Best of our wild blogs: 29 Jun 09

Black-tipped Reef Shark @ Pulau Hantu
from Colourful Clouds and Giant Reef Cuttlefish from Pulau Hantu and blind shrimp and shrimp goby and yellow-lipped sea krait.

Lazarus Island - Old and new
from Singapore Nature and Life on Seringat-Kias from wild shores of singapore with Lazarus quickly

The Lost Islands of Singapore
from wonderful creation

Adventures on Sentosa Island
from Nature's Wonders

Beting Bronok
from Urban Forest

"Clean up Lim Chu Kang beach before it turns into marine graveyard"
from The Lazy Lizard's Tales

Pasir Ris Beach is a medley of colours
about fiddler crabs from The Lazy Lizard's Tales

Red-bearded Bee-eater taking a beetle
from Bird Ecology Study Group

Hummingbirds harvesting nectar
from Bird Ecology Study Group

Meet the carnivorous pitcher plant
from The Lazy Lizard's Tales

Draco
from Biodiversity Singapore

Will Earth Become a Planet Without Ice Caps?
Leading Expert Says "Yes" from The Daily Galaxy: News from Planet Earth & Beyond

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All for the love of Durian

They camp, they park, they climb
Zaihan Mohamed Yusof, The New Paper 29 Jun 09;

DURIANS have been available for as little as 10 cents in Jurong West, but for these lovers of the fruit, the thrill is in the hunt, it seems.

They trek far and wide. Some set up tents. Others create smoke with fallen branches to drive off mosquitoes. And yet others, who looked like foreign workers, climb perilously up trees in the jungle.

All to get hold of durians growing in the wild.

Going in search of them was no easy task, with the season close to its end. But we found them in these spots:

Bukit Panjang Forest

At 8am, there was only one motorcycle parked near the entrance of the durian trail, close to the Bukit Timah Expressway flyover.

After a short walk on meandering footpaths, we were deep in durian country, with empty durian shells littering the forest floor. About 30 minutes into the search, we were suddenly greeted by a 'whoosh' somewhere to ourright.

But before we could react, four men in their 60s had rushed to the fallen fruit.

We were wrong to think we were alone.

Twice, these wily pickers beat us to the durians.

Retreating 50m, we found a cluster of eight durian trees near a disused well.

And then, we heard what seemed like music to our ears - the familiar 'thud' of a durian hitting the ground.

In under two hours, we found eight fruits - ranging in size from a grapefruit to a football.

One 'durian uncle' we met gave some advice: 'Guard your durians closely.'

He explained that there had been fights among durian pickers, some of whom switched their fruits for better ones when nobody was watching.

The man, who did not give his name, said: 'Competition is stiff. You can argue all you want out here, but if you don't carry a parang or a big stick, you're asking for trouble.'

We ate three fruits on the spot - one of them had been eaten away by worms, while the others tasted slightly bitter, yet creamy.

Bukit Batok Forest

From Bukit Batok Road parallel to the forest, we could see big durian fruits on trees.

We had intended to walk into the forest, but a red sign warned us that we were on military land.

Still, that did not stop some from trespassing.

Just five steps from a lalang clearing we saw a woman who had pitched a tent, while eight others sat on plastic chairs and newspapers.

A man leaving the forest showed us his fragrant prize: two watermelon-sized durians.

Kranji

We had been here recently on a separate assignment.

A week ago, we ended up licking the fleshy remnants of six durians off our fingers, while scouting for hideouts believed to be used by illegal immigrants.

Today, we weren't so lucky because there were factory workers and senior citizens to contend with.

We finally 'took cover' near three durian trees 100m away, where we found a small durian.

We waited patiently, yet the trees seemed unwilling to reward us.

Just as I was opening the one durian we had, another fruit fell beside us.

A small portion had been gnawed away by a squirrel, but the rest was all right.

With our heads intact, we left an hour later after eating four durians, which had smaller seeds, but were sweeter than those we ate at Bukit Panjang.

Punggol Forest (see map)

Cars, lorries and even bicycles were parked along Punggol Road at noon, as we looked for a parking spot at a nearby estate.

Jogger Matt Lee, 39, said the parked vehicles have always been a nuisance during the durian season.

Added Mr Lee, a resident of Ponggol Seventeenth Avenue: 'I can't jog on the road shoulder with the parked cars around. When I jog on the road, I'm afraid passing cars may not see me in time.'

We were full from eating seven durians but we wanted to see what the forest in Punggol had to offer. Judging by those waiting with half-filled gunny sacks, Punggol was a prime spot.

There were senior citizens and young men around, some of them father-and-son teams.

One man, Mr John Ng, 76, from Hougang had started his watch at 7am.

For the last 20 years, the part-time gardener has regularly gone to the forest with his wife and children.

Said Mr Ng, who was armed with a hard hat, rubber boots and stick: 'Being close to nature and getting some exercise is good for us, especially for my wife, who is suffering from rheumatism.'

Unlike, the pickers at Bukit Panjang, those in Punggol were friendly and quick to share their durian over a conversation.

Some, like Mr Tay Joo Mong, 60, cleared the area of rubbish and leaves while waiting for durians to drop.

In the end, it was a quite a triumph for us - bagging 13 durians in four hours.

They may not taste like your D24 XO durians in Geylang or the ones served buffet-style on Malaysian plantation tours.

But the satisfaction of hunting for our food was rewarding enough. Burp.

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Will historic icon end up in a scrapyard?

Calls to find signal mast a new home as it lays in Sentosa's Tanjong Beach
Ng Tze Siong, The New Paper 29 Jun 09;

IT used to stand tall and proud at the entrance to the Singapore harbour, guiding ships safely into what would become the world's busiest port.

But today this historic signal mast looks more like scrap metal.

Dismantled, broken into three rusty pieces, it lies on Sentosa's Tanjong Beach, in a deserted corner overgrown with weeds.

Recently, an urgent e-mail appeal was sent out to various Government bodies and heritage lovers hoping for a new home for the mast, following word that it may be headed for the scrapyard soon.

But so far, no solution has been found.

One reason could be the cost: The restoration and reinstallation of the mast is estimated at $500,000.

The mast, while acknowledged as historically significant, has been passed from party to party over the years.

No one seems to know what to do with it.

Should we care?

It may help, for a moment, to think of the signal mast as the maritime equivalent of the Changi Airport control tower.

In the days before electronic communication, signal masts like this were used to guide ships safely into port.

Colourful flags, each representing a letter in the alphabet, hung from them, relaying messages between land and sea.

That was the role this mast once performed at Albert Dock, at the heart of the Singapore port.

But in 1972, the area around Albert Dock was developed into a container terminal.

That was what cemented Singapore's position as a major trading port.

Main attraction

But it also meant that the signal mast became obsolete. It was moved to the Singapore Maritime Museum, which opened in Sentosa in 1975.

There it stood for the next 26 years, as one of the museum's main attractions.

It was a picture of this signal mast which the museum used on the cover of its brochure to tell the story of the world's busiest port.

But the museum didn't do well.

Of all the attractions on Sentosa, which at the time included Volcano Land and Asian Village, the Maritime Museum was the poorest performer.

It attracted only 21,000 visitors a year, or an average of 57 a day - even with free admission.

The museum finally closed in 2001. Since then, the mast has been out of the public eye - until now.

Comments from the relevant organisations were hard to come by.

The mast used to be owned by the Port of Singapore Authority (PSA). It was then passed on to real estate company Mapletree Investments.

But next month, ownership will pass - yet again - to the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA).

All three organisations declined comment when contacted.

On its side, Sentosa Development Corporation can do only so much. It never owned the mast, which was on loan to the Maritime Museum.

And because the museum was run by Sentosa, and not by the National Heritage Board, the latter's hands are tied too.

Some are hoping that Resorts World, the integrated resort coming up on Sentosa, can provide a home when it opens next March.

After all, it is building a maritime museum of its own, and some hope it can find a spot for the mast, which lies nearby.

But when contacted, Resorts World said it is still premature to reveal plans for its maritime museum.

'It's a case of everyone denying responsibility,' said Dr Kevin Tan, president of the Singapore Heritage Society. 'If the property keeps changing hands, from one developer to the next, then there is no proper accountability.'

So far, the best hope rests with Raffles Marina.

Its president, Mr Francis Lee, has offered space - for free - for the mast to be re-erected at the marina in Tuas, next to the Second Link.

Obstacle

'We'll be happy to provide a home for it,' he said.

But first, the funds for its restoration have to be found. That, said Mr Lee, 'would be the main obstacle'.

'Alternatively, you can erect it somewhere more central, perhaps near the statue of Sir Stamford Raffles, at the Padang or near the Merlion,' he said.

'You can bring school children up into the crow's nest, which looks like it can fit 20 people quite easily, and teach them about how to signal using maritime flags.'

But then again, just how important - really - is this mast to Singapore if it has been allowed to descend into its present state?

Mr Chung Chee Kit, a director in a major shipping firm who helped organise the Admiral Cheng Ho exhibition in Singapore in 2005, said that from a historical perspective, the significance of an object is judged from the story it tells.

