Mrs Brown is widely acknowledged for her environmental outlook. She is a Landcare ambassador, has been involved in the Aorere Catchment Water Quality Project (Read more about the project here).

Source: Carbon News.

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Ms Figueres was speaking at the Greens-organised Climate Change Conference in early June which brought together academics, public policy specialists, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and representatives from Federated Farmers.

Dr Graham, Green Party Climate Change spokesperson said the conference was very effective. “It filled a space that the Government has created through inaction in the last year on climate policy.” He says it brought together the main parties in the climate debate to “begin a dialogues as to where we should be going with climate policy.” The conference was attended by members of the Green and Labour party.

Addressing the conference, Ms Figueres urged New Zealand to set a binding emission reduction target in order to support action taken by Pacific nations, many of whom are at the front line of climate change and are embracing renewable energy and putting in place climate change adaptation strategies.

“It is in the best interests of New Zealand to do so – not just because it is environmentally sound policy that preserves your natural resources, but because it makes sense for national security and economic strategy. A diverse energy mix that uses clean technology reduces fossil fuel dependence and increases energy security. Protecting agricultural and fishery resources increases food security, slowing glacial melt ensures water security. Efficient green building practices save consumers money while delivering a product that is in demand. Those are only two very good reasons why investors worldwide are looking for more and larger low-carbon investment opportunities.”

Last year New Zealand pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, which officially ended in 2012. Other countries, including Australia, have signed up to a legally binding emissions reductions agreement, known as Kyoto 2.

Dr Graham, Green Party Climate Change spokesperson said that we need to set a target, and play our part in the global problem.  “The international community accept that urgent action on climate change is needed but New Zealand is failing to do its fair share. New Zealand cannot continue to freeload on the efforts of others.”

Watch presentations from the speakers here.

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This is the tenth year of recognition for boundary-pushing businesses with sustainability at their core.

Element Magazine sponsors is proud to be involved again with the awards and will sponsor the Sustainability Champion Award. Last year, Chris Morrison, director of All Good Organics, founder of Phoenix Organics, co-owner of Nice Blocks, Founding Chair of the SBN, director of Clean Planet Ltd and (phew) Kokako, took the prize.

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Garlic part 3
Plant your garlic 

Planting garlic is fun and fairly easy – especially if you have prepared your bed or container. It’s one of those jobs that can literally be over in a matter of minutes.

First, separate bulbs by prizing the cloves apart from their central base and anchoring the stem, then lay your cloves about a hand’s length apart on the soil if they are small, or a bit further if they are big. Do this in a line to make a row, then space your rows at least a hand’s length apart.

I like to place all my cloves on top of the bed just so that I can do a final check on spacing before I push them beneath the surface. Using a trowel, butter knife, piece of kindling or something else thin and handy make a small hole about twice the height of the clove itself and pop in your clove so that it sits comfortably – fat end down with pointy end up. Do the whole row before back-tracking and softly closing the soil over your treasure trove.

Check out this video on garlic planting from Pod.

Container planting
What is also fairly handy is that you can plant garlic in buckets or containers that are bucket-sized or bigger.

Make sure there are holes in the bottom for drainage and fill with a good quality potting mix and well-rotted compost (about 50% – 50%). Plant your garlic as directed above and be sure to monitor watering closely as soil in buckets and pots dries out much quicker than in beds.

For full-scale, seasonal edible gardening advice and inspiration see www.podgardening.co.nz or check out Pod Gardening on facebook.

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Serves 4 – 5 people

Ingredients:

1 x 250g can cooked pinto beans (or white beans)
1 x 250g can Puy lentils
2 x red capsicum (sliced)
80g diced organic onion
10g minced garlic
50g diced celery
50g diced organic carrot
50g diced leek
2g fennel seeds + 2g cumin seeds + 2g coriander seeds: all toasted and ground
5g smoked sweet paprika
10g thyme leaves
10g oregano leaves
2 bay leaves
1 x 400g tin crushed Italian tomatoes
50ml olive oil

Other items:

4 x poached eggs
120g blue cheese
Half cup of coriander leaves
4 slices organic sourdough toasted
1 x red chilli – sliced

Method:

Heat olive oil in a medium pot. Sweat off onion, garlic, celery, leek & carrot until soft.
Stir in all spices and cook for a further two minutes
Stir in crushed tomatoes and cook for 15 minutes
Drain beans and lentils and stir in. Cook for a further 15 minutes gently so not to break up the pulses
Season well and at the last moment stir through oregano and thyme.

