fire safety, that we had to abide by,' he adds. About $300,000 was spent on renovation, interior decoration and customising old furniture for the store. The sum includes the cost of making prototypes such as the papier mache shelf and buying recycled materials. Mr De Souza says most of the recycled materials were bought from a scrap heap factory in Paya Lebar, where metal objects are usually melted and sold. Items such as the compressor fans cost about $80 each. Ms Janet Lim, Spa Esprit's public relations manager, says the company is taking small steps towards green conservation. She adds that more of the group's stores will be 'going green' in the future. Its second Skinny Pizza restaurant, also at Wheelock Place, will have seats made from restructured bicycle seats and tables made from bicycle wheels. It will open in November. The Wheelock beauty services store opened on Sept 1 and has already attracted the attention of shoppers passing by. Undergraduate Kelly Lee, 20, says: 'It's quirky and makes me think about how I can get creative with what may be junk.' [email protected]

=== Unwanted plastic crates have been resurrected as table legs (above). Old compressor fans (main picture) have been repainted and fitted onto the main reception counter at Spa Esprit's Wheelock outlet. Over at the entrance to Browhaus (above), an old table and armchair have been restored and are now part of the store's furniture. A recycled sink (left) with old-fashioned faucets in the main reception area. -- ST PHOTOS: BRYAN VAN DER BEEK

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

WSJ: World's Within - The ‘Spirited Away’ animator on his new fantasy film ‘Ponyo’

THE ADVISER
AUGUST 6, 2009, 9:06 P.M. ET

Worlds Within

The ‘Spirited Away’ animator on his new fantasy film ‘Ponyo’

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

In the films of Hayao Miyazaki, the mundane and the magical live side by side. His new film, “Ponyo,” due out Aug. 14, tells the story of a young boy in a home on a cliff overlooking the water who befriends a supernatural sea creature that lives beneath the waves. The filmmaker says he got the idea for the movie when he was living in a house on a cliff with a view of Japan’s Inland Sea.

 

A Scene From 'Ponyo'

0:35

Watch a scene from the animated movie "Ponyo." Video courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures.

The 68-year-old Japanese animator is known for making movies that take place in imaginative settings. His 1986 movie “Castle in the Sky” focused on the search for a mythical flying city; much of his Oscar-winning 2001 film “Spirited Away” took place in a bathhouse for spirit creatures; and his Oscar-nominated 2004 movie “Howl’s Moving Castle” featured a troubled magician who lived in an ambulatory residence.

“Ponyo,” features perhaps the most star-studded cast for a Miyazaki movie, including the voices of Cate Blanchett, Liam Neeson, Matt Damon, Betty White and Tina Fey.

Disney Animated fantasy movie ‘Ponyo’

Disney, the studio distributing the film in the U.S., has marshaled the next generation of its stars to support the movie, which also features the voices of Noah Cyrus (Miley’s little sister) and Frankie Jonas (younger sibling of the Jonas Brothers music trio).

Although Mr. Miyazaki is little-known in the U.S., in Japan he is a household name and his films are blockbusters.

The director said his career path was set after watching the animated fantasy film “Panda and the Magic Serpent” as a teenager. At the time, he was feeling “a lot of pressure” because he was studying for exams. Although the film was only a “cheap love romance,” it made a deep impression on him, in part because the movie was made in Japan. He had been planning to become a writer of Japanese manga (comic books), but instead decided to become an animator.

Corbis Director Hayao Miyazaki

Mr. Miyazaki, who is also a screenwriter, typically works by drawing sketches of the characters in his movies and handing them over to the chief animator to flesh out. His films rely on hand-drawn animation, but he has nothing against computer animation. “The reason hand-drawn is so important is that I am only able to do hand-drawn,” said the animator, speaking by phone through a translator.

Many of Mr. Miyazaki’s films explore the futility of conflict. Mr. Miyazaki said growing up in Japan in the shadow of World War II shaped his outlook about war, but he strives to keep his views from coming across too “overtly” in his films. He said, however, that his opposition to the war in Iraq was one of the reasons why he decided not to attend the 2003 Academy Awards, where “Spirited Away,” won for best animated feature.

The importance of safeguarding the environment is another recurring theme in his work. In “Ponyo,” man and nature are portrayed as out of balance, and the sea is depicted as full of garbage. “All I did is just draw how the sea has become, the way it is in reality,” said Mr. Miyazaki.

Write to Christopher John Farley at [email protected]

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

NY Times: Urban Farming, a Bit Closer to the Sun

June 17, 2009

Urban Farming, a Bit Closer to the Sun

By MARIAN BURROS

THIS summer, Tony Tomelden hopes to be making bloody marys at the Pug in Washington, D.C., with tomatoes and chilies grown above the bar, thanks to the city’s incentives for green roofs.

Mr. Tomelden, the Pug’s principal owner, says he’s planting a garden to take advantage of tax subsidies the city offers in his neighborhood if he covers his roof with plants.

“If I can do something in my corner for the environment, that seemed a reasonable thing to do,” he said. “Plus I can save money on the tomatoes.”

There won’t be bloody marys at P.S. 6 on New York’s Upper East Side, but one-third of its roof will be planted with vegetables and herbs next spring for the cafeteria. The school is using about $950,000 in city funds that it has put aside, and parents and alumni are providing almost a half-million dollars more.

“For the children, it’s exciting when you grow something edible,” said the school’s principal, Lauren Fontana.

Aeries are cropping up on America’s skylines, filled with the promise of juicy tomatoes, tiny Alpine strawberries and the heady perfume of basil and lavender. High above the noise and grime of urban streets, gardeners are raising fruits and vegetables. Some are simply finding the joys of backyard gardens several stories up, others are doing it for the environment and some because they know local food sells well.

City dwellers have long cultivated pots of tomatoes on top of their buildings. But farming in the sky is a fairly recent development in the green roof movement, in which owners have been encouraged to replace blacktop with plants, often just carpets of succulents, to cut down on storm runoff, insulate buildings and moderate urban heat.

A survey by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, which represents companies that create green roofs, found the number of projects its members had worked on in the United States grew by more than 35 percent last year. In total, the green roofs installed last year cover 6 million to 10 million square feet, the group said.

Steven Peck, its president, said he had no figures for how many of the projects involved fruits and vegetables, but interest is growing. “When we had a session on urban agriculture,” he said of a meeting of the group in Atlanta last month, “it was standing room only.” Mr. Peck said the association is forming a committee on rooftop agriculture.

Tax incentives have accelerated the plantings of green roofs, particularly in Chicago, which has encouraged green roofs for almost a decade. The Chicago chef Rick Bayless uses tomatoes and chilies he grows atop his restaurant Frontera Grill to make Rooftop Salsa.

New York State has subsidies both for roofs with succulents spread out over a thin layer of soil and for edible plants covering a smaller area. A proposed amendment to New York City’s tax abatement for some roof projects would include green roofs. Most roof gardeners aren’t in it for the money, though.

After her Lower East Side co-op refurbished the 1,000-square-foot roof of its six-floor walk-up, Paula Crossfield persuaded fellow board members to spend $3,000 to put a 400-square-foot garden on it. They built planters and paved part of the roof so people can walk easily among the plantings.

Ms. Crossfield, managing editor of the Civil Eats blog, about sustainable agriculture, is paying for the seeds and will do the harvesting, sharing the bounty with her neighbors. (She and her husband live on the top floor.)

In the process, she estimates she carried up 500 of the 1,500 pounds of soil they bought and put in planters.