'In some old port cities, signal masts are actually masts removed from old ships and re-erected on land, so they tell a larger story about maritime history,' he said.

'The mast in Sentosa is made of steel, so it looks like it was constructed specifically to be a signal mast on land.

'So while it is still important, its significance lies more in its utility rather than in the story it tells.'

Nonetheless, he feels that the impasse is a sign of how Singapore has been neglecting its maritime heritage.

For a while, the old Maritime Museum at Sentosa tried to remember this heritage and pass it on.

'But it was not a very good museum,' said Dr Tan.

'I don't think a lot of thought was put into it... There was not enough research done. They put a few boats here and there, and they called it a museum.'

Mr Chung hopes the new maritime museum at Resorts World will be better.

'I hope it is designed by people who are serious about maritime heritage, and not just building a place where you have some lights, some sounds, and where you go ho ho ho and a bottle of rum - and that's it.'

Another big question that puzzles many in the maritime and heritage fraternity is this: Why were relics from the old Maritime Museum, such as its old boats and maritime maps, transferred to Mapletree Investments?

A handful is still on display, scattered around the HarbourFront Centre area. But where are the rest?

'Should relics like these be transferred from the public to the private domain?' asked Mr Chung.

For him, the obvious question to ask is: If there is this mast, rusting away at a corner of a tourist island, what else is out there?

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Time to think of value of water instead of cost

Lee U-Wen, Business Times 29 Jun 09;

LOOKING at our monthly utilities bill, we all know how much a unit of water costs.

But what about the actual value of that precious resource?

That is a question Len Rodman, a 40-year veteran of the global water industry, wants more people to start thinking about as the demand for clean drinking water continues to rise sharply with the world's population.

Speaking to BT in a recent interview during Singapore International Water Week (SIWW), the president, chairman and chief executive of global engineering and construction company Black & Veatch said the cost and value of water are 'fundamentally different' things.

'Due to growth, urbanisation and more knowledge, the water in our streams is not as pure as it was many years ago. Treating water has become more important. We need to build plants to do that. It uses resources,' he said.

'There are very few pure water sources left in our environment. It's scarce; there's just not enough water to meet demand. We must start thinking about the value of water to us, rather than taking it for granted that it is always there.'

This point was echoed by Dan McCarthy, president and CEO of the company's global water business: 'The waste water industry has done itself a disservice by pricing water at its cost, rather than the value. We have to ask ourselves: Where do we get the water from? How good is the quality? How far do we have to transport it to the consumer?'

Mr Rodman, incidentally, was the most senior of the plenary speakers at this year's SIWW, which ended last Thursday.

Black & Veatch has links with Singapore's water authority dating all the way back to 1922, and he described the current relationship with water agency Public Utilities Board (PUB) as 'strong and dynamic'.

The company has been involved in a number of high-profile projects in Singapore of late - most notably the Sembcorp Changi NEWater Plant, the Marina Barrage and the SingSpring Desalination Plant.

And while Black & Veatch too has not been spared by the global economic downturn, Mr Rodman said there were still some positives.

'One good thing about the recession is that it reduced demand for water and energy,' he said. 'Many areas have received more capacity for their systems due to lower demand.'

The downside, of course, is lower revenue, he added, but the extra capacity did give utility bodies the 'perfect opportunity' to go back and think about their long-term issues and challenges.

'If the economy were going up, they'd just be so busy trying to keep up with demand. Now, in a recession, there are some terribly good buys out there. Projects are less expensive, more labour is available, and commodity prices are down,' he said.

'If you've got a sound plan or current need, now is a good time to get those projects and put them in place.'

Extra networking opportunities the hallmark of Water Week

Tangible results of these activities will be announced today
Teh Shi Ning, Business Times 29 Jun 09;

IT was fitting that the second Singapore International Water Week (SIWW) closed on Thursday night with a dinner party beside Singapore's first city reservoir, the Marina Barrage.

Michael Toh, managing director of SIWW, said it is his hope that the annual conference may one day be seen as 'the Davos of Water'.

Which is why, apart from hosting formal, high-level discussions between water industry big-wigs and ministerial officials, policymakers and academics, this year's SIWW was intentionally planned to 'create even more networking opportunities', Mr Toh said.

Even before the key Water Leaders Summit, Water Convention and Water Expo began, conference delegates got the opportunity to mingle on Sentosa Golf Club's Tanjong Course, at SIWW's Golf Classic 2009 on Monday morning.

Then there were nightly networking events, including a banquet at the Istana and the closing night's Dinner by the Bay.

'Our intention was really for Water Week to be this huge platform where buyers meet sellers, private sector meets the public sector, and officials, academics, businessmen can all meet to speak about issues and challenges facing the water industry,' Mr Toh said.

But big names alone do not make the event, and the organisers decided to tap into programming details to enhance networking opportunities.

Tea and lunch breaks were synchronised - allowing for at least eight tea networking sessions to be hosted by industry associations on the sidelines.

Each day's schedule of forums and meetings also ended earlier this year, to allow delegates to host private meetings or entertain clients and partners in the evenings.

'With corporations hosting other functions for clients at hotels, it's not just the water industry that benefits,' Mr Toh said. 'SIWW brings much value to Singapore's MICE and tourism industry too.'

SIWW was timed to coincide with the ongoing Singapore River Festival, which included a Mojito Fiesta and Cuban jazz and salsa performances, among other events.

At the Water Expo, exhibitors were encouraged to provide reception areas in their booths - many had sofas and coffee tables around which to sell their technologies to trade visitors.

Tangible results from such networking - the dollar value of deals signed - will be announced today, the organisers said. They expect to match or even exceed SIWW 2008's $367 million of water business deals.

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Plug the green leak - charge more for plastic bags

Straits Times Forum 29 Jun 09;

I WOULD like to address the lack of basic environmental awareness among Singaporeans. There are two areas: plastic shopping bags and disposable plastic or styrofoam food boxes.

It disheartens me to note that nothing much has been done by retail stores or supermarkets to curb use of plastic bags. Granted, there have been meagre efforts such as certain stores charging an additional 10 to 20 cents for their issue on certain days. Others sell colourful recycle bags at cashier counters for more than $1. Most customers would probably pay a few cents for a plastic bag rather than bring their own cloth bag. Such measures are self-defeating if the goal is to reduce the use of plastic bags.

I am sure everyone is aware of the damaging effects plastic and styrofoam have on the environment. However, while individual responsibility like bringing your own reusable bag will help, what we need is a bold government initiative to clamp down on the use of plastics.

From June 1, China effectively banned the use and manufacture of thin plastic bags nationwide. The underlying reason was to lower environmental pollution and save on the large amounts of oil used to produce plastic. On June 8, the United Nations environment chief said there was zero justification for the use of plastics any more.

While an outright ban will be unreasonable and difficult to implement, a more substantial effort such as charging an additional 40 to 50 cents per plastic bag will be beneficial in the short term. This would transfer the environmental cost - one cannot put a price but there needs to be a reasonable disincentive - to the consumer. In addition, retailers will buy less plastic from their suppliers when demand falls.

We will also need alternative materials to replace plastic and styrofoam food boxes. Food boxes made of recycled paper and other materials could be a start.

Singapore has been exemplary in many aspects when it comes to going 'green'. This is a longstanding leak that needs to be plugged now. If we are to be at the forefront of the 'green' revolution that is to come, this is a blemish we need to get rid of.

Darren Yong

Let's not go back to the 50s to save the earth
Straits Times Forum 29 Jun 09;

I REFER to the Forum Online letter by Madam Seah Nida, 'Take drastic steps to curb use of plastic and styrofoam' (June 17), and disagree with her unrealistic condemnation of anything plastic.

I would like to pose a question to environmentalists: What would happen if the world suddenly eschewed all plastic packaging and switched to leaf wrappers?

Banana, lotus, bamboo and coconut leaves make the best food wrappers. We used them before the leap to the modernity of plastic bags and containers, and styrofoam for hygiene, light weight, mouldability, automatic packaging and convenience.

Leaves are practical, multi-purpose and environment-friendly. Could we use them to wrap McDonald's breakfasts, takeaways at foodcourts and hawker centres? Is it cost-effective and hygienic to auto-pack individual items like sushi, sashimi, nonya kueh, sweet rolls and cakes in bamboo leaf wraps in food factories? Can the food industry use banana leaves to pack tofu, fishcake and ice cream?

Using leaves may cost us dearly because of the sheer quantity needed to meet modern-day packaging requirements. Imagine the amount of leaves to be harvested and the loss of carbon dioxide converters. The key is progress and choosing the lesser of two evils.

Let us find sustainable and practical substitutes for food wrapping materials and plastic bags before eschewing plastics.

It is not helpful to echo the calls of environmentalists to ban plastic bags and use paper or biodegradable materials. In fact, plastic and biodegradables virtually do not decompose in landfill where garbage is kept from air and water to prevent bad materials from leaching into ground water. Nor can incinerators help reduce global warming. We can only mitigate by cutting use of fossil fuels to balance plastic consumption.

