Couple turns lawn into ecosystem; officials threaten to mow it down

The one good thing about drought is that the lush green lawns outside your neighbors’ houses act as a sort of banner, proclaiming ASSHOLES LIVE HERE. But lawns aren’t just water hogs: They are also monocultures, as devoid of diversity as suburban school districts. Lawns lack the fauna that bees and other important pollinators need to survive. The mass mowing and fertilizing of lawns pollutes the air, the soil, and the groundwater.

In short, those prissy, manicured lawns are wasteful and useless — and that’s without mentioning the basic nuisance of waking up to the whine of your neighbor’s push mower at 9 a.m. on a Saturday.

In Ohio, Sarah Baker and her partner decided to tackle the lawn problem by letting their rural one-acre lot go wild. They stopped mowing. And when they stopped mowing, Baker writes in The Washington Post:

A diverse potpourri of plants began to flourish, and a rich assortment of insects and animals followed. I had essentially grown a working ecosystem, one that had been waiting for the chance to emerge …

The un-mowed plants in our yard attract plant-eating bugs and rodents, which in turn attract birds, bats, toads and garter snakes that eat them. Then hawks fly in to eat the snakes. Seeing all this life emerge in just one growing season made me realize just how much nature manicured lawns displace and disrupt.

Town elders, however, didn’t see Baker’s lawn as a functioning ecosystem; they saw it as a nuisance.

Read more here.

EU food control coming?

Crop diversity under threat

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The European Union minions in Brussels/Strasbourg are working on controlling what foods we can eat. No, I am not jesting.

They are aiming to ban, as in outlaw, all heirloom and non-hybrid seeds, even for personal garden use, as well as the growing of such plants, the retention of their seeds (and seeds also from hybrid seeds for future use) and the taking and passing on of cuttings.

This way they will regulate what kinds of vegetables we can buy and even grow ourselves, and those will all have to be approved hybrid varieties and thus all only and rare vegetables will no longer have a chance.

As the collection and keeping of seeds and passing on from one gardener to another will also be punishable by law it means that we will have to – annually – go to authorized seeds merchants and buy our seeds for our garden.

Agribusiness, especially the big plant breeders, such as Monsanto, have been lobbying the EU commissioners for the last five plus years to create law that will do this and thus make it impossible for the people to avoid buying seeds from that company and others.

They have been working out, one can but guess, that people were voting with their feet and decided to grow their own food and especially here gardeners were aiming to use non-hybrid seeds and also to keep seeds from the harvests back for future use and also to share with other gardeners.

Therefore the EU commissioners have been lobbied hard to outlaw this practice and if the revised proposed seed regulation becomes EU law then we will all be forced to, if we wish to grow our own food, to grow only what they permit and keeping seeds back from the harvest for use next year will be punishable by this law.

How they are going to enforce this is, obviously, a question but if heirloom varieties are no longer available and organic seeds – for it would appear that they also will fall foul of this proposed legislation – then policing will be hardly necessary anyway.

This proposed legislation from Brussels proves yet again that the European Union is far from being a good thing for the people of Europe; the opposite rather, and the sooner it is put to death the better.

While this issue is all over the news in Germany and some other continental EU countries not a single word is mentioned of this issue in the media in the UK or Eire.

Time for a serious change to our system is needed...

© 2013

"Herculean task" to safeguard biodiversity

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

BONN, Germany – The world faces a Herculean task to safeguard animal and plant life from climate change and pollution, German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said at the opening of a U.N. biodiversity conference on Monday, May 19, 2008.

U.N. experts say human activities including greenhouse gas emissions mean the planet is facing the most serious spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. One species disappears roughly every 20 minutes, they say.

"In my view, climate change and the loss of biodiversity are the most alarming challenges on the global agenda," Gabriel said in a speech opening the conference, held once every two years.

He vowed to do all he could to reach accord, saying countries had to answer inconvenient questions and take action rather than produce "huge amounts of paper with little content".

"It will be a Herculean task to get the world community and each individual country on the right path to sustainability," Gabriel said, noting that extinction rates were 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural rates.

"The truth today is that we are still on the wrong track. If we follow this path we can foresee that we will fail to meet the target," said Gabriel.

Biodiversity has jumped up the political agenda due partly to a recent surge in food prices, which has been linked to booming demand in fast-growing economies, including China, and, more importantly, I should say, the growing use of crops to provide fuel, and it is this madness of trying to created bio-fuel from food crops that is causing us such problem.

Experts say agricultural crops will suffer if wild stocks die out. Without a change in human consumption habits, feeding 9 billion people would be impossible, they warn.

Business as usual is no more an option if humanity is going to survive. Losing biodiversity is not just losing trees and species, it is an economic and security loss. However, how do we go about it. Growing food crops to make into fuel is not the answer, that is one thing for sure.

"This summit is a unprecedented opportunity for governments to stop talking and start acting," said Greenpeace International campaigner, Martin Kaiser. But then again we have the likes of Greenpeace campaign against power generating plants that use the incinerating of waste for this purpose and this always, time and again, with the excuse that we MUST recycle more. But there is only that much that can be recycled and composted and that which cannot, as it is done in other countries – countries such as Sweden, for instance – is being burned to generate heat and electricity. But in the UK this is always being met with NIMBY-ism, led mainly by the likes of Friend of the Earth and Greenpeace.

UN conference to discuss ways to stop destruction of nature

Berlin (DPA) – A major international conference opens in the former West German capital of Bonn on Monday to discuss measures against the ongoing destruction of nature.

Some 5,000 delegates from 190 countries are taking part in the ninth conference of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) that runs until May 30.

Scientists and environmental groups have called for urgent action to stem the loss of the plant and wildlife which underpins the health of our planet and has a direct impact on people's lives.

Data compiled by the Zoological Society of London shows between a quarter and one-third of the world's wildlife has been lost since 1970 as a result of pollution, over-fishing and urban expansion.

The destruction of rain forests, marine eco-systems and other forms of nature costs the global economy 6 per cent of its annual gross national product, or 3,000 billion dollars, according to a new study for the European Union.

The Bonn gathering aims to "reduce significantly" the rate of loss of biodiversity by 2010, a target set at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and the Sustainable Development Summit in Johannesburg a decade later.

The agenda includes the destruction of indigenous forests and the plundering of the sea as well as tapping traditional knowledge on medicines, promoting biodiversity in the world's poorest cities and the impact of biofuels on agriculture.

Another goal is to create equitable benefit sharing from the use made by the pharmaceutical industry of genetic resources in plants and animals.

German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel warned the discussions would be complex and said flexibility was needed to avoid a failure.

"The conference is at a crossroads," the minister told a news conference in Berlin last week. "In essence it is about the survival of mankind."

Gabriel said efforts to save threatened species from extinction was one of the most important global political issues along with measures to combat climate change.

The CBD meeting is the last major gathering before the 2010 target date. Its central aim is to draft a document similar to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change to take over after 2010.

The organizers are keen to secure binding commitment to clearly laid down targets, along the lines of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the successor agreement which began to take shape at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Bali in December.