“My decision to start a garden is an extension of my work,” Ms. Crossfield said. “Growing my own food helps me understand better what I write about: how food gets to our table, the difficulties it entails.” It’s not all about agricultural policy, she added.

“The bottom line,” she said, “is that I harbor a secret desire to be a farmer, and my way of doing that is to use what I have, which is a roof.”

Two weeks ago Ms. Crossfield transplanted seedlings from her apartment onto the roof: golden zucchini, oakleaf lettuce, brussels sprouts, butternut squash, watermelon, rainbow chard, cucumbers, nasturtiums, calendula, sunflowers, amaranth greens, tomatoes and herbs.

In San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, Maya Donelson has filled planter boxes with vegetables on a 900-square-foot patch of roof at the Glide Memorial Church. For the past year she has managed the Graze the Roof Project at the church’s Glide Center, a neighborhood social service provider.

The food goes to the center’s volunteers and children in the neighborhood who work in the garden one day a week and learn to cook what they grow.

“I’ve never had one kid who hasn’t wanted to get his hands dirty,” said Ms. Donelson, who studied architecture and environmental design. “They are willing to try anything if they see it growing and pull it out of the ground. We juiced the purple carrots and the kids drank that.”

Sustainable South Bronx, a nonprofit environmental organization, said it will help Alfred E. Smith High School plant a roof garden and has helped a company in Hunts Point put strawberry plants on its roof. (The owner likes strawberries, an official of the group said.)

One of the more ambitious projects is a 6,000-square-foot roof farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which will grow food for local restaurants and shops.

Ben Flanner, a transplanted Wisconsinite who’s running it, said he became fascinated with organic agriculture and was set to take an internship on a rural farm but then had a change of heart.

“I wanted to farm but I didn’t want to leave the city,” he said.

Mr. Flanner was lucky to find an environmentally aware company — Broadway Stages, a stage and lighting company — that wanted a green roof on one of its buildings. It paid to prepare the roof for planting and agreed to let him grow food on it. Mr. Flanner and his partner, Annie Novak, did the planting and will be able to keep all the profits from their organic vegetables.

“People are knocking on my door to buy the stuff,” he said. Andrew Tarlow, a partner in four nearby restaurants, including Marlow & Sons, has agreed to buy anything Mr. Flanner grows.

The roof cost $6,000 to prepare, according to Lisa Goode, who with her husband, Chris, owns Goode Green, a company that designs edible roof gardens. There are at least 1,000 seedlings planted in 16 beds, each about 60 feet long.

“A smaller roof would cost more per square foot,” she said. Mr. Flanner’s costs for the garden itself were less than $2,000, but Ms. Goode said it will take more than one roof for him to make a living.

“This is sort of a pilot to see if it can become a viable business model because he isn’t going to make any money from this,” she said. “If we can get the owner to do more roofs, he can then make a profit.”

Not long ago, edible rooftop gardeners were less likely to be thinking about sustainable food systems or the environment.

Lee Utterbach wanted to recapture summers on his grandmother’s farm. But there was no land around his house in the Mission district of San Francisco. So when he bought the building where he lives and runs a photo equipment rental shop, he turned the roof into a vegetable and flower garden. Since the roof slopes, all the planting was done along its perimeter. Some of it, like the rosemary, is so well established, it hangs over the front of the building.

Reaching the roof means a trip through the kitchen window, then up an incline. A small ladder takes visitors to his wife’s greenhouse and a hot tub, a deck , a composting toilet and the future guest room. In one area that his wife, Aly, describes as his “man cave,” Mr. Utterbach watches his 17-inch TV screen from a comfortable chair.

“I was probably eight or nine years ahead of the curve when I built this,” he said. “I just enjoy watering plants and digging in the soil.”

Peter Bergold, a neuroscientist who teaches at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, was also inspired by the past. Memories of the first asparagus and carrots he ate from a garden years before led him to start growing produce on the roof of his landmarked brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, six or seven years ago.

“That was my epiphany,” he said of the sweetness he was trying to recapture. “I assumed asparagus grew with a rubber band around them.”

Environmental awareness came slowly. “One of the things that got me interested,” he said, “was that between global warming and the thermal bubble of cities you can start things much earlier so you have a much longer growing season.”

Another benefit gardeners get from planting well above the ground is that they face fewer pests.

But roof gardeners also have to think about winds that can knock over tender vines. And while concentrated heat on top of city buildings can help tomatoes ripen, it also means more frequent watering, even if irrigation requires lugging watering cans up stairs.

Though rooftop gardens go back at least to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the modern green roof movement has made its way here from Europe, where for years government policies have encouraged or required green roofs.

The government benefits take into account the fact that gardening on the roof requires much more preparation than gardening on terra firma.

First, it must be determined whether the roof can support the weight of the soil, the plants and the water. It may need to be retrofitted. Barring that, gardeners can place planters around the perimeter, which is generally its strongest part.

The containers can be almost anything: ready-made planters; boxes made of reclaimed wood, old milk cartons, children’s wading pools. A screen at the bottom holds in a lightweight substance, like packing peanuts for bulk, topped with a barrier fabric so the soil can’t go through. Potting soil, mixed with ingredients to lighten it, is put on top.

When gardens are planted directly on the roof, a waterproof membrane is laid down first, followed by insulation and a root barrier. (A guide to roof gardening is available at baylocalize.org.)

All this work can be off-putting for landlords. Five years ago, Ms. Crossfield said, the owner of an apartment building on Sixth Avenue in the West Village told one of his tenants to get rid of a garden she had planted.

“He told the woman to take it off the roof,” she said, “because he didn’t see any benefit in it.”

That’s not so likely these days.

“Several years ago you might have seen a certain amount of resistance,” said Miquela Craytor, executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, “but now people are coming to us saying they want one.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Cloud appreciation

Cloud appreciation

By Natalie Whittle

Published: May 15 2009 13:13 | Last updated: May 15 2009 13:13

Gavin Pretor-Pinney: ‘It’s all very turbulent and chaotic’

Gavin Pretor-Pinney looks shocked. I have just made the mistake of saying, innocently enough, that I don’t see many interesting clouds where I live in London.

“That’s because you’re not looking. You’re not looking!” He blinks at the offence. Clouds are Pretor-Pinney’s passion, and after a few hours in his company I am careful to make a thorough scan of the sky before making any rash statements.

Pretor-Pinney is a polymath and proselytiser, a designer, writer and sometime television presenter who, in 2004, founded the Cloud Appreciation Society, an online forum and club for people whose gaze drifts upward to observe “the last wilderness” of the sky and the extraordinary things that form there.

Sitting in the kitchen of his Somerset home, Pretor-Pinney reaches for his recently finished book, The Cloud Collectors’ Handbook, and leafs through impatiently to find a picture of a fallstreak hole cloud, also known as “hole-punch clouds” for their puncturing appearance in the sky. “I’ve seen fallstreak holes in London,” he says, shaming me further. “You see these pileus clouds sometimes, which are like little caps, or a cloud hairstyle or a beret. They only appear very briefly on top of a large building – kind of like a teenage storm cloud.”

In Pretor-Pinney’s world, there is a rich and endless discourse about the puffs of air and moisture that most of us take for granted. The basic science of clouds is easy: when air rises, it expands and (as with any gas) cools, and when it cools, some of its moisture condenses. The advanced science, and the interactions of clouds with landscape, weather cycles and humans, is fraught with complexity. “The problem is that it’s not a contained system,” says Pretor-Pinney. “These air masses are interacting with each other and it’s all very chaotic and turbulent. So actually pinning down what is happening, what’s moving and how it’s changing in temperature is quite complicated.