To save the earth, I do not want to go back to the 1950s and use plant leaves to wrap food. However, I am prepared to compromise and take my own reusable canvas bag shopping.

Paul Chan

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MediaCorp's Gaia Life Challenge has two new green ambassadors

Hasnita A Majid, Channel NewsAsia 28 Jun 09;

SINGAPORE: A passionate environmentalist and a defence contractor have won this year's MediaCorp's Gaia Life Challenge.

The duo beat two other pairs of contestants to win the top prize which includes S$3,000 cash.

Spending time in their "temporary homes" under the full glare of the public has not been easy for the contestants, especially when it is warm in the cubicles even with the fans switched on.

But the contestants gamely endured the inconvenience to help raise environmental awareness.

They spent 24 hours in the transparent acrylic cubicles, coming out occasionally to face challenges that require them to answer questions and carry out activities on saving the environment.

They also went online to blog about their experiences.

For Jaclyn Ng and Jasbindeerjeet Singh, the experience has been worth it. They emerged winners after completing various challenges and collecting the most points.

Ng said: "The message is: no action is too small and no action is of course too large for everyone to do their part to save Gaia and try to think about your carbon footprint and tell yourself that if you can save here, it basically means that you can save Gaia."

The pair won electrical goods such as an air-conditioner, an LCD TV, a fridge and a standing fan on top of the cash prize, which they will use to fund an initiative to promote projects on the use of renewable energy among schools.

This is MediaCorp's second year at promoting the green message through such activity.

Shaun Seow, MediaCorp's Deputy CEO (News, Radio, Print), said: "I think the interesting point about this year's challenge is that there are a lot of games and through the games, the contestants have come to realise, for example, that turning on the aircon uses 100 watts (of electricity) compared to 30 watts in the case of a fan.

"This was apparent in the kinds of blogs that they were putting out, and through the online presence they are actually spreading the message to their friends and family."

He added: "The response (to MediaCorp's Gaia Life Challenge) was good, in the sense that many contestants (had) wanted to take part but we had to turn them away...

"Obviously, in this climate (amidst the H1N1 scare, all sorts of economic decline) it is quite difficult to make people understand the green message and we are glad that we are still trying to reinforce that we've got to save Gaia, Mother Earth."

The winners will become the MediaCorp-Gaia Ambassadors for a year to help spread the message of going green.

- CNA/ir

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Sarawak closer to producing anti-HIV, cancer drugs

The Star 27 Jun 09;

MIRI: Two researches carried out by the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre (SBC) on drugs obtained from local plant species to fight Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and cancer were now in their final stages, said Deputy Chief Minister Tan Sri Dr George Chan.

He said the anti-HIV drug, obtained from Calanolide which is contained in the latex of Bintangor or Calophyllum tree, was now in the clinical trial stage that, among others, would test its side-effects before the drug could be available commercially.

"The tests would still take sometime to be completed and would be carried out in collaboration with foreign researchers," he told reporters after launching the official website and publicity campaign of the Borneo Research Council (BRC) Conference 2010 here Saturday.

Curtin University of Technology Sarawak and BRC, an international organisation of eminent scholars engaged in Borneo-related research, would jointly organise the biennial international conference.

On the anti-cancer drug, Silvestrol, Dr Chan said two local scientists from SBC were sent to the United States to collaborate with several other foreign experts at the National Cancer Institute there to carry out intensive studies.

Speaking at the launching ceremony earlier, Dr Chan said the success of developing the two drugs reflected the huge biodiversity potentials of the plants available in Sarawak.

He hoped Curtin University Sarawak could use the conference to showcase its role as a leading centre for scholarly research on Borneo, in line with its plan to start Borneo Studies as one of its study programmes next year. - Bernama

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WWF-Malaysia's Help save the turtles!

Suzanna Pillay, The New Straits Times 29 Jun 09;

IF you’ve always wanted to do your bit for conservation, here’s your chance to step up to bat. Malaysia’s turtles need your help. All you need to do are two simple things: support WWF-Malaysia’s “Egg > Life” campaign and stop using plastic bags for your shopping.

Poorly-planned coastal development, marine and nesting beach pollution are taking its toll on dwindling turtle populations here. Even the deep blue seas which were formerly a refuge for these gentle giants are becoming increasingly hazardous. Thousands perish from accidental ingestion of plastic bags which they mistake for jellyfish, while fishing gear used by fishermen to catch fish, ensnare turtles and cause mortalities.

Compounding the problem are illegal activities like poaching and smuggling which flourish because of inadequate turtle protection laws. Comprehensive federal laws, additional resources and heightened enforcement are needed to effectively protect our turtles. Current federal laws on turtles are limited. Moreover, under the Constitution, states have the authority to make laws on turtles, meaning that these laws vary from state to state and have loopholes.

Need a better picture of how badly the turtle population is declining? Perhaps this will put some perspective on things: the leatherback turtle has already been declared functionally extinct in Malaysia.

In the 1950s, there were 10,000 leatherback nests in Rantau Abang each year; now there are fewer than 10.
Some students and corporations here have already done their bit to support the “Egg>Life” campaign by collecting 1,000 or more signatures. These include Taylor’s University College Environmental Club (Subang Jaya campus), Multimedia University (Malacca campus) and Taylor’s College (Sri Hartamas campus).

Meanwhile, Intel Malaysia Berhad has pledged to collect 5,000 signatures and have already obtained 1,500.

Here’s how you can help save the turtles:

Support “Egg>Life” campaign



1. Sign up to support WWF-Malaysia’s “Egg > Life” campaign and pledge to support laws that will ban the sale and consumption of all turtle eggs throughout Malaysia and the call for comprehensive and holistic federal legislation to conserve marine turtles.

Each signature will lend weight to efforts aimed at improving turtle protection legislation in Malaysia.

Readers can sign up using the pledge form inserted in today’s issue of the New Straits Times.

Just send it back to the WWF (postage is paid.). Alternatively, readers can also sign up at www.wwf.org.my.

Students and business leaders who would like to emulate these socially responsible individuals and organisations mentioned above can email contactus@wwf.org.my for details. Students and corporations that collect 1,000 or more signatures in support of the “Egg>Life” campaign will be recognised as a supporter on WWF-Malaysia’s campaign website.

2. Use shopping bags instead of plastic bags

You won’t only be helping to protect turtles by using shopping bags instead of plastic bags; you would also be helping thousands of other marine life such as whales and seals, that die from accidentally eating plastic bags which they mistake for food. An added incentive — you’d also be helping to mitigate climate change. Plastic is a petroleum product. Using fewer plastic bags will reduce our use of fossil fuels and help reduce global warming!

If you send a contribution of RM100 or more to WWF-Malaysia by Sept 29, you will receive two FREE WWF Shopping Bags as your special gift. To find out more about donating to WWF-Malaysia, email contactus@wwf.org.my or call 03-7803-3772.

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Forgotten evolutionist lives in Darwin's shadow

Michael Casey, Associated Press Yahoo News 28 Jun 09;

SANTUBONG, Malaysia – As he trudges past chest-high ferns and butterflies the size of saucers, George Beccaloni scours a jungle hilltop overlooking the South China Sea for signs of a long-forgotten Victorian-era scientist.

He finds what he's looking for: an abandoned, two-story guest house, its doors missing and ceiling caved in.

"Excellent. This is the actual spot," he yells.

It is on this site, in a long-gone thatched hut, that Alfred Russel Wallace is believed to have spent weeks in 1855 writing a seminal paper on the theory of evolution. Yet he is largely unknown outside scientific circles today, overshadowed by Charles Darwin, whom most people credit as the father of a theory that explains the origins of life through how plants and animals evolve.

Now, in the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, a growing number of academics and amateur historians are rediscovering Wallace. Their efforts are raising debate over exactly what Wallace contributed to the theory of evolution, and what role, if any, the spiritual world plays in certain aspects of natural selection.

Beccaloni, a 41-year-old British evolutionary biologist with London's Natural History Museum, is on a quest to return Wallace to what he sees as his rightful place in history. He and Fred Langford Edwards, a British artist making an audiovisual project about Wallace, are retracing the scientist's eight-year trip around Southeast Asia.

Unlike Wallace, Darwin spent two decades developing his theory of natural selection and had far more evidence to back it up, as presented in his defining work, "The Origin of Species," published 150 years ago. But Wallace reached the same conclusion before Darwin published his findings, and Beccaloni contends that Wallace deserves equal billing.

"The Darwin industry is what has distorted the whole of history," Beccaloni said. "People have just concentrated on Darwin and his life and work but they fail to see Darwin wasn't alone and he fits into a wider picture."

Wallace, a British beetle and bird collector, set off for Singapore in 1854. Eight years and 14,000 miles (23,000 kilometers) later, he returned to England as one of the most celebrated biologists after Darwin.

Often traveling with a lone assistant and enduring monsoons and malaria, Wallace collected more than 125,000 birds, beetles and other animals. Thousands were new to the West, including one he named Wallace's golden bird wing butterfly. He shot 17 orangutans and shipped their skins back to Britain, became a fan of the durian — a fruit known for its thorns and powerful odor — and admired the moral character and mental capacity of the Dyak people of Borneo.