To Serve:

Serve in a bowl with the poached egg placed on top of the stew.
Crumble over blue cheese, coriander leaves and a few slices of red chilli
Serve with toasted organic sourdough to the side.

Get more info on Kokako here, or drop by and visit their vegetarian cafe at 537 Great North Road, Grey Lynn.

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A 1.6 million litre crude oil spill from Ecuador’s main oil company, Petroecuador, in the country’s Amazonian region, has polluted water supplies and threatens to leak into Brazilian territory.

A landslide on June 1 destroyed a 100 metre section of the Trans-Ecuador pipeline which transports around 500,000 barrels of oil daily into refineries in the U.S. and China.

The spill initially travelled downstream from the Quijos River into the Coca, a tributary of the Napo River, which flows into the Amazon.

The spill has polluted the water supply of Coca, endangering an urban population of 800,000 people and has most recently spread into the Peruvian Amazon region of Loreto.  Environmental authorities in Brazil have been put on standby.

The Napo River area has a long history of resistance from indigenous groups to particularly heavy oil production.  In 2011, U.S. multinational energy company Chevron Corporation was ordered to pay $18 billion in damages, after locals argued that billions of gallons of oil had been improperly disposed of in the Napo River between 1964 and 1992.

Petroecuador is supplying water and food rations to the people of Coca and the 13 other Ecuadorean communities affected by the spill.

The company has placed oil containment barriers on a part of the river Coca to contain further spread in that area and has hired workers from communities along the Napo and Coca rivers to help with the cleanup.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa has formally apologised to Peru for the “problems we have caused.”

Petroecuador resumed pumping through the pipeline four days after the spill.

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By Sophie Barclay

As part of the Matariki Festival, the inaugural Grounded Festival (June 27 – 29) will showcase sustainability superstars including The Roots Creative Entrepreneurs, recycle artist Mesepa Edwards and offer workshops for kids and adults.

Grounded, a festival based around creative solutions to social and environmental issues, will take over Auckland’s Manukau Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of the Matariki festival.

The festival opens on Thursday, June 27 with a series of talks from landscape legends Xanthe White and Philip Smith, The Roots Creative Entrepreneurs and artists, including ‘recycle artist’ Mesepa Edwards.

Edwards turned to making art out of ‘waste’ when her financial circumstances forced her to re-examine a newspaper lying in her recycling bin. She weaved it into a bowl which was instantly scooped up by her best friend.

Recycled bowls by Edwards. 

The “recycle artist educator,” who turns waste materials into reusable functional pieces like zip earrings and envelopes made of old children’s story books, will also be running a workshop, demonstrating how to turn a plastic bottle into a windmill using the whole of a 1.25 litre bottle (including the cap). Edwards’ windmills may be familiar to Aucklanders who attended the Waitangi Day concert at Bastion Point (Takaparawhau), where she created huge 10 foot tall windmills out of recycled waste to mark the location of recycling bins.

One of Edwards’ bottle windmills. 

Since embarking on her recycled art career path, Edwards has researched sustainability solutions put in place around the world. She organised Earth Ship builder Mike Reynolds’ first trip to New Zealand in March and has been researching community-based recycling centres in Australia finding solutions to current waste issues.

Richard Orjis, festival coordinator, lecturer of art a design at MIT and presenting artist at Grounded, will be speaking about a proposed Hauora garden in Outhwaite Park in inner city Auckland. The garden will replace eight beds of annual planting with native and introduced medicinal herbs and provide information on how to use them.

He says that the festival is an exciting opportunity for Otara to host an event showcasing the local talent of the area. “It is really to celebrate and highlight all the local art and bring awareness to it. It’s an alll encompassing festival – including creative writing, performance and dance. Essentially it’s a platform to ask how artists might start thinking about implementing aspects of sustainability in their practice.”

Orjis encourages Aucklanders to take a look at what’s on offer in the festival, highlighting the opening on a sculpture trail along Otara Creek on the night of Friday the 30th and the Pacific Mamas workshop (elderly Pacific women, weaving artworks out of shower curtain off cuts) as not be missed.

Auckland Council’s Cate Jessep, who works in the Education for Sustainability team, is also adding to the flavour of the festival by organising a creative workshop for students. Students from the Make a Difference (MAD) programme, Waste Wise secondary schools and Sir Peter Blake Youth delegates are invited to attend the event on Saturday the 29th.