“Each cloud is unique, and is part of a fluid system. If you were a little fish in a bathtub, and you’re trying to work out how the bubbles of the foam form on the surface of the water, it’s all chaos. Just one little swirl of the water makes them change.”

The bathtub metaphor seems odd at first, but in Pretor-Pinney’s study, a pile of notebooks bound by a rubber band with “Waves” written on the front cover gives a clue to this new preoccupation. He is preparing a book on undulations in all forms, from the human hand-wave to Mexican waves and surfers’ fantasy breaking rollers.

He admits he hasn’t quite figured out how the book will work yet. But like his other projects, it will doubtless show a distinct kind of scholarship. “I’ve always found clouds intriguing. Perhaps one reason I like them is that they chime with the feeling that I’ve always been somewhere between science and art in perspective on the world. I never really felt I was comfortable in either.” Pretor-Pinney studied philosophy at Oxford, but pursued a career in design. He designs the Society’s annual calendar and also laid out his new book, with a fastidiousness equal to the detail he applies to his knowledge of clouds. (He fought hard to get rounded corners on the book, for example.)

As president of the Cloud Appreciation Society, Pretor-Pinney charges £4 for life membership. This gets you a certificate, a badge and “an occasional newsletter” when he has time to write one. The main focus is people’s pictures of clouds, posted on the website for discussion and admiration.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney with Natalie Whittle under a Somerset sky

Outside, Pretor-Pinney gives me a tour of what (I think to myself) is quite a plain sky. “This is quite a good day for cloud spotting. There’s a lot going on.” Earlier, he’d told me about an early-19th-century English pharmacist and amateur meteorologist, Luke Howard, who came up with a system for naming clouds by dividing them into three main types: cirrus, cumulus and stratus – wispy, clumpy and flat. “His idea was to think about clouds with a naming system in the same way we use for plants and animals with a genus and a species.”

Today is a cumulus cloud day. “But it’s not cumulus humilis – the cotton wool clouds or little sheep you see on a sunny day. You see this one down here [he points towards the horizon], it’s building up quite nicely. It’s got quite a crisp top, which means it’s vigorously rising. In the right conditions, that could grow into a large cumulus cloud.”

Next month, Pretor-Pinney will be giving similar instruction to guests at a cloud-spotting weekend organised by the School of Life which will attempt to show why “contemplating clouds is the perfect antidote to the stresses of modern-day life”. He’ll also be pursuing the philosophical tangent to cloud spotting. Clouds, he writes in The Cloud Collectors’ Handbook, “embody the impermanence of the world around us”. But even if they form and pass quickly, they are open to all.

“They never happen when you expect them to,” he tells me. “One of the good things about clouds is that you don’t have to be somewhere special – they’re there for everyone. You just have to have a view on the sky. It doesn’t have to be somewhere spectacular – it could be a tower block in the middle of London.”

[email protected]

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The details
More information at http://cloudappreciationsociety.org; Sky Weekend, June 19-June 21, www.theschooloflife.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: What are zoos for?

What are zoos for?

By Peter Barber. Photographs by Piotr Malecki and Charlie Bibby

Published: May 8 2009 19:48 | Last updated: May 8 2009 19:48

Shetland pony

Behind the rusting gates of Wroclaw Zoo, ivy is claiming the walls of the ramshackle gothic administration building. Inside, the best Radoslaw Ratajszczak can do to keep out the Polish winter is to point a bar heater at his desk. “You can see the challenge I face,” the zoo director says, gesturing at the peeling paintwork. From high on the wall, the head of a large black rhino watches ­Ratajszczak’s every move. He hates the thing and has tried to remove it, but it’s bolted through the brickwork. “I don’t like dead animals,” he explains.

Ratajszczak, a biologist who resembles a chain-smoking Santa, is jolly even in the face of the huge task before him. When he won his directorship two years ago, he took it upon himself to transform the worst zoo in Poland into a state-of-the-art conservation park. The mounted rhino is a reminder of the days when best practice in the acquisition of zoo animals was to shoot the mother to capture the offspring. Ratajszczak’s challenges are typical of those faced by dilapidated zoos across eastern Europe as they are forced to accept European Union rules on the humane treatment of animals.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Reportage - Nov-24

However, while zookeepers can replace metal bars with moats, and cages with warm, eco-friendly enclosures, can they really change the fundamental nature of their enterprise: the display of captive wild animals for the entertainment and edification of humans? Why do we frown on wild animals in circuses but flock – in our millions – to see them in zoos?

After a slump in the late 1970s and 1980s, the zoo as family entertainment is back. Worldwide, as many as 600 million visits are made to zoos each year, according to the World Association of Zoos and Aquaria (Waza). In Europe, they are among the most visited of all tourist sites: the Berlin Zoo, to pick probably the most successful example, is a stock-market-listed – though non-profit-making – company that aggressively merchandises star animals such as Knut, the cute baby polar bear (now reputedly a ­maladjusted adult).

‘Tumku’ the orangutan

Still, the question of what zoos are for has not gone away. Most of the animals on display in the UK’s largest zoological gardens are at the very lowest risk of extinction in the wild, according to the Born Free Foundation, which campaigns to “keep wildlife in the wild”. Fewer than a quarter are classified as “threatened” on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List. Yet it is species conservation that dominates zoos’ ­branding – and the spur behind their revival seems to be that they have convinced punters that the price of a ticket buys them, not entry to a show, but a stake in the preservation of the natural world. When Born Free conducted a survey to discover what percentage of UK zoo income people thought was spent on the conservation of threatened species in the wild, most answered: about a quarter. The true figure, Born Free believes, is between 4 and 7 per cent – in other words, of the average £10.30 cost of a ticket to a British charity-registered zoo, between 41p and 72p goes to in situ conservation. Even captive breeding programmes, Born Free estimates, account for less than 14 per cent of the 5,600-plus vertebrate species on the Red List. “The zoo model has largely remained the same, but the marketing model has had to adapt to meet changing public expectations,” argues Born Free’s chief executive, Will Travers.

Since 2005, Europe’s zoos have been required to implement an EU directive on minimum standards of animal welfare and engage in educational and conservation work. But the provisions of the directive are vague and implementation has been variable, according to the Eurogroup for Animals, a non-profit organisation that monitors animal welfare. The group’s forthcoming 2009 report will conclude that many member states are failing on both objectives.

The group has launched legal action against Spain and Portugal and also has concerns about Italy, says Véronique Schmit, the group’s executive officer for policy. It has so far held fire against two others, Bulgaria and Romania, which have only been bound by the directive since 2007 when they joined the EU. “We acknowledge that zoos will always exist,” says Schmit. “But we feel that the educational role of zoos is the only way they can be justified.”

. . .

Gibbon

Anthony Sheridan is a retired businessman from Hertfordshire whose personal quest is to bring the zoos of Europe up to standard. His field is electronics and he has no particular expertise in animal husbandry, although he did breed Indian mongooses when he was 12, which got him a spot on the television programme Children’s Newsreel. He has maintained a lifelong fascination with wildlife. Using his own money, Sheridan has met and quizzed the directors of more than 60 of Europe’s leading zoos.

“I’m interested in what the rationale is for zoos now and in the future,” he says. “People have moved on. They see the David Attenborough programmes and everything else, and they ask: why do we need to keep animals in zoos?” Sheridan has compiled a ranking of the best zoos in Europe on the basis of 25 factors including the animal collection itself, the quality of the enclosures, visitor numbers, overall investment, education involvement, in situ and zoo-based conservation activity, marketing and publicity. Vienna, Leipzig and Berlin are at the top with Rotterdam and Chester close behind. London Zoo does not make his top 10. Wroclaw is at the bottom, but Sheridan expects it to climb up the list as the new director implements his renovation plan.