But his biggest contribution to science was his writings in the Malay archipelago on evolution and natural selection, building on an earlier four-year trek to the Amazon.

In 1855, he laid out the Sarawak law — named after the place he wrote the paper, now a state in modern-day Malaysia — in which he described evolution as a branching tree. His forceful argument in support of evolution came at a time when creationism, or the idea that God created man, was the popular school of thought.

A year later, he proposed what became known as the Wallace Line after traveling to the islands of Bali and Lombok, in what is now Indonesia. He noticed that bird species were different on each island and concluded that a deep water trench created a boundary that separated the animal species of Southeast Asia and Australasia.

Two years after that, Wallace came up with the theory of natural selection — or survival of the fittest — while bedridden with malaria on another nearby island.

His theory was presented together with Darwin's by the Linnean Society of London on July 1, 1858. Upon his return to England in 1862, Wallace found himself welcomed into a select club of scientists that included Darwin, Sir Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker and Thomas Henry Huxley.

Wallace became one of the most prominent scientists of his day, publishing more than 800 articles and 22 books over the next 50 years. He was a leading voice in an anti-vaccination movement, a proponent of land reform and the father of biogeography, or the study of the geographic distribution of plants and animals.

"He was a person with a remarkable open mind," said Charles H. Smith, a professor and Western Kentucky University librarian who runs a Web site on Wallace. "He had more concern with science as it related to humankind than practically anyone in his time. That is why he was so interested in social issues."

Wallace died in 1913 at the age of 90. Over the years, he slipped into obscurity, joining a long list — British scientist Patrick Matthews and French scientist Jean Baptist LeMarc among them — whose contributions to evolution theory have largely become footnotes.

The soft-spoken, baby-faced Beccaloni became enamored of Wallace as a graduate student studying the evolution of mimicry in butterflies. He took up Wallace's cause in 1999 after stumbling upon his poorly maintained gravestone in Dorset, England.

Calling himself Wallace's Rottweiler, Beccaloni has barnstormed across England to preserve Wallace homes and other sites. He convinced the Natural History Museum in London to buy the scientist's insect collection, correspondence and books from Wallace's two grandsons.

He also runs a Wallace Web site and is helping British standup comedian Bill Bailey plan a routine based on the scientist. Beccaloni's biggest job by far, however, is defending Wallace's legacy.

He and other scholars claim Darwin conspired to ensure his paper was presented with Wallace's to prevent Wallace from getting sole credit. Roy Davies, the author of the "The Darwin Conspiracy," even accuses Darwin of stealing his ideas from Wallace — an allegation dismissed by other Wallace supporters as unsubstantiated.

But Peter Bowler, a Queen's University of Belfast professor who has spent his career studying evolution theory, contends Wallace's achievements have been exaggerated by his supporters.

Wallace did not have the complete theory and nowhere near the evidence Darwin had compiled — and that was needed to win over a skeptical public, Bowler said. Darwin's evidence included fossil records, animal breeding and heredity, while Wallace relied almost exclusively on biogeography.

"How many years would it have taken Wallace to put together the sort of comprehensive account that would have grabbed people's attention the way 'The Origin of Species' did?" Bowler asked. "Without Darwin, I don't think there would have been a great debate about natural selection in the 1860s and 1870s."

Also controversial is Wallace's support of spiritualism, a popular movement that held seances and believed spirits of the dead can communicate with the living. He upset Darwin and damaged his scientific reputation by arguing that the development of the human mind and some bodily attributes were guided by spiritual beings rather than natural selection, Beccaloni acknowledged.

That has turned Wallace into an unlikely hero among some Christian conservatives opposed to the teaching of evolution. He is also used to support intelligent design, the theory that certain features of life forms are so complex that they must have originated from a higher power.

Michael Flannery, the author of the new book "Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution," argues that Wallace was in many ways "the seminal figure in what we consider the intelligent design movement." The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the main supporter of the theory, cites Wallace in its promotional material.

Beccaloni groans when the talk turns to Wallace's spiritualism, noting that he wasn't even a Christian. Christian groups are "grasping at straws," he said, and other academics are using spiritualism to diminish his scientific importance. Beccaloni is trying to keep the focus on his earlier scientific discoveries.

In the Malaysian riverside town of Simunjan, Beccaloni was again on the trail of Wallace. Using Wallace's famous travelogue "The Malay Archipelago" as a map of sorts, he followed a rusted railroad track featured in the book, past paddy fields and palm oil plantations, until the road ended in a peat bog.

That's when Beccaloni began noticing chunks of coal sticking out of the dark soil, a telltale sign of coal works that Wallace described in his book. It was here, Beccaloni surmised, that Wallace spent nine months collecting insects, discovering a strange tree-frog and shooting orangutans.

But nobody would know. The site was unmarked.

___

On the Net:

The Alfred Russel Wallace Memorial Fund: http://wallacefund.info/

The Alfred Russel Wallace Page: http://www.wku.edu/

The Discovery Institute: http://www.discovery.org/

Natural History's Wallace Collection: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/collections-at-the-museum/wallace-collection/index.jsp

Fred Langford Edwards Page: http://www.fredlangfordedwards.com

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Mozambique agrees to protect lost rainforest of Mount Mabu

Conservation secured after expedition discovers new species of snake, butterfly and chameleon in untouched African landscape

Antonia Windsor, guardian.co.uk 27 Jun 09;

The unique lost rainforest of Mount Mabu is to be given protection from exploitation, following a new expedition to the remote area revealed a host of new species.

The existence of the pristine forest in northern Mozambique was revealed by the Observer last year, and was originally discovered with the help of Google Earth. It is now thought to be the largest such forest in southern Africa.

At a meeting this week in the capital Maputo, government ministers agreed to put conservation measures in place before any commercial logging occurs there after meeting representatives from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the Mulanje Mountain Conservation Trust (MMCT), and numerous other groups involved in the project.

"The three messages we conveyed were that there is rich biodiversity in Mozambique, that butterflies and botany can be as important as mammals, and that conservation policy should take into consideration areas such as these mountains or the coastal forests, that do not easily fit into the usual category of national park," said Kew's Jonathan Timberlake. The media coverage had clinched the participation of the government, added Paul Smith, head of the Millennium Seed Bank project at Kew.

Julian Bayliss of MMCT, who first identified Mount Mabu as an area of possible exploration using satellite imagery on Google Earth said: "As scientists it is incredibly exciting to go into a previously unexplored area and discover new species of butterfly, snake and chameleon, but our aim was always to secure pledges of conservation towards the protection of these sites."

The first full-scale expedition to Mabu last October uncovered three new species of butterfly, a new species of bush viper, a number of rare birds and potentially unrecorded plants. "These expeditions into the area are absolutely essential to securing conservation measures," said Smith. "Unless you know what's there, then no protective decision can be taken about management of those areas."

Outside the forest, the land has been devastated by civil war, but inside the landscape was almost untouched. Ignorance of its existence, poor access and the forest's value as a refuge for villagers during the fighting had combined to protect it. The scientists fear that with local people returning to the area, and Mozambique's economy booming, pressure to cut the forest for wood or burn it to make space for crops will threaten the ecology.

Just weeks before presenting their findings in Maputo, Bayliss was convinced that further new species could be discovered and so gathered a team of experts – and the Observer – for a final expedition into the area.

After trekking into the thick forest, the team spent its time setting up butterfly traps in sunspots, overturning stones and fallen branches searching for frogs, and tapping at the huge mahogany buttresses to awaken sleeping snakes. Nights saw the bat nets go up and torch-lit searches for chameleons.

"Hunting chameleons at night is much easier," explained herpetologist Bill Branch. "Because at night they sit out in the open and they bleach to a white colour, which means they stand out in torch light."

The pygmy chameleons, no bigger than a thumb, were in abundance, but it took three nights to uncover a different beautiful creature with perfectly coiled tail. "It appears similar to the one that is considered endemic to Mount Mulanje, but frankly from the colouration I suspect we have a new species here. This is what I came to Mabu to find," said Branch.

The expedition discovered eight new species of amphibians, four of butterfly and a new pseudo scorpion.

The findings were reported at the meeting in Maputo, where representatives from the Mozambican department of agricultural research, Birdlife International, WWF, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the British High Commission joined the others to convince the government to commit to protection. "It was an extremely positive outcome," said Smith.
The expedition team

Bill Branch Herpetologist at Bayworld, Port Elizabeth, South Africa: "These mountains are some of the last explored areas in southern Africa; I came here specifically to hunt for a new species of chameleon."

Colin Congdon Lepidopterist based in Tanzania: "We leapt at the opportunity to join this expedition because nobody from the butterfly world has ever been into these places before."

Martin Hassan Lepidopterist based in Tanzania: "The Baliochila were flying high up in the canopy and I had to climb high up a vine and use extension poles on my net to catch them."

Steve Collins Director of African Butterfly Research Institute, Nairobi, Kenya: "It has been really exciting to see the place – seeing is believing – to get to the top of the mountain and look at the forest spread out is incredible."

