Fresh green links

I haven’t done this in a while! Things have been very busy. But I had to share these with you…

Coal Seam Gas : By the numbers – the ABC is gathering data on where coal seam gas companies have wells and leases. See if there are any near you, or let them know about any they’ve missed.

Stuffed to the gills – how crap took over one guy’s life, and how he intends to get it back.

A review of Prosperity Without Growth, which is going on my reading list. I heard about it while reading about the OWS protests. Has anyone else read it? Let me know how you liked it.

Capitalism vs the Climate – I skimmed the stuff about the deniers, since it’s pretty much the same as always, but really liked the sections where the writer lists some steps for moving forward on climate change.

The Great Kilowatt Challenge – if you haven’t joined in Gavin’s energy-saving challenge yet, it’s not too late.

A new friend in our garden: rainbow lorikeet

I have a post half-written about how the Occupy Wall Street movement relates to environmentalism, but I’m on holidays right now and I wanted to show you something more fun.

This little fella decided he liked the look of our garden recently. He’s a rainbow lorikeet, which means he’s not native to WA. The population here came from aviary releases, according to Birds in Backyards. The other birds here don’t seem to mind – maybe because lorikeets eat nectar and the other native and introduced birds near us are all about the insects.

He’s got a cheerful little chirp and loves our bottlebrushes and grevilleas. I think he must have been tame, if not an actual pet, because he landed on my father-in-law’s head and was happy to run up and down his arm. He didn’t mind the noise of the guys loading up a trailer full of building rubble either, while the other birds kept their distance.

The funniest part was when I brought out a bread bag with a couple of crusts in it to see if he’d eat them (we didn’t know then they prefer nectar) – he perked up and ran right towards the bag making lots of chirping noises! I guess he knows that bread bags mean it’s lunchtime

We’ve given him some fruit now – apple and strawberries. Not that he needs it, with our driveway-length of bottlebrushes and 3 grevilleas, and some unknown orange-flowered thing that he seems to like too. It’s just that Dave can’t bear to have an animal so close and not provide it with food, water and pats on the head!

Update!

It turns out that lorikeets are considered a pest in WA. We only found this out after a bit of an adventure though.

About 5 minutes after I finished posting what’s above, we could hear our little guy squawking madly in our neighbour’s yard. Dave looked over the fence and her dog was having a go at the lorikeet. Dave jumped the fence and rescued him, but he seemed to be a bit injured in the foot. We rang the Wildcare line, which is run by the state government to put people who find injured wildlife in touch with vets or rehab places that can help them.

We ended up at Kanyana Wildlife centre, where a lovely volunteer took our feathered friend and told us what happens next. Because lorikeets are a pest here, they can’t be released back into the wild. However, there’s a lady who takes them in, and keeps an eye on the newspaper ads to see if anyone’s lost one so she can return them. We’re going to call back in a day or two to find out how the little fella is doing.

Guess what this is…

My in-laws brought this little fruit with them when they came to visit us this weekend. It came from their vegie patch. Some of you might have seen one before, but none of us had. Can you guess what it is?

It’s the fruit from a potato plant, after it flowered. Frank went to look at it and it just came off in his hand. It’s very much like a cherry tomato, except that it feels tougher and the skin is more like a capsicum.

Apparently if you chop it finely and put it in water, up to 300 seeds will be released and sink. Once you’ve salvaged the seeds, you can plant them and get what I can only imagine would be a lot of potatoes! I’m used to growing potatos from tubers or seed potatoes, not from actual seeds. Have any of you used one of these fruits before?

Fresh green links

Girl Scouts debuts new Locavore badge – what a great idea for helping kids understand how our food system works.

How farmer’s markets help me to eat well – a great guest post over at Limes and Lycopenes, which is a really interesting food blog with a focus on making sensible health choices.

The case for unsustainability – a thought-provoking idea from Paul Hawken: why is it that we must prove the benefits of a sustainable lifestyle? We should be asking the business-as-usual supporters why they think all this pollution and waste is such a great idea.

Remember CCS? – an update on the latest numbers. Turns out it’s extremely expensive and although the ‘Carbon Capture’ part works ok, the ‘Storage’ part is proving to be very difficult. I’m sure you’re all very suprised by this shocking news

How climate change denial works – in a flowchart, via Treehugger. Anyone want to make an Aussie version?

How the Dutch got their cycle lanes

By now everyone knows that the Netherlands has really great bike facilities because it’s such a common form of transport there. And obviously it’s a chicken-eggy situation, because the more people ride bikes, the more resources are allocated to them, which encourages more people to ride, and so on.

But how did the current bike culture start? This 6 minute video tells the story of how it happened. (Subtitles in English and other languages are available).

As the narrator points out, the situation wasn’t unique. A combination of economic circumstances, rising petrol prices and the public loudly asking for cycle paths isn’t impossible to achieve today. There are more and more cycling groups around the country, and we’ve all noticed rising prices already… the squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?