Sheridan believes that we have no choice but to keep animals in captivity, for the purposes of conservation and education. The problem is that practices at too many zoos don’t match the promises. He says that to bring a typical large European zoological garden up to scratch over the period of a decade would require €100m.

. . .

Until the Victorian era, zoos were living displays of wealth and power, confined to the private pleasure gardens of the aristocracy. Then, in 1847, the Zoological Society of London began charging the public to view its collection of exotic animals in Regent’s Park. It was an immediate hit. The London Zoo captured the mood of the time. Elephant tusks had begun to grace the entrances to gentlemen’s clubs along Piccadilly; feathers from exotic birds were appearing on ladies’ hats.

Siberian tiger

Ashton Nichols, a professor of Liberal Arts at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, says that the zoo was a powerful embodiment of the notion that not only had British culture been able to extend itself over the furthest reaches of the globe, but that it had “actually been able to bring the furthest reaches of the globe back to the centre of the imperial city”. The founder of the Zoological Society, Stamford Raffles, was himself an officer of the East India Company, and the London Zoo became a display of living plunder. Zoos as we know them today are relics of this earlier era of globalisation, in which not just people and spices were dispersed across the planet, but the natural world.

Throwing open the gates to the zoo coincided with changing attitudes towards animals. Bull- and bear-baiting were banned in 1835; Darwinian theories of evolution were starting to be popularised. Even as thousands flocked to Regent’s Park, some expressed unease at what they were witnessing. “Why can we have Acts of parliament in favour of other extensions of good treatment to the brute creation, and not one against their tormenting imprisonment?” wrote Leigh Hunt in A Saunter Through the West End, published in 1861. Many of the animals were captured by wild animal merchant Carl Hagenbeck, who also supplied circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum. Hagenbeck was later to expand his trade to indigenous people – human exhibits such as the “Hottentot Venus” and ­African “Bushmen” were hugely popular.

The methods used to seize the animals were merciless. In Savages and Beasts, a history of Hagenbeck’s business, Nigel Rothfels cites a letter from Bronx Zoo director William Hornady to Hagenbeck in 1902 urging discretion: “We must keep very still about 40 large Indian rhinoceroses being killed in capturing the four young ones … There are now a good many cranks who are so terribly sentimental that they affect to believe that it is wrong to capture and exhibit them, even for the benefit of millions of people.”

Feeding time at the Penguin Pool

Ironically, Hagenbeck is also generally credited with revolutionising zoo design at the start of the 20th century by dispensing with bars in favour of open spaces surrounded by moats, the template for modern zoo architecture. Naturalist and author Gerald Durrell pushed this reforming ethos ­further. Durrell, founder of Jersey Zoo and a former animal collector, argued that a zoo’s primary purpose should be the captive breeding of endangered species, once all efforts to preserve them in the wild had failed. So how is it that, still, most animals in modern zoos are not endangered?

In Wroclaw, Ratajszczak says the problem is that, of the four basic tenets of zookeeping – conservation, research, education and recreation – only the last makes money. To fund the worthier functions of the zoo, you must get people through the gate. And what do people want to see? Charismatic mega-vertebrates like elephants and cute and cuddly mega-stars such as Knut the polar bear.

The Eurogroup for Animals believes that elephants – of which only the Asian species has a declining population – do not belong in zoos. According to the RSPCA, elephants typically live only 15 or 16 years in zoos, about half as long as even their counterparts in Burmese timber camps. Breeding rates are far lower than in the wild and illness – such as circulatory problems, foot problems and herpes – kills off 60 per cent of those that survive beyond infancy. Zoos claim that keeping elephants supports conservation, but the World Wide Fund for Nature believes that captive breeding does not contribute significantly to the preservation of the species.

Gorilla Kingdom

So what about Knut, the polar bear that became a media phenomenon for Berlin Zoo after it was abandoned by its mother, a former circus bear called Tosca? In 2007, more than three million visitors came to the zoo, providing an estimated €5m fillip. The zoo swiftly registered the bear as a trademark and out rolled Knut fluffy toys, mugs, T-shirts and gummy bear sweets. There was even a Vanity Fair cover with celebrity ecologist ­Leonardo DiCaprio and BBDO Consulting briefly attached a brand value of €10m euro to the cub. Other German zoos, such as Stuttgart and Nuremberg, rushed to acquire photogenic versions of their own.

But Knut, like many child stars, seems to have become a victim of his own fame. German tabloids reported that Knut had become addicted to applause, “crying” when the crowds disappeared. One German zoologist says that he has become a sociopath who will never mate. It’s perhaps not the classic Hollywood story that was envisaged by an American studio when it reportedly began negotiating with the zoo to produce an animated film based on the bear. Berlin Zoo director Bernhard Blaszkiewitz says that Knut’s alleged behavioural problems are a media invention.

But the king of the crowd-pleasers is the giant panda. All pandas are the property of the Chinese government and are leased out to zoos around the world at a list price of up to $1m a year for a breeding pair. However, it is hard work getting these breeding pairs actually to breed (females are in heat for as little as three days every year) and when they do, China levies a “baby tax” of $600,000. There are believed to be only 1,600 mature giant pandas left in the wild, threatened most of all by habitat destruction and a single-minded reliance on the periodic flowering of bamboo. The Captive Animals’ Protection Society argues that the renting of pandas is a misuse of zoos’ scarce conservation resources.

And as if pandas didn’t have enough problems, they also have to contend with the ups and downs of international politics. Chairman Mao gave America pandas Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing in 1972 as an act of goodwill following the visit of Richard Nixon. But ­pandas offered as a peace overture to Taiwan in 2006 were initially rejected as being clearly aimed at undermining the smaller nation’s sovereignty. Meanwhile, Berlin Zoo’s efforts to find a mate for Bao Bao after the female Yan Yan died have been rebuffed by China, allegedly in response to Angela ­Merkel hosting the Dalai Lama; ­however, Berlin zoo director Blaszkiewitz said negotiations with China for a new panda were in fact continuing.

. . .

In 1973, the director of the Bronx Zoo, Bill Conway, delivered a ­lecture entitled “How to exhibit a bullfrog”. It became a seminal text for forward-thinking zoo ­directors. Conway imagined a zoo as a “world of wild creatures” with no visible buildings, in which an animal – specifically, an endangered species – was shown in the context of its biosphere: its earth, air and water. By doing so, a zookeeper could make a bullfrog as exciting for a visitor as a chimpanzee.

Gorilla statue

But there is a counter-argument in favour of the more traditional capture and display of the rare and exotic: that this may be the only way to save them. For example, the last wild specimen of Père David’s deer, native to China, is believed to have been shot in 1939. But 40 years earlier, the deer had been introduced to the private deer collections of the European aristocracy. The 11th Duke of Bedford formed a breeding herd at Woburn Abbey in England – and in 1956 the first Père David’s deer were sent back to China, albeit to Beijing Zoo. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature hopes the species will one day be reintroduced into the wild.

The reality is that we face a future in which more and more of “nature” exists only in a kind of museum. A quarter of mammal species face extinction while half have declining populations, according to the IUCN Red List. But the list also shows that captive breeding can bring animals back from the brink. The Arabian oryx has been reintroduced into the wild, as has the golden lion tamarin in ­Brazil. The last six wild American condors were captured in 1987 for a breeding programme and growing numbers are now being released. The American bison is no longer endangered and Przewalski’s wild horse, which was considered extinct in the wild, appears to be less endangered. And zoos may be the only safe haven for the Tasmanian devil, as a rare form of communicable cancer threatens to extinguish its native population within 20 years.