Julian Bayliss Project field coordinator of this Darwin Initiative project and ecological adviser to the Mulanje Mountain Conservation Trust: "We don't just want to finish this project with a series of technical reports put on the tables of various Mozambican departments, we want pledges of conservation towards the protection of these sites."

Hassam Patel Botanist: "Mabu is very important because it is such a big area of mountain forest. In the other sites it was mainly woodland, but this is very special and we are uncovering lots of new plants."

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Scots firm accused of destroying endangered apes’ rainforest home

Orangutans fight for survival as palm oil producer clears jungleBy Kathy Marks in Sumatra
Sunday Herald 29 Jun 09;

THE ANCIENT peat swamp forests of Tripa, on Indonesia's Sumatra island, were once home to 1500 orangutans. Now just 280 remain. The rainforest is being torn down to plant the latest wonder crop, palm oil - and a Scottish company that made its fortune from the Chinese opium trade is helping to destroy the critically endangered ape's habitat.

Jardine Matheson, an internationally renowned trading group with a long and colourful history, owns one of Indonesia's biggest palm oil producers, Astra Agro Lestari. AAL, part of a Jakarta-based conglomerate, is one of the leading operators in the Tripa area, where it is burning and clear-felling large tracts of the coastal jungle.

Global demand for palm oil - a cheap and versatile oil used in scores of food and household products, including Mars bars, Hovis, Persil, Special K and Flora margarine - is regarded as the main threat to the orangutan's future. The Sumatran species is particularly vulnerable - with only 6600 left in the wild, it is likely to become the first great ape to disappear.
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In Sumatra, locals call oil palm the "golden plant", thanks to the income that the rapidly growing industry is bringing. But conservation groups say the economic benefits come at a high price, and they deplore Jardine Matheson's role in hastening the orangutan's extinction.

Jardines, founded in 1832 by two Scottish traders, William Jardine and James Matheson, is still controlled by a Dumfriesshire family, the Keswicks. The company's chairman, Henry Keswick, was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours this month for "services to British business interests overseas".

But not all Sir Henry's fellow Britons appreciate his work. Every year dozens of orphaned and injured orangutans, many from Tripa, end up at a rescue centre run by Ian Singleton, a zoo keeper from Hull. Singleton says: "There's a lot of concern about illegal logging in Indonesia, but legal conversion for palm oil is far more serious. Once a forest has been converted to plantation, it's gone forever."

At his centre, set on four jungle-clad hectares near the city of Medan, young orangutans clamber around a cage, gorging on bananas and swinging on ropes. Sold as illegal pets after their mothers were killed by farmers or plantation workers, they will eventually be released back into the wild.

Singleton - who teaches the apes how to find forest fruit, build a nest and even how to climb trees - says human-orangutan conflicts are increasingly common as the latter's territory shrinks. Many arrive with air rifle or machete wounds. "For every 10 babies we get, probably another 10 have been killed, plus 20 adult females," he says.

Asia has always been Jardine Matheson's focus. After the British East India Company lost its monopoly on trade with China, Jardines sent the first private shipments of tea to London, Liverpool and Glasgow. It also trafficked opium into China from India, helping to spark the so-called Opium Wars, which led to Hong Kong being ceded to Britain.

The Keswicks, descendants of William Jardine's sister, dominated the group as it expanded into shipping, property and insurance, acquiring enormous influence in the region. The Jardines chairman became known as the "taipan", or big boss. The novelist James Clavell based a series of racy historical dramas on the family.

Nowadays the company's wide-ranging interests include the Mandarin Oriental hotels and Asian branches of Ikea and Starbucks. AAL is a small but lucrative part of the empire, increasing net profits last year by 33% following record plantation earnings.

With Indonesia now the world's largest palm oil producer, Sumatra - a lush, mountainous island where monkeys scamper in the bushes and water buffalo wander by the roadside - appears to be at risk of turning into one vast plantation. The short, stumpy oil trees are now beginning to blanket the landscape, with the monotony relieved only by occasional scarred brown hillsides.

As you fly over Tripa, designated a priority conservation site under a United Nations plan to save the great apes, the scale of devastation becomes clear. The green tangle of forest abruptly gives way to gigantic rectangles studded with thousands of palms. Numerous illegal fires are visible, including on AAL's estate.

The peat swamps not only harbour exceptional biodiversity, they also acted as a protective buffer when the 2004 tsunami struck Sumatra's Aceh province. They also hold massive carbon stores, which are now being released, exacerbating climate change.

Helen Buckland, UK director of the Sumatran Orangatan Society, said this week: "It is frankly shocking that the chairman of Jardine Matheson has been knighted while his company is actively contributing to the demise of the Sumatran orangutan. British businesses must be held accountable for their part in the destruction of this globally important area of forest."

In a statement, Jardines said: "Both AAL and Astra International take environmental stewardship seriously. AAL believes in and supports the preservation and conservation of the natural environment in Indonesia, and this is fully reflected in its sustainable palm oil growing programmes."

The firm added it was confident AAL's plantations function "in full compliance" with local laws, including environmental studies covering the potential impact on endangered species.

AAL denied destroying orangutan habitats and said it planned to develop only half its 13,000 hectares in Tripa because of conservation concerns. It denied setting fires and said it operated according to sustainable principles and practices, taking "careful account of the economic, social and environmental impact of all our plantations".

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Desperate bid to save finches that changed the world

Mike McCarthy, The Independent 28 Jun 09;

British conservationists are to launch an ambitious project to safeguard the future of a colony of Galapagos finches which inspired Charles Darwin to formulate his radical theory of evolution.

There are now only about 100 individuals left of the Galapagos mangrove finch, the rarest of the 14 closely related finch species that Darwin encountered when he visited the islands in 1835 as the naturalist on board the survey ship HMS Beagle.

All of these species evolved from a single common ancestor to fit different niches in the ecosystem, and when Darwin realised this once he was back in Britain, it helped to trigger his insight that completely new species could come into being through the process of natural selection.

The mangrove finch has shown the most extreme evolution of all: it inhabits only the narrow strips of mangrove swamp that are found in just a few parts of the Galapagos coastline.

Black rats which infested the holds of pirate ships have been identified as the chief culprits behind the destruction of the finches. The rats are thought to have arrived on Isabella, the largest of the Galapagos islands, on pirate vessels perhaps as early as the 16th century. Pirates used the archipelago, which is around 500 miles off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean, as a hiding place before sailing off to the Spanish shipping lanes in search of boats carrying treasure.

The scarcity of its habitat means the mangrove finch has probably never been numerous. In recent times it has been rapidly heading towards extinction, and is now one of the rarest birds in the world.

However, a British-funded conservation programme has spent three years investigating its decline, and is now about to spend another three years attempting to reverse it by moving some of the birds from the western side Isabella to the eastern side where there is another small area of mangroves.

The project is being led by the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, the Jersey-based charity which specialises in saving endangered species, in partnership with the Charles Darwin Foundation, the international research organisation for the Galapagos, and the Galapagos National Park, which is run by the Government of Ecuador.

Britain's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is funding the programme under its international wildlife grants scheme, the Darwin Initiative, which has spent nearly £75m helping endangered species around the world since it was set up in 1992.

"The mangrove finch is a quite remarkable piece of evolution," said Glyn Young, the Durrell Trust scientist who is leading the effort. "It's evolved to live in this tiny habitat. It's not as though mangroves have disappeared from the Galapagos – there's just never been much there in the first place. It's a brilliant example of natural selection, filling in this tiny niche."

Dr Young and his colleagues hope to take 10 young birds a year for three years from the main colony, at Playa Tortuga Negra on the west coast of Isabella, and release them in mangroves at Bahia Cartago on the eastern side of the island, where a handful of birds is thought to be clinging on to survival.

The Galapagos mangroves are different from other mangroves around the world, Dr Young said, in that they do not grow directly at the edge of the sea but are separated from it by beaches, so piles of leaves and stalks build up underneath them – and it is in these than the mangrove finch forages. Black rats are thought to have taken a steady toll of the birds.

Starting a project to bring the birds back in 2009 was very appropriate, Dr Young insisted, as this year is a double anniversary – the 200th of Charles Darwin's birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his ground-breaking revolutionary treatise, On The Origin Of Species. "I think Darwin would have been very pleased," he said.

Galapagos finches: How they made Darwin's theory take flight

*One day millions of years ago a flock of sparrow-sized birds of a single species, closely related to what is now the blue-black grassquit finch found along the Pacific coast of South America, flew out to sea and kept on flying westwards for 600 miles until they came to the Galapagos Islands. There they found a home.

But as they bred and their numbers increased, they found they could survive better by specialising. So some began to specialise in eating insects, while others began to specialise in eating seeds, or leaves, or flowers, or even in one weird case the blood of seabirds – and over time the shape of their bills changed to reflect their specialisations.

Gradually they evolved into 13 quite separate species, each exploiting a different niche in the ecosystem (with a 14th from the same common ancestor having evolved on Cocos island to the north). This process is now known as adaptive radiation.

When Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands in 1835 he and colleagues collected many of the finches, but did not at first realise they were related and missed their significance. It was not until he had returned to London that the ornithologist John Gould examined them and found them to be all subtly different but closely related members of a quite new family of birds.