The workshop, run by members of Council’s Environmental Programmes, Waste Minimisation and Education for Sustainability teams, will see youth attending either an art or music workshop, working with locals from The Roots Creative Entrepreneurs (who will teach kids how to make a hanging herb wall out of recycled materials and beautiful plastic chandeliers) and the South Auckland Poet’s Collective and musicians Joe “Envioso” Tana and Geordie McCallum.

The Roots’ Waikare Komene (L) and Martin Leung-Wai (R) in front of a glasshouse made from repurposed plastic bottles. 

The workshops are limited to 30 each. Special consideration will be given to other interested school-aged children if there are spaces.

Check out the programme here.

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This July, Michael Reynolds, visionary sustainability architect and star of the documentary film “Garbage Warrior,” will visit our fair shores to share his groundbreaking sustainable building technology.

Imagine a home that heats and cools itself, provides its own food and water, generates its own power, handles its own sanitation, works in harmony with the intelligence of the earth and is made predominantly from tyres and other recycled materials. This home is called an Earthship, and its technology has been fine-tuned after 40 years’ hands-on experience worldwide.

Thanks to Waiata Artists Trust and Platform One Foundation, Mike Reynolds, creator of Earthships and founder of Earthship Biotecture, will share his groundbreaking sustainable building technology in two presentations at Massey University’s Albany campus.

Covering all aspects of Earthship history, design and building practices, the Friday evening seminar on July 5th will introduce the complete systemic approach to Earthships: year-round food production, water harvesting, solar and wind power generation, contained sewage treatment, thermal dynamics, and the use of tyres and other recycled materials for building.

The seminar will address how the Earthship concept, first developed in desert climates with blisteringly hot days and freezing nights, has been applied all over the world in a variety of climates. Reynolds will explain how Earthships perform in climates like Auckland’s with mild temperatures and high humidity and rainfall.

The presentation, on Saturday, July 6, will be an advanced class going deeper into the physical and living mechanics of Earthship design and utility systems.

This is the first time Mike Reynolds has visited Auckland.  The Auckland seminar follows a hugely successful visit to Christchurch in March 2013 where Reynolds presented seminars to offer innovative ideas for Christchurch’s rebuilding process and held a three day practical workshop to build a small Earthship – now open to the public to visit. (More information on that here.)

Reynolds’ original Earthships were inspired variations on traditional New Mexican adobe structures, and have been compared to the work of Antoni Gaudi.

Today, an Earthship can be made to fit almost any kind of building style — in Scotland, an Earthship looks like a stone castle; in Haiti, like a hut; in North America, like a conventional suburban home. The key is Earthship systems technology, which can be integrated into virtually any kind of structure.

Historically, eco and sustainable homes have been more expensive to build than conventional structures. The cost of building an Earthship is equal to or less than the cost of building a conventional home as much of the construction work involves pounding earth into tyres and is able to be undertaken by people who are not trained builders.  Furthermore, an Earthship has the advantage of zero utility bills – the building heats and cools itself, provides its own water and generates its own power.  Earthships claim to be the most versatile and economical building design in the world.

Reynolds’ choice to bring his cumulative knowledge to Auckland is timely and welcome, especially for those looking to maximize both sustainability and freedom in uncertain times.

“The time has come to embrace true sustainability, and walk our talk,” says Dana Darwin, Director of Platform One Foundation and co- host of the event. “We have a window of great opportunity. It is time to embrace the most integrated and sustainable technologies available, and to live harmoniously within our natural eco-systems and our planet.”

Reynolds will return to Auckland in February 2014 to deliver hands-on practical workshops in conjunction with the building of an Earthship on Waiheke Island.  Attendees at the Auckland seminars will have the opportunity to apply for limited places on the February training course.  Waiata Artists Trust and Platform One Foundation will be selecting 40 apprentices to work side by side with members of the Earthship Biotecture crew on a four-six week project of work on the Waiheke Earthship.  Selected apprentices will be sponsored to attend the US Earthship Academy in Taos New Mexico to undergo further training and obtain a qualification from Earthship Biotecture.

Through awareness raising and skill development, Platform One Foundation and Waiata Artists Trust vision is to support young Aucklander’s especially Maori and Pacific Island communities to build affordable, sustainable housing.

To learn more, and register for the Auckland seminars, visit www.earthship.co.nz/events.