Captivity might be the last hope for chimpanzees, accepts primatologist Jane Goodall. “In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if all chimpanzees could live in protected areas,” she says. “But the sad reality is that, so often in the wild, chimpanzees are subjected to habitat destruction, to hunting, caught in snares; human populations are expanding…”

Primates can have enriching lives in well-managed, enlightened zoos, Goodall says. The key is to provide sufficient space, stimulation, a good social group and the ability for them to make choices. “Sometimes when I’m looking at chimps in a zoo like that, and I think of some of the places I’ve seen in Africa, I think that probably a chimp would actually prefer that,” she says. “We tend to have this idealistic view of freedom, but I don’t think the chimpanzees do.”

. . .

People like Sheridan and Ratajszczak are the reason zoos exist in the first place – they have a deep need to be close to animals. ­Ratajszczak, who claims to have visited 407 zoos since he was a child, was the first person from communist eastern Europe to attend a zookeeper’s training course in the west. The course, held by the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Society, “opened my eyes to what we have to do”, he said, “that we really need to orient ourselves more to education and to captive breeding of endangered species, that the zoos need to change”.

In the 1980s, the only way that Ratajszczak could get hold of editions of the Zoological Society of London’s International Zoo Yearbook – the zookeeper’s bible – was to trade them with Bristol Zoo for some of his Argentinian black vultures. Now he constantly shares information with other zoos, and is helping Sarajevo Zoo rebuild after the Bosnian war. It’s a measure of how things have changed at ­Wroclaw Zoo. Within recent memory it had become a byword for animal neglect in Poland after a handler was savaged by a brown bear that had been kept for nine years in a 12 square metre space with no light. When Ratajszczak was appointed by the city council to bring the place up to scratch, he found “an accidental gathering of animals”, few of them in good condition.

As we zip around the grounds in Ratajszczak’s electric cart, it is clear that Wroclaw Zoo is a work in progress. In the reptile house, lethargic crocodiles bask dead-eyed in artificially lit Perspex boxes not much larger than themselves. All these will go. A cramped and dark stone enclosure from 1863 that once imprisoned birds will be converted into a display documenting how animals were kept in the bad old days. “In the middle of the last century they were showing dwarves and bearded women in circuses. That is our history. You can deny it? No,” he says.

The new Animal Adventure children’s exhibit

Gerald Dick, executive director of the World Association of Zoos and Aquaria, says that one of the trends that has improved zoo husbandry is the move away from cramming in as many animals as possible. Ratajszczak is in the course of rationalising his own collection: “People used to say: if you don’t know what to do with an animal, give it to Wroclaw Zoo. It was filled with strange animals in strange places, like 16 red foxes.” There was even an exhibition of caged domestic chickens in what is now the butterfly house.

The zoo has one of the last remaining 19th century elephant houses – a structure that, perhaps more than any other, symbolises the limitations of the Victorian zookeeping philosophy. Elephants need company and space. Ratajszczak plans to knock out the cages to open up the enclosure for his “three old ladies”, each of which is more than 40 years old. One, a former circus act, was alone for nine years and was pacing unnaturally before two companions were found for her.

Some major work has already been completed. Ratajszczak has built a new primate building with access to a large island that must seem like Shangri-la to the gibbons, which had been in tiny cages for 26 years. But in the administration library are the plans for his masterstroke. It is a futuristic €40m walk-through multimedia exhibit focusing on a single African ecosystem: the plains, the forest, the water and the air. Conway would be pleased.

In terms of species conservation, though, Ratajszczak is grimly realistic. “We are losing the war,” he says. “We are winning some small battles.” Still, he believes there is a permanent place in the struggle for Wroclaw Zoo. “You can find zoo-like establishments in all the ancient cultures,” he says. “The Egyptians, the Chinese, the Mayans … There has always been a need for humans to be with animals.”

Peter Barber is the FT’s Americas news editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

ST: Designing engineers to change the world

Excerpt:

Design goes beyond cosmetics, branding and exclusivity to incorporate innovation and marketability. Design in its broadest senses is all encompassing. Who better to take up this challenge than engineers? They have done a good job through the ages. Thanks to them, we have microwave devices, refrigerators and air-conditioning. The world today needs engineers who can create something that is right the first time round, in look and feel, as well as practicality. And not just products that raise the quality of life, but also sustainable solutions to meet global challenges such as climate change.

===

April 21, 2009

ECONOMIC WATCH Designing engineers to change the world

By Chan Eng Soon

DESIGN is at the core of everything. Apple's focus on design, for instance, helped bring the computer industry to a higher level of creativity. Consumers were willing to pay higher prices for its sleek designs and user- friendly operating systems. Of course, in uncertain times, consumers may look for cheaper options. In February, Apple Mac sales declined, while Windows PCs made a strong rebound. Apple fans, however, are optimistic the Mac will spring back - the same way it survived the doldrums of the 1990s. Perhaps the lesson is that 'design' can take one places - but 'design' in its broadest sense can take one even further, including through hard times. But this means design going beyond cosmetics, branding and exclusivity to incorporate innovation and marketability. Design in its broadest senses is all encompassing. Who better to take up this challenge than engineers? They have done a good job through the ages. Thanks to them, we have microwave devices, refrigerators and air-conditioning. But engineers can do even better. The world today needs engineers who can create something that is right the first time round, in look and feel, as well as practicality. And not just products that raise the quality of life, but also sustainable solutions to meet global challenges such as climate change. In line with Singapore's recognition of the importance of design in the next phase of its economic growth, the National University of Singapore's Faculty of Engineering has introduced its first design- centric engineering curriculum. This will expose students to design from their first year. It will bring together form, function, aesthetics, culture, engineering and lifestyle. By interacting with industry, students will learn to solve problems and be entrepreneurial at the same time. Take the Faculty's Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (FSAE) cars: They have been a roaring success, taking top places in design, and ranking among the best 30 in overall performance worldwide. Seven have been designed so far, with the latest given the thumbs-up by local racing car celebrity driver, Hafiz Koh. Last year, NUS designed and built Singapore's first eco-car. Running on gas- to-liquid fuel, which contains virtually no sulphur and aromatics, the car is the first environmentally friendly city concept model designed and built locally. This year's model has been taken to yet 'greener' heights: Running on a hydrogen fuel cell, its only emission is water. Indeed, future transportation systems will be one of the multi-disciplinary themes that students taking the new curriculum will develop. Other multi-disciplinary themes will include engineering in medicine and smart cities. The transportation theme will build on experience gained from the FSAE race car and eco-car projects. These have demonstrated that the design and construction of engineering systems produce highly sought-after engineers. Students not only develop a deeper appreciation of their engineering education, but are also drawn by the challenge of formulating innovative designs. Students will first focus on designing and producing a prototype of a future marine transportation system relevant to Singapore's maritime, offshore and tourism industries. The engineering in medicine theme will focus on technologies needed to address medical challenges in Singapore and the region, especially age-related and infectious diseases. And the smart cities theme envisages technology that will change the way infrastructure is built, so that future urban infrastructure will be 'smarter' and more 'intelligent'. The three themes will involve partnerships with the university's School of Design and Environment, Faculty of Science and the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. Such partnerships will present opportunities for creativity in integrative design. With a design-centric engineering education, Singapore - like Finland, Denmark and South Korea, countries that have developed national design policies - may well be on its way to becoming a country known for its design. We may see not just more locally-designed products, but also made-in-Singapore solutions. For example, in tackling health issues of the elderly, NUS researchers have invented 'MEMSWear'. MEMS stands for Micro Electro Mechanical Systems - and the smart suit is equipped with an array of microsensors able to detect falls suffered by its wearers and to send alerts to their caregivers. The engineers behind this innovation took another step forward recently. The smart suit is being developed to include an 'impact-reduction' system to protect the wearer when he or she falls. Even cabbages in our research labs are getting into the business of prediction and warning. At the Mixed Reality Lab, a team is 'designing' cabbages that change colour when they sense danger. Hooked up to a data-sensing system, for example, they can monitor one's blood pressure and change colour when the pressure goes up. Why cabbages? Because the world is becoming immune to digital 'beeps' - and the researchers figure the world would sit up if living things started 'beeping' by changing colour. Incidentally, the project has been dubbed the Babbage Cabbage. We may not need Babbage Cabbage to awaken us to the fact that the world needs design-centric engineers before complex challenges like global warming overwhelm us. But it will certainly take a paradigm shift in engineering education to bring about a new generation of engineers able to devise innovations guided by the perspectives of a true designer. The writer is dean of the Faculty of Engineering, National University of Singapore.