It was this discovery that set Darwin thinking that they may all have evolved from a single common ancestor, and thus to start to understand the mechanism of natural selection, which enabled new species to evolve.

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Biodiversity helps feed poorest

Charles Sturt University, Science Alert 23 Jun 09;

Fulfillling human needs using the ways in which nature benefits humans, or ‘nature’s services’, could protect endangered plants and animals in the world’s poorest regions, says a leading Charles Sturt University (CSU) ecological researcher.

Associate Professor Gary Luck, a research leader with CSU’s Institute for Land, Water and Society, together with colleagues from the University of British Columbia in Canada and Duke University in the USA, has identified which of the world’s watersheds are priorities for protecting both nature’s services and biodiveristy.

“The services we examined included providing water for drinking and agriculture and minimising the effects of flooding,” Professor Luck said.

“We found that these services were most needed in watersheds found in the world’s poorest and most densely populated regions. Some of these regions are also ‘rich’ in biodiversity and we identified Southeast Asia and East Africa as regions with the highest priorities for protecting nature’s services and biodiversity.

“Our research showed that a dollar spent protecting nature’s services in many developing countries would have a greater relative benefit to humans than spending the same amount in developed countries such as Australia and the USA.

“People living in developing countries rely heavily on the services provided by local forests, wetlands and other ecosystems. In developing countries, land is relatively cheap to acquire for conservation and restoration and labour costs are lower than developed countries. Many of these areas are also under greater threat from land clearing, undermining the capacity of nature to provide services.

“Developing countries also often can’t afford the alternatives to nature’s services. For example, building water filtration plants, de-salinisation plants and levee banks can be too expensive in developed counties, so they must rely on these services from natural ecosystems.

“Many ecosystems in developing countries are also rich in species, so there is great opportunity to promote both biodiversity conservation and human wellbeing by protecting these ecosystems.”

Professor Luck argues that focussing on the human need for nature’s services, combined with knowledge of the world’s most important biological regions, is a way of combining human development and conservation goals.

Published in the latest issue of the international journal Conservation Letters, the research has implications for the employment of conservation and human development projects worldwide and for guiding investment decisions by global institutions such as the World Bank and World Wide Fund for Nature.

“Despite the accelerating loss of biodiversity worldwide, conservation is not a primary concern for many national or international development programs. By emphasising the human need for services that are underpinned by biodiveristy, we hope to encourage a greater conservation focus in future development projects.”

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Trouble brewing for Sri Lanka tea farmers

Amal Jayasinghe Yahoo News 28 Jun 09;

KOTMALE, Sri Lanka (AFP) – World tea prices have rocketed but along misty tea-growing mountain slopes in Sri Lanka's central hills, farmers are facing disaster.

Despite production shortfalls coupled with increased demand making the daily cuppa dearer, the men and women who toil the land have little reason to cheer, for they must uproot tea bushes desiccated by a severe drought.

Tea farmer N. K. Atapattu, 42, picked a crop of nearly 2,000 kilograms (4,409 pounds) of tea leaves from his small plot last year but the crop is sharply down in the first quarter of this year.

The tea harvest fell more than 50 percent in the first three months of the year on the highlands, according to official figures, and Atapattu and his fellow farmers are praying for better weather.

Nalini Aluthgama, 61, says her newly planted home plot at the village of Kotmale, some 170 kilometres (106 miles) east of Colombo by road, is devastated.

"I have just removed over 100 dead tea bushes," Aluthgama said while volunteers joined in to uproot the dead wood. "Most of my plants are about three years old and they don't give much of a crop."

The volunteers get a token two dollars a day for working on the tea plots.

Dhammika Manaweera, 42, the secretary of a local tea farming association, says all her 53-strong membership have suffered because of the drought.

The British charity Oxfam has been helping the local community to learn more about new techniques in tea growing and get the maximum from their inputs, but when it comes to weather, they are helpless.

"We have taken these farmers to experts and taught them good agricultural practices, but they don't have income security because of uncertain weather," said Oxfam's Tharanga Godallage.

This is an area where climate change is affecting an entire community uprooted 25 years ago to make way for a hydro-irrigation reservoir which inundated their traditional farmlands.

"We were re-settled here in 1984. We had a drought in 1988 but this time it is worse," Manaweera said. "We have started replacing the dead tea bushes, hoping for rain. We are getting some right now but if there is too much of rain, it will also ruin us."

Small-time farmers are a vital component in Sri Lanka's tea industry, the country's largest foreign exchange earning commodity, and the authorities are taking their plight seriously.

An hour's drive along a narrow road through hill slopes is Sri Lanka's Tea Research Institute, which is trying to develop new types of drought-resistant tea bushes.

"There was frost damage on the crop earlier this year," said TRI director Sarath Abeysinghe. "It was frosty early in the morning and very dry and hot during the day. It could be attributed to global climate change. We can't predict the weather anymore."

The TRI is using artificial pollination to develop cultivars from the tea bush, botanically known as Camellia sinensis, to withstand harsh weather, but coming up with a successful variety could take decades.

He said the distinctive aromatic flavour of tea usually produced in the mountainous regions during February and March had been ruined by the drought.

The teas, known as Dimbula, are hot sellers among buyers in Japan and Germany.

"There have been times when we were not able to get a quality season because of the erratic weather," he said. "But this year has been worse."

The chief plant breeder at the TRI, Kumudini Gunasekare, said drought resistant cultivars are being developed by her team to address the new issue of climate change.

"Earlier we were concentrating mainly on enhancing yields -- drought was not an issue then -- but we are now focusing on drought-tolerant varieties," Gunasekare said.

World tea prices have risen by about 35 percent in the past year and supermarket prices are set to rise another 10 percent in June, but small farmers in Sri Lanka who account for more than two thirds of the country's production have not benefited.

Sri Lanka earned a record 1.23 billion dollars from tea exports in 2008 thanks to the global commodity boom in the first half last year, but the party is now over.

The drought means that the subsistence farmers will not benefit from the rising prices and the troubles ahead are not something they can forget with a refreshing cup of tea.

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Dams Are Thwarting Louisiana Marsh Restoration, Study Says

Cornelia Dean, The New York Times 28 Jun 09;

Desperate to halt the erosion of Louisiana’s coast, officials there are talking about breaking Mississippi River levees south of New Orleans to restore the nourishing flow of muddy water into the state’s marshes.

But in a new analysis, scientists at Louisiana State University say inland dams trap so much sediment that the river no longer carries enough to halt marsh loss, especially now that global warming is speeding a rise in sea levels.

As a result, the loss of thousands of additional square miles of marshland is “inevitable,” the scientists report in Monday’s issue of Nature Geoscience.

The finding does not suggest it would be pointless to divert the muddy water into the marshes, one of the researchers, Harry H. Roberts, said in an interview. “Any meaningful restoration of our coast has to involve river sediment,” said Dr. Roberts, a coastal scientist.

But he said officials would have to choose which parts of the landscape could be saved and which must be abandoned, and to acknowledge that lives and businesses would be disrupted. Instead of breaking levees far south of New Orleans, where relatively few people live, Dr. Roberts said, officials should consider diversions much closer to New Orleans, possibly into the LaFourche, Terrebonne or St. Bernard basins.

“It’s going to be an excruciating process to decide where that occurs,” Dr. Roberts said of the levee-breaking.

Sediment carried by the Mississippi built up the marshes of Louisiana over thousands of years, but today inland dams trap at least half of it, Dr. Roberts said. He pointed out that there were 8,000 dams in the drainage basin of the Mississippi.

Levees have turned the river into “a pipe” south of St. Louis, Dr. Roberts said. Getting sediment into the marshes, he said, “is not happening, at least not very efficiently.”

The extent to which inland dams have had an impact on sediment flow has been debated. Although sediment in the river is only about half what it was in the 18th and 19th centuries, some scientists have argued that the flow back then was unusually high because of the advent of farming in the nation’s midsection.

Dr. Roberts said a new analysis of sediment data going back thousands of years challenged that idea. “There probably was a spike, but it was insignificant,” he said.

In theory, it might be possible to remove inland dams to increase the flow of sediment. But Dr. Roberts said the trapped sediment contained agricultural chemicals and other pollutants that might worsen the already deteriorating water quality at the mouth of the Mississippi.

On the other hand, he said, if nutrient-rich sediment made its way into Louisiana’s marshes, it might encourage the growth of plants that would contribute to marsh health.

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Algae Farm Aims to Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel

Matthew L. Wald, The New York Times 28 Jun 09;

Dow Chemical and Algenol Biofuels, a start-up company, are set to announce Monday that they will build a demonstration plant that, if successful, would use algae to turn carbon dioxide into ethanol as a vehicle fuel or an ingredient in plastics.

Because algae does not require any farmland or much space, many energy companies are trying to use it to make commercial quantities of hydrocarbons for fuel and chemicals. But harvesting the hydrocarbons has proved difficult so far.