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Auckland’s Jet Park Airport Hotel and Conference Centre, an independently owned and operated hotel, recently took out the Qualmark Environmental Initiative Award 2013. Announced at the beginning of June at the NZ Hotel Industry Conference in Auckland, the award recognised Jet Park’s commitment to sustainability.

Jet Park has comprehensively reviewed all aspects of its business to find gaps where improvements could be made. It has installed eco bulbs in 65% of the hotel, uses only recyclable ink cartridges, boasts a herb and vege garden on-site, uses sustainable coffee and local food providers, has changed the pool from a chlorine-based to a natural salt-water pool (reducing chemicals) and has set up a solar panel to heat half the water used in the hotel.

The hotel also supports Women’s refuge and the SPCA and provides employment opportunities to local communities by working with governmental agencies.

The hotel was awarded the Qualmark Enviro-Gold Rating in 2011, a rating which assesses energy efficiency, waste management, water conservation mechanisms, community activities and conservation initiatives.

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An Amazonian indigenous community says they will “go to war” with the Brazilian Government over plans to build a series of hydropower dams in the Amazon basin and see how hidden smartphones can stop illegal logging.

The Guardian reports that the indigenous Munduruku group from the Para state of Brazil have been betrayed and will “go to war” with the Brazilian government over “military incursions” into their land to plan for a dam.

The Munduruku São Luiz do Tapajós dam is one of three planned dams on the Tapajós river in the Amazon Basin. The Government are planning four larger dams on a tributary of the river, the Jamanxim over the next 10 years.

Critics say the dam is being pushed ahead by the Government without consultation or the permission of the Munduruku.

According to Brazilian law, large infrastructural projects must consult with indigenous peoples. In order to conduct an environmental impact assessment, helicopters, soldiers and armed police have visited the area, but communities have yet to be contacted about the development.

Federal prosecutors have said that the Munduruku community do not support any further studies without prior consultation, but a court ruling deemed said the project could go ahead, as long nobody enters indigenous villages.

The President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has allowed military personnel to be used for dam survey operations – for the safety of scientists and the local population. Amongst the visitors to the area will be some 80 researchers who will undertake a comprehensive cataloguing of flora and fauna.

Local missionaries, on the other hand, say that armed troops near the village of Sawré Maybu in Itaituba have behaved in a manner that is threatening and disrespectful. A spokesperson from the International Rivers group also states that the Government should not be making decisions about the dam before an impact assessment, and that their military tactics are unhelpful. “The recent military operations illustrate that the federal government is willing to disregard existing legal instruments intended to foster dialogue between government and civil society.”

Concerns are that the dam will impact on the biodiversity-rich waterways which boast more than 300 fish species and the several tribes living in voluntary isolation live along the basin. The construction of the dam will result in flooding of some 198,400 hectares, 33,000 of which includes national parks and forests.

The dam will provide over 6,100 MW of power – enough to power just under three million New Zealand homes a year.

Dams and forests
A recent study, released by the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences journal (PNAS) shows that deforestation will reduce rainfall, making dams less effective.

Regions with large areas of rainforest, have “hydropower generation potential that figures prominently in many nations’ energy growth strategies,” states the study. The study also shows that “feasibility studies of hydropower plants typically ignore the effect of future deforestation” or incorrectly assume that deforestation will increase river discharge and therefore energy generation.

It shows that by cutting down huge tracts of forest, local rainfall drops. This has implications for the effectiveness of hydro-power station reservoirs situated in the Amazon.

The study examined the potential local direct effects (changes in water loss that occurs in leaves and trees) and regional indirect effects (changes in rainfall) of deforestation on the output of energy in Belo Monte energy station, currently being built on the Xingu River in the Amazon.

It illustrates that deforestation would majorly impact on power generation, reducing it to 25% of maximum output.

The study stated that the reliability of hydropower plants as energy sources “must take into account their dependence on forests”

Cellphone spies save rainforests
Meanwhile, the San Francisco-based ‘Rainforest connection’ hopes to end illegal logging by using smartphone surveillance to enable real-time action against deforestation.

The not-for-profit is using cellphone ‘spies’ installed in trees in threatened tropical rainforests. The phones continuously record the ambient environment and noises that match the whine of a chainsaw will trigger an alert, providing information to local rangers enabling them to intervene immediately.

Each of the solar-powered phones will cover over 860,000 square metres and will be simple enough for locals to install themselves.  A test is currently underway in western Sumatra’s Air Tarusan reserve.

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