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

TIME: Cows with Gas: India's Global Warming Problem

Saturday, Apr. 11, 2009

Cows with Gas: India's Global Warming Problem

By Madhur Singh / New Delhi

Indolent cows languidly chewing their cud while befuddled motorists honk and maneuver their vehicles around them are images as stereotypically Indian as saffron-clad holy men and the Taj Mahal. Now, however, India's ubiquitous cows — of which there are 283 million, more than anywhere else in the world — have assumed a more menacing role as they become part of the climate change debate.

By burping, belching and excreting copious amounts of methane — a greenhouse gas that traps 20 times more heat than carbon dioxide — India's livestock of roughly 485 million (including sheep and goats) contribute more to global warming than the vehicles they obstruct. With new research suggesting that emission of methane by Indian livestock is higher than previously estimated, scientists are furiously working at designing diets to help bovines and other ruminants eat better, stay more energetic and secrete lesser amounts of the offensive gas. (See pictures of India's largest ruminant: the Asian elephant.)

Last month, scientists at the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad in western India published a pan-India livestock methane emission inventory, the first ever, which put the figure at 11.75 million metric tons per year, higher than 9 million metric tons estimated in 1994. This amount is likely to increase as higher incomes and consumption rates put more pressure on the country's dairy industry to become even more productive. (See pictures of China's cow town.)

Already the world's largest producer of milk, India will have to yank up production from the current 100 million metric tons to 180 million metric tons by 2021-22 to keep pace with growing population and expanding disposable incomes. Livestock such as cows, buffalo, goats, sheep, horses and mules are indispensable to India's rural economy — whether yoked to plow land, raised for milk and manure, or harnessed to pull carts to move goods and people. The Ministry of Agriculture estimates that the animals contribute 5.3% to total GDP, up from 4.8% during 1980-81. But, says Dr. K.K. Singhal, head of Dairy Cattle Nutrition at the National Dairy Research Institute in Karnal in northern India, "while livestock plays a crucial role in the economy, global warming is becoming a huge worry. We're trying to find indigenous solutions, because our realities are very different from the West." (See the 10 things you should know about the world's cheapest car: India's Nano.)

For starters, most Indian livestock is underfed and undernourished, unlike robust counterparts in richer countries. The typical Indian farmer is unable to buy expensive dietary supplements even for livestock of productive age, and dry milch cattle and older farm animals are invariably turned out to fend for themselves. Poor quality feed equals poor animal health as well as higher methane production. Also, even when western firms are willing to share technology or when western products are available, these are often unaffordable for the majority in India. For instance, Monensin, an antibiotic whose slow-release formula reduces methane emission by cows, proved too expensive for widespread use in India. So the emphasis for Indian scientists is on indigenous solutions. "We know we cannot count on high quality feed and fodder," says Singhal, "No one will be able to afford it. What we have done instead is develop cheaper technologies and products." One example is urea-molasses-mineral blocks that are cheap, reduce methane emission by 20%, and also provide more nutrition so they're easier to sell to illiterate farmers who don't know a thing about global warming but want higher milk yields.

Most dietary interventions work by checking methogens — microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments such as cows' guts, where they convert the available hydrogen and carbon (byproducts of digestion) into methane, a colorless, odorless gas. "We encourage well-to-do farmers to use oilseed cakes which provide unsaturated fatty acids that get rid of the hydrogen," Dr. Singhal says. Another solution is herbal additives. Some commonly used Indian herbs such as shikakai and reetha, which go into making soap, and many kinds of oilseeds contain saponins and tannins, substances that make for lathery, bitter meals but block hydrogen availability for methogens. Dr Singhal says they are used in small quantities and the cows don't seem to mind the taste. "Imagine how much potential they'd have in the international market," he says. (See pictures of India's biodegradable dishware.)

Several other institutions, such as the National Institute of Animal Nutrition and Physiology (NIANP) in Bangalore, are also researching herbs. "We're studying the effect of tannin compounds from various easily-available sources like tealeaves. We're also studying prebiotic and probiotic feed supplements," says Dr K.T. Sampath, director, NIANP. Other institutes, such as the New Delhi-based The Energy Research Institute (TERI), are working on methane capture strategies. One long-running project has been biogas production — cow dung is utilized to make biogas for use in kitchens and even compressed biogas for use in vehicles. "Biogas plants have been very successful," says R.K. Rajeshwari, a fellow at TERI, "Farmers are able to use biogas in their kitchens, to light lamps and to even drive vehicles." Such projects, she says, have been particularly successful at gaushalas, cow shelters supported by donations from the devout and by government grants, of which there are 4,000 across India now. Most gaushalas are for abandoned, dry and aged cattle, of which there are many since killing cows is illegal in all but two states (the communist-ruled West Bengal and Kerala). "This way they are put to some use at least," says Rajeshwari, "And by replacing conventional sources of energy, they help prevent global warming."

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1890646,00.html

FT: Fighters of climate change

Fighters of climate change

By Ed Crooks

Published: March 18 2009 20:42 | Last updated: March 18 2009 20:42

From a solar-powered cardboard cooker for Africa to a giant industrial microwave that locks underground carbon sucked from the atmosphere by vegetation, innovation and ingenuity still offer hope that it is not too late to tackle climate change.

That at least is the encouragement offered by the five varied finalists in the FT Climate Change Challenge.

The competition, organised by Forum for the Future, the not-for-profit sustainable development group, and backed by Hewlett-Packard, the information technology company, aims is to raise the profile of innovations that can be both commercially successful and bring about material reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Financial Times readers, having been invited to nominate entries over the past few months, now have the chance to vote online for the winner, who will receive a prize of $75,000.

The credit crunch and economic downturn have undoubtedly dealt a blow to investment in environmental technologies such as renewable energy, with smaller companies often the hardest hit. At the same time, however, “green stimulus” plans in the US, the European Union and elsewhere point to a political resolve to tackling climate change. The downturn, many now say, offers opportunities to restructure economies and put them on a path to lower carbon dioxide emissions.

As Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, puts it: “It is clearly more difficult to raise money now, but a lot of the ideas we have been looking at are going to save money as well as greenhouse gas emissions.

“There are things we can do that will both help us get through the recession and change industry structures to put in place the low-carbon economy that we need to create if we are to avert the threat of climate change.”

Against that background, the outlook for our five finalists is challenging, certainly, but not discouraging. Nearly 300 entries were submitted. A few were grandiose, large-scale projects, but the majority were highly practical ideas that have realistic hopes of being converted into successful commercial applications relatively quickly.