The ethanol would be sold as fuel, the companies said, but Dow’s long-term interest is in using it as an ingredient for plastics, replacing natural gas. The process also produces oxygen, which could be used to burn coal in a power plant cleanly, said Paul Woods, chief executive of Algenol, which is based in Bonita Springs, Fla. The exhaust from such a plant would be mostly carbon dioxide, which could be reused to make more algae.

“We give them the oxygen, we get very pure carbon dioxide, and the output is very cheap ethanol,” said Mr. Woods, who said the target price was $1 a gallon.

Algenol grows algae in “bioreactors,” troughs covered with flexible plastic and filled with saltwater. The water is saturated with carbon dioxide, to encourage growth of the algae. “It looks like a long hot dog balloon,” Mr. Woods said.

Dow, a maker of specialty plastics, will provide the “balloon” material.

The algae, through photosynthesis, convert the carbon dioxide and water into ethanol, which is a hydrocarbon, oxygen and fresh water.

The company has 40 bioreactors in Florida, and as part of the demonstration project plans 3,100 of them on a 24-acre site at Dow’s Freeport, Tex., site. Among the steps still being improved is the separation of the oxygen and water from the ethanol. The Georgia Institute of Technology will work on that process, as will Membrane Technology and Research, a company in Menlo Park, Calif. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an Energy Department lab, will study carbon dioxide sources and their impact on the algae samples.

Algenol and its partners are planning a demonstration plant that could produce 100,000 gallons a year. The company and its partners were spending more than $50 million, said Mr. Woods, but not all of that was going into the pilot plant. The company had applied to the Energy Department for financing under the stimulus bill, but would build a pilot plant with or without a grant, he said.

With a stimulus grant, he said, the division of spending would be slightly more than 50 percent from the private sector, although the normal level was 20 percent. The project would create 300 jobs, he said, adding that Algenol and Dow were “incredibly hopeful” of getting the grant, partly because they had a combination of an innovative start-up company, a major company with extensive experience in industrial processes, a university and a national laboratory.

At Dow, Peter A. Molinaro, a spokesman, said that the ethanol was “intriguing to us as a feedstock, because the chemistry is simple.” Dow is already working on using ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane as a replacement for natural gas as an ingredient in plastics.

When Congress created a tax subsidy for ethanol, it raised the price for nonfuel users like Dow, he said. “We’re looking at options, and this is one,” he said.

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UK scientists attack energy industry

Roger Harrabin, BBC News 28 Jun 09;

Britain's energy systems are no longer fit for purpose, according to leading members of the UK's best-known scientific academy, the Royal Society.

A meeting of experts at the society said the government must invest hugely to create a new low-carbon economy.

And it must take on the big generating companies who dominate energy policy, participants said.

The government says the key issues on energy will be addressed in its forthcoming energy White Paper.

Electricity 'supergrid'

The experts say ministers must make up lost time by investing massively in research and deployment of renewables; creating a more wide-ranging electricity 'supergrid'; and ensuring that coal-fired power stations capture 90% of their carbon emissions by 2020.

One leading member of the society said privately that the government's performance on carbon capture so far had been pathetic - although would agree that criticism should not be confined to the UK.

The meeting agreed that failure to develop renewables in time meant that the UK must continue to rely on nuclear power - even though questions over waste and security were unresolved.

First priority on the society's action list is a big push on energy efficiency in existing homes, taking advantage of the latest technologies.

The call is echoed by the all-party parliamentary climate change group, which is set to insist that landlords should be prevented from letting homes which waste energy.

White Paper

The group's vice-chairman, Lord Redesdale, said the UK would never reach its climate change targets unless it radically improved policies on existing homes.

He said: "A billion tonnes will have failed to be saved from domestic carbon emissions and this is equivalent to the CO2 pollution from Britain's aviation sector over the next 25 years.

"We can either heat our homes and have hot baths, or fly but not both. There really does need to be much tougher policies on reducing carbon emissions from the homes."

The government says many of the issues will be addressed in its energy White Paper - although to the frustration of ministers in the energy and environment departments, the Treasury has blocked whole scale investment in home refurbishment until after 2012.

Ministers argue that their policy on carbon capture and storage is ahead of any other major nation - calling for four demonstration projects and insisting that new coal-fired power stations should capture a percentage of their emissions until the technology is fully proven.

A Department of Energy and Climate Change spokesman said the UK had made major strides recently on energy and climate change.

He listed The Climate Change Act, carbon budgets, and leadership for the Copenhagen climate summit - including the Prime Minister's suggestion last week that rich nations should transfer $100bn-a-year to poor nations to help with climate change

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Batteries included: Are eco-friendly cars any good?

The Independent 29 Jun 09;

Politicians want British drivers to switch over to eco-friendly cars. They're silent and stylish – but are they any good? John Walsh puts pedal to the metal

The first shot of the electrical car revolution was fired on 10 January 1985.

Rather than change the world, it hit a wall of media criticism, ricocheted against several bricks of public abuse and pinged back to strike its originator between the eyes. It was the winter morning when Sir Clive Sinclair, the eccentric, beady-eyed, ginge-bearded inventor of pocket calculators and microcomputers, introduced the Sinclair C5, the world's first electric car.

It was an odd-looking thing, like a pointlessly streamlined invalid carriage, 6ft long, 2ft 6in high, 2ft 6in wide and weighing just 99lb. Instead of petrol, it ran on a 33lb lead acid battery which drove a 250-watt electric motor – identical, journalists noted, to the one that powers your mum's washing machine. Its top speed was a snaily 15mph, and it could travel a whole 20 miles between recharges. Imagine.

How they scoffed, the C5's first spectators, as they watched the shoe-shaped machine slither in the snow. Nobody believed the 20-mile claim. Sceptics noted it used more electricity in cold weather and struggled so much uphill, the driver was obliged to use pedals. Its height made it dangerous for the occupant, who, A: couldn't been seen by lorry- or jeep-drivers, and B: would be choked by car fumes just at the level of his or her nose.

It was a disaster. Nobody wanted the C5, the invention that conferred instant wally status on anyone foolish enough to climb into it. Sir Clive became a figure of ridicule. The price was slashed from £399 to £199 to offload the surplus stock. By October, Sinclair vehicles were in the hands of the receivers, and production of the C5 ceased. Electric cars? Pah, everyone said. They're battery-powered toys, one step up from milk floats. They are slow, anaemic, whining, pathetic and need charging up with flex and socket every few miles. How am I supposed to drive one to the Cairngorms? Don't talk to me about electric cars.

Scoot forward to 2009 and you could be forgiven for thinking our relationship with the things had scarcely improved. The only electric car driven by anyone I know is the GoinGreen G-Wiz and, much as I like the owner, you'd never catch me in one. I recall the nitric scorn heaped on it by Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear. He abused its cramped conditions, its lethal cornering, its arse-juddering suspension, its sluggish performance: you can't, he pointed out, access the radio or the fan, or have electric windows, or go fast or even stop, "because it'll wear the battery down". He mocked the fact that the EU didn't classify the G-Wiz as a car at all, but a "quadricycle". He raced one against a standard Renault (it lost) and a kitchen table carried by six men (it lost when it ran out of juice). Plus, EU data also revealed that, whatever its manufacturers claimed about a 45mph top speed, the average speed at which it's usually driven is 10mph. Twenty-odd years after the C5, the electric car is still becalmed near the intersection of Toytown and Rubbishville.

Not for much longer. Last week, the Government rolled out a scheme to persuade the population to love, or consider loving, electric cars – sorry, "environmentally-friendly vehicles", because they're not all electric; at least one runs on wind turbine energy. The scheme, fronted by Paul Drayson, the science minister, is costing £25m and will make 340 cars from various manufacturers available, at the end of the year, to members of the public to test, on short-term leases, in eight areas, including London, Glasgow, Birmingham and Oxford.

Universities and regional areas will be encouraged to help by experimenting with finding ways to supply the nervous electric motorist with charging points. The aim is to cut road transport emissions in the UK by half, from 22 per cent to 11 per cent.

The Government's scheme will start with four models: they'll be given the Star Wars-ish title of the Ultra Low-Carbon Vehicle Fleet. They are the Smart Electric Drive, owned by Mercedes; the MiniE from BMW; the Expert Eurobus (formerly the Teepee) from Peugeot, and the Lightning from the combined forces of Westfield and Delta Motorsport. But hardly had the scheme been announced than other makers pitched in. Ford Motors announced its own "global commitment" to developing "Battery Electric Vehicles" or BEVs. They're not saying which makes or models will take part in the scheme, but we shall find out by the end of the year.

Will we like them? I thought I'd go for an early sighting. I am no petrol-head, but I love cars. I practically live in my Alfa Romeo 159. Could I find an electric one that didn't make me feel (and look) a fool or a geek when driving it? Could I turn myself into an amp-head, a watt-brain, an ohm-body?

The cool-looking Lightning, sad to report, isn't currently available, since it's still being built. Ditto the Mini E, which BMW hope will be available to the public by November. So I high-tailed it to west London to try out the Smart ED.

People are in two minds about Smart cars. They look slightly ludicrous, but are becoming less so. They nip in and out of traffic like annoying hornets, but have a certain miniature charm.

At first sighting of the ED, your heart sinks. Climbing into one is like getting into one of those electrically-operated toy vans you see outside supermarkets. It's all front seat, driver's door, then nothing. I was reminded of the moment in the wartime movie Kings Row, when the unfortunate Ronald Reagan, having fallen foul of a vindictive surgeon, wakes up in hospital to find both his legs amputated, and cries: "Where's the rest of me?" Inside, though, it's not half bad. There's plenty of headroom. Even if, like me, you're six-feet-one, there's plenty of legroom. The dashboard is charming. On the left of the speedometer, two little dials poke up like antennae on a robot: one's a clock, the other tells you how much percentage of electricity remains.

I switched it on, nervously. I put it in gear. (There are three gears: neutral, drive and reverse. Electric cars don't need clutches, transmission, spark plugs, engine oil, filters, exhaust, any of that stuff.) I gingerly placed my foot on the accelerator. A strange, mosquito whine filled the air: "Eeeeeeeee." Slowly, painfully, the Smart ED inched forward, as though expressing a whingey reluctance to go anywhere (or anywhere with me). Once I left the car park, the noise resolved into a cute, kittenish mewing, then disappeared. It was damned odd to be driving something so discreetly, mutedly, virginally, monkishly, mortifiedly silent.

As I became used to its teeny size, things became easier. It was still sluggish getting away from traffic lights, but I could feel it trying. It handled very lightly – sometimes I felt I was sitting on a metal tray with windows – but was a little ponderous when taking corners, hardly surprising when you think of the heavy battery pack under the floor. Though my reflection in shop windows looked a little ridiculous (especially with the words "emission zero!" emblazoned just under my nose), it was easy to feel rather cool and zippy.

The makers claim a top speed of 60 mph and I can confirm that, in a burst of enthusiasm, I got it up to 56mph on the M4 before being forced to subside. The main drawback of the Smart ED, though, is that you spend a lot of time watching the dial that tells you how much juice is left. At the start of my drive, the dial said 83 per cent remained. After an hour, the figure had reduced to 60. At times, I thought I could see the needle moving before my eyes while I hummed along. They say you can drive 70 miles before needing to recharge the battery. I'm afraid I'd have one eye on the dial all the way.

It's a simple drive, in a car that feels properly constructed, rather than fashioned from plastic. It doesn't emit carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, unburned hydrocarbons – it doesn't emit anything except a high-pitched whine. And charging it means sticking a blue plug into a six-pin socket and sticking the three-pin plug at the end of a long yellow flex into a household socket, for up to eight hours. Call me a dreamer, but the Smart ED seems to represent the normalisation of the electric car. If only someone could apply the transformation to a family-sized saloon ...

Should you have an unusually large family – very large – you might talk to Peugeot, who are taking part in the Government's trial. For a year from this autumn, they'll supply 40 of their "zero emission vehicles" (ZEVs) for drivers in Glasgow, in partnership with the local battery company, Axeon. During the trial period, Scottish Power will set up 40 electric-charging points around Glasgow. All the data about car journeys will be recorded by satellite and analysed by boffins at Strathclyde University. The only drawback to the plan is that ZEVs aren't your usual family runaround. They are big commercial vans and "multiple passenger vehicles" (or as we say in English, "buses").

I headed for the Peugeot showroom in Chiswick and took out a Peugeot Expert Eurobus. It's a big, roomy, metal box with windows; it will never appeal to the boy racer but, in its electrical incarnation, it's fun to drive. You feel like you're sitting six feet above other motorists, humming along in near-silence. The suspension is so bouncy that driving over speed bumps is like hitting a trampoline – and then there's the gear lever.

Just the sight of it made me laugh out loud. Plonked in the middle of the wide dashboard, sitting on a metallic pad the size of a beer mat, the lever is the size of a toothpick, tapering outwards at the top. It resembles one of those miniscule screwdrivers you get in a Christmas cracker. You flick it forward an inch, and the 3,000kg bus moves forward. Flick it back an inch, and the metal Behemoth obediently reverses. I flicked it back and forth a dozen times, entranced by the power and heft that could be accessed by prodding something the size of a Twiglet.

The Eurobus has a top speed of 70, and a range of 100 miles between rechargings; the makers suggest you treat it like a pet, settling it down after a hard day's driving, for "a good night's charge", so you can assume eight hours is standard.

I was beginning to warm to electric cars – their silent efficiency, their clean energy, their lack of bits that can go wrong. Hard-core petrol-heads will never love them – without all the complex engine parts, no exhaust system, fuel system, gearbox or clutch, they rather resemble a human body with no internal organs, only a robot brain and an On/Off switch – but you can see them catching on, as soon as the problem of recharging availability is solved. Should sockets be available on the forecourt of every petrol service station? Or would the petrol companies consider that helping the enemy?

What I missed about the cars I'd tried was a sense of style. Then I learned that the Tesla company was opening a London outpost. Tesla is a name that raises goose-bumps on some motorists' skin. Rumours have flown for months about the Californian company owned by Elon Munsk, whose electric Roadster is a sports car that can reportedly out-race a Porsche and a Ferrari from a standing start.

The showroom was in Knightsbridge. The four cars on display were jaw-droppingly beautiful - sleek and glistening in red or silver. The makers have adapted the chassis from a Lotus Elise, made it 6in longer and 2in wider, its carbon-fibre skin as smooth as butter. The gear stick is a perfect silver ball like a Ferrari's. The seats are low-lying and buttock-clenching. The leather upholstery is black and red, finished with exposed stitching like a Savile Row suit.

Don Cochrane, who runs the UK office, is a handsome, Wapping-born Londoner with coal-black hair and a boundless optimism about electric cars. He dismissed the idea that Tesla was in competition with the environmentally-friendly cars coming out from BMW, Peugeot, Mercedes and Ford. "We're not making cars in their price bracket. But I'm happy to see more electric cars in the market place. The more people see them, the more they'll say, 'Maybe it's realistic for me to have an electric car for the 20 miles a day that I drive, instead of a combustion-engined vehicle.' " A car lover rather than an environmental zealot, he is nonetheless keen to change people's perspectives: "It makes sense that if things are going to change, you should be part of that change and not have it forced upon you." He used to work for Formula One under Bernie Ecclestone. Could he imagine an electric model ever having the performance level of Formula One cars?

"Certainly. Give it five years. There's so much investment now in battery technology. One positive side-effect of this recession is that governments are bailing out companies but, as part of the bailout, are forcing them to work on more environmental cars. Ford just announced they're going to build two; that's because they're just got $1.5bn of DOE money from the States."

Mr Cochrane can talk at torrential length about battery technology and the 6,831 lithium-ion cells that make up the battery in every Tesla Roadster. He can explain with admirable fluency the "torque curve" of ordinary cars, as they increase their power ratio through the gears, and how electric cars provide 100 per cent torque all the time (but controllably). He explained how the Roadster's top speed is 125 mph and that it can go 200 miles without recharging. I listened politely, but itched to try it. We rolled the doors aside, Cochrane started the engine (silently) and rolled the silver Roadster out into the narrow roadway. He glided into a side-road, then – in a burst of pure showing-off – whizzed in reverse round the corner, fast as a whipcrack. I climbed in (the seats make you virtually horizontal), plied the key, engaged "Drive" and glided away, with no whining, no wheel-grind, no noise at all except the envious cooing of passers-by.

It was a completely new driving experience: touch the accelerator and you rocket forward, the G-force pushing you back in your leather seat as if you're on a fairground ride, although you never feel out of control. The handling is (as with the Smart ED) a touch heavy when cornering, but deliciously smooth on the straight. Though the car lies very close to the road, it bounces over bumps and sleeping policemen as if pillowed in goosedown. And you can't help but feel a boyish glee about the vast coiled spring of power and speed that's detectable under your hands. On Hammersmith flyover, doing 50 with no traffic ahead, I experimentally floored the accelerator to see what would happen. The car leapt forward, in a split-second, to 70mph. Talk about torque. It was scary (and possibly illegal) but tremendously exhilarating.

By the time I returned it, with the greatest reluctance, to Mr Cochrane's tender care, I was determined to buy one. There are 500 lucky Californians driving Roadsters and amazing their friends with their environmental responsibility and their love of speed. It's time I joined them. It'll only take 20 years or so of patient savings to find the £94,000 I'll need.

With their curious little fleet of tiny Smart cars and Minis, and huge utility vehicles from Peugeot, the Government may have an uphill struggle making British people love electrical cars. The shadow of the Sinclair C5 hasn't completely dispersed. I suspect if the sceptics were given five minutes in a Tesla, they'd change their minds. It's becoming obvious that the electrics are where the future of cars must lie. Whoever comes up with the first mid-range, sensible-sized, four-door family model for under £20,000, with a charging-range of at least 100 miles, will be a very lucky winner indeed, in this fascinating off-shoot of the race to environmental purity.

On the circuit: The electric alternatives

Smart Electric Drive 4-2

Top speed: 60mph

Charge time: 4 hours

Distance between charges: 70 miles

Price: Not yet released

***

Peugeot Expert Eurobus