Alas, many highly promising ideas did not make the final shortlist: among them, a proposal to use mobile telephone texts to arrange shared taxi rides in London, and an idea for solar-powered internet centres for Africa.

The five chosen were the ones that seemed to offer the greatest potential for growth in the eyes of the panel of judges: entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson; Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change; Mark Hurd, chairman and chief executive of HP; Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco; Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Leon Sandler, executive director of the Deshpande Center for technological innovation at MIT; Jonathon Porritt, founder of Forum for the Future; and Lionel Barber, editor of the FT.

The finalists are:

Carbonscape

A New Zealand company that has developed a machine to turn biomass such as agricultural waste into carbon-rich material, locking up the carbon that would otherwise enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The material, known as biochar, could also be used as fertiliser or fuel.

Mr Barber commented: “Carbonscape has the potential to be an efficient and effective solution to the problem of rising greenhouse gas levels. Its feasibility has been proven and it could have a truly global impact.”

ADEF

A US company founded by a former truck salesman, which has a $50 wheel cover for heavy trucks called the Deflektor. It is estimated to reduce fuel consumption by 2 per cent, giving a very quick return on the investment.

Sir Richard commented: “I cannot see a world without trucks. This simple idea could make a huge difference.”

Kyoto Energy

A Kenyan company selling $5 solar cookers made of cardboard and acrylic. The cookers, which have recently gone into production in Nairobi, fight both deforestation in Africa and the health problems caused by cooking on wood fires.

Sir Terry said: “As well as reducing carbon emissions and deforestation, this cheap and simple idea could save people in developing countries time and money.”

Neem Biotech

A British company producing a feed additive called Mootral, to be fed to cows and sheep to reduce their flatulence. Farm animals make a significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and are attracting increasing interest from policymakers.

Sir Terry praised “a novel idea with the potential to have a real impact inreducing carbon emissions from the food chain”. Sir Richard was also impressed: “Can they stop cows farting and save the planet?”

Loughborough University

British academics have designed ceiling tiles that can cool rooms, to be used alongside or instead of conventional air-conditioning systems.

Air conditioning accounts for a significant proportion of electricity use, particularly in the US, and is growing rapidly in the developing world: reducing its demand for power could make a real difference to energy consumption.

Ms Claussen said: “This design will be well received by investors in the heating and ventilation industry.”

On FT.com, you can read more about the companies and the competition, and vote for your favourite idea. While the contest organisers hope all five entries will prosper, the key criteria is to identify the idea that most deserves to grow, but needs the extra push that the publicity of winning would give it – the one, perhaps, you would choose to invest your own money in. Voting closes on April 1 and the results will be announced in the FT on April 3.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Noted for trust

Two years ago Lewes joined a growing international movement of “transition towns” in countries as diverse as the US, Japan, Australia and Italy where residents believe that the best way to preserve the values of their communities and combat climate change is to favour local produce and business over the standardised offerings of the global economy. And, last September, it went one step further by introducing its own currency.

Oliver Dudok van Heel, a volunteer with Transition Town Lewes and one of the architects of the Lewes pound programme, argues that the currency’s effect on individual emotional well-being has been even more important than its economic and environmental one. A sense of taking personal responsibility for the health of a community is deeply satisfying, he explains. And “a relationship develops between resident and trader that is absent in a supermarket; people talk to each other about their lives and we’ve seen the level of trust grow enormously within the community.”

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Noted for trust

By Fiona Leney

Published: February 28 2009 00:16 | Last updated: February 28 2009 00:16

In the pretty Sussex town of Lewes, 10 miles inland from the southern English coast, an interesting experiment is taking place.

At first glance, Lewes seems to be a picture-postcard of the past, with hilly streets and quirky shops, a cobbled humpbacked bridge, a Victorian brewery and a population prone to parading around in historical costumes as a celebration of centuries-old villains and martyrs. But behind the scenes the hometown of 18th-century reformer Thomas Paine is living up to his tradition of social radicalism.

Two years ago Lewes joined a growing international movement of “transition towns” in countries as diverse as the US, Japan, Australia and Italy where residents believe that the best way to preserve the values of their communities and combat climate change is to favour local produce and business over the standardised offerings of the global economy. And, last September, it went one step further by introducing its own currency.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Small but perfectly formed - Feb-21

Within these walls - Feb-14

The kindness of strangers - Feb-07

Moving experiences - Jan-30

Exchange advantage - Jan-23

Presidential preferences - Jan-17

This is a less eccentric move than it seems. Precedents for alternative currency schemes in the modern world began to crop up as far back as the 1930s when two businessmen, Werner Zimmermann and Paul Enz, set up the Wirtschaftsring-Genossenschaft (WIR) scheme in Switzerland to provide credit to local small- and medium-sized businesses in the midst of the Great Depression. No notes were ever issued but the system remains active today and serves as inspiration.

In the US there are now at least 12 local currency schemes, created not to overcome financial hardship – though that might prove a side benefit in the current economic climate – but to emphasise traditional small-town American values and those linked with the contemporary transition town movement, with neighbours supporting one another against a hostile outside world.

The largest is the Berkshares programme, launched three years ago in the rural Berkshires region of southern Massachusetts. Issued in denominations of one to 50, at a 5 per cent discount to the dollar, and administered by a not-for-profit company, the money is now widely accepted, even for large purchases and wage payments, with nearly $2m worth circulating among businesses and private individuals. According to Susan Witt, who sits on the board that oversees the scheme, it has also become a powerful social force. “It reformed the way many Berkshires business owners and residents think about their local economy and helped educate the community on why shopping locally matters,” she says. “Our youth prefer to spend their free time on Main Street rather than at the mall. They experience and contribute to the vibrancy of our downtown.”

In the UK the small, south-west English town of Totnes, known for its market, green credentials and arty, bohemian vibe, preceded Lewes with the launch of its own pound in 2007. But the latter town is more than twice the size of the former and an important regional economic centre. Its proximity to London also thrusts the idea of an alternative economy under the capital’s nose and Brixton, a neighbourhood in the south of the city inhabited by a mix of young professionals and low-income families, has just announced plans to introduce its own scheme in September.

Walking into any of the diverse independent stores lining Lewes’ high street, one immediately senses the fierce loyalty residents have to their traders. May’s General Store, resplendent in cream woodwork and hand-painted maroon signage, is one of the shops authorised to issue Lewes pounds at an exchange rate of one to one sterling. Inside there is barely room to move among an eclectic mix of well-groomed mothers, young hippy types, middle-aged businessmen and pensioners browsing shelves laden with everything from whole-foods to ethnic textiles, clothing to fine bone china. It’s the sort of shop that seems to have disappeared from other UK towns and its owner, Sue May, presides over proceedings with a brisk, school-marmish authority, dispensing home-baked bread pudding to regulars while giving the low-down on Lewes’ alternative currency project.

“The pound is a way of keeping money in the local economy and carbon footprints down by encouraging shoppers to spend in their own neighbourhood,” she says. “It gives people the choice of doing something positive to support their community.”

But the benefits go even further since it has also boosted Lewes’ stock among anyone looking to live in a place with a clear identity and a strong community spirit. (It helps that Lewes is also only a 55-minute rail journey from London and a 20-minute drive from the beach.)

As elsewhere, property prices have declined in recent months but less than in many similar towns and local agents report that business is picking up at these new, lower levels, reflecting the fact that demand still outstrips supply for the right sort of property. Topping the desirability list are elegant, brick-built Georgian family houses high on the top of the high street overlooking the river Ouse and the brewery, which can command prices of more than £2m. In new developments, such as The Nurseries, on the outskirts of town, eco-friendly townhouses designed for young families meanwhile sell for around £450,000.

“We get families moving here from London and Brighton who very much want to live in a strong, vibrant community. They want not only nice properties but a feel-good factor,” says Angela Ramsey, who manages the Oakley estate agency, another independent business in town. “There are a lot of professional people who move out here with sophisticated tastes but who are looking for a return to core values. And once people move here they tend not to leave again.”

Oliver Dudok van Heel, a volunteer with Transition Town Lewes and one of the architects of the Lewes pound programme, argues that the currency’s effect on individual emotional well-being has been even more important than its economic and environmental one. A sense of taking personal responsibility for the health of a community is deeply satisfying, he explains. And “a relationship develops between resident and trader that is absent in a supermarket; people talk to each other about their lives and we’ve seen the level of trust grow enormously within the community.”

The scheme, which has put about 25,000 Lewes pounds into circulation, is scheduled to run until August, at which point the town authority, which has been holding all the sterling that residents have exchanged, would convert it back. But it’s been such a success that there are now plans to extend it indefinitely and to issue notes of larger denominations, answering early criticism that a system based on £1 notes could never be a serious business tool.

Other teething problems have also been overcome. The first 3,000 notes, handsomely printed with pictures of Paine, were snapped up within days of issue but many were hoarded by collectors or speculators who sold them on Ebay for up to £35 each. Eventually more notes were issued to solve the liquidity problem – although van Heel is quick to point out that there was no inflationary effect. “As you have to exchange one pound sterling for every Lewes pound, there’s no overall increase in the number of notes in circulation. That’s why we chose to back our currency with ‘fiat’ money, that is, the legal currency of the realm,” he says.

Sherman Robinson, a consultant to the scheme and an economics professor at nearby Sussex University, notes that it was never designed to grow into a fully functioning financial system. The point, he says, is to create a symbol and raise public awareness. “Legal tender is made acceptable by law [but] the Lewes pound is not, so each act of acceptance by a customer or business is an act of trust, of buying into the deal,” he explains. “People in the transition town group lay much emphasis on self-sufficiency, with a sense of returning to past values.”

Abigail Petit, owner of Gossypium in Lewes, agrees. She produces and sells funky clothes and home furnishings made in fair-trade cotton from an Indian co-operative yet designed by the daughter of a local textile manufacturer. In fact, Petit is convinced that such attitudes – and a commitment to seemingly crazy ideas like an alternative currency – are what make small towns like Lewes and their businesses successful. “A brand like ours could never have started – and thrived – anywhere else,” she says. “We are all interconnected here [and] people are very loyal.”

And, according to May, that extends to everyone in town, not just its soya-latte-drinking, peasant-blouse-wearing, upper-middle-class residents. “We’ve got a shop on each [low-income] housing estate which takes Lewes pounds and people are using them,” she says. “The other thing about recreating the personal trust between trader and client is that shopkeepers are willing to give credit – not something you’d ever see in a chain store.”

I make way for Ella Jones, a regular at May’s who’s in to pick up a favourite lime chutney she used to get from the supermarket nearby. She came to Lewes from Australia to visit her sister but has since decided to stay. “The town just prioritises strands that I think are vital to quality of life,” she says. “I’ve always cared about issues like the environment but the economics always seemed detached. Using an alternative currency brings it home that we can make a difference to where we live by our own economic clout. It’s giving people power to influence their immediate environment.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Totoro Forest Project

"Totoro Forest project is an international charity effort to save Sayama Forest, also known as Totor Forest. This endangered sanctuary on the outskirts of Tokyo is where director Hayao Miyazaki got the inspiration for his much loved character "Totoro".
 
Over 200 top international artists from animation, illustration, and comics are donating artwork especially created for this cause."
 
The assignment: Totoro is a mysterious character, a spirit, a monster or creature that is visible only to kids. We asked artistes to pause and give some thought to the film. How did it inspire them? How did they feel after it? What does the totoro from their own personal life look like? We wanted artwork that could convey that childhood sense of wonder and spiritual beauty of nature that the movie conveyed. 

http://totoroforestproject.org/

See also: http://chutzpah.typepad.com/slow_movement/2008/09/my-neighbour-totoro.html

IHT: Sustainable water solutions

1% WATER focuses on our relationship to water. The exhibition showcases works, concepts and experimental environments by designers, artists and scientists that are beginning to shape a new water consciousness. 



70% of the planet's surface is water, but only 3% of this is freshwater and only 1% is readily available for human consumption today. Factors such as the world's growing population and increasing consumption, climate change and pollution mean that even this relatively limited and unevenly distributed resource is under threat.

It goes without saying that water feeds the planet's ecosystem and flows through our bodies and our buildings. Water plays an important role in religion, spirituality and mythology in all cultures. Yet the bond that once connected humans with the source of life has been broken and the way we have used water in the last century is no longer appropriate for today. The challenge lies in creating new conditions for water's use that enhance rather than constrain our lives. 


The exhibition explores themes such as AbUse, Sacred Waters and Reconnect through works by artists, designers and graphic designers, as well as key historic pieces. Graphic designers Karlssonwilker were commissioned by Z33 to map and visualize water consumption worldwide.

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The above samples are displayed at the start of "1% Water and our Future," an exhibition at Z33, a design and art gallery in the Belgian city of Hasselt. The show explores our relationship to water, and how design can help us to use it more responsibly and productively. All of the liquids are exactly the same thing - water. To be specific, they are examples of the 1 percent of the world's water that is available - and deemed suitable - for human consumption.

 

Some 70 percent of the earth's surface consists of water, but only 3 percent of it is freshwater, and less than a third of that is drinkable. The amount of water we consume is increasing, whereas the supply of freshwater is static, which is why it's running out. More than a third of the world doesn't have enough water, and the situation is worsening. What can we do about it? Pictured left, a woman using the LifeStraw, a $5 portable device invented by the Swiss company Vestergaard Frandsen to purify water as it is sucked up through a straw.

The exhibition suggests other possibilities as well. Some are political initiatives, such as the water-saving program adopted by the Spanish city of Zaragoza, which reduced its citizens' water consumption to a third of the national average. Others are ideas developed by designers and artists to suggest how we can redefine our relationship to water, as well as to propose practical solutions to the crisis. Pictured above, a water saving and purification device in the 1% Water exhibition.

 Pictured above, an Aquaduct concept tricyle developed by IDEO.

 Some of the solutions are being tested at "1% Water and our Future." Hanging outside the building is "Rain Catcher," a giant raindrop-shaped device developed by the Spanish designer Jordi Canudas to add rainwater to the drainage system.

Pictured above, "Pig Toilet," by the Dutch artists Atelier van Lieshout. It combines a pigpen with a human toilet, the contents of which are eaten by the pigs, rather than being flushed away and wasting water. "In the 19th century there was a vigorous debate between the advantages of dry and wet sanitation systems. The urgh! factor is the reason why wet systems won, but dry sanitation was a perfectly workable solution," said Ilse Crawford, a co-curator of the exhibiton.

A collection of antique water vessels from different countries shows how water has been used sparingly, but very effectively by cultures that value it. Pictured left, an old idea interpreted in a new way, the Matlo is a water-cooling device developed by the London-based design team Doshi Levien. The inspiration was the traditional terracotta drinking water vessel, which is a familiar sight in Indian homes and is used to keep water at a cool temperature. The Matlo is an energy-saving device that cools water without using electricity even in hot climates.

See: http://www.z33.be/ (You can click on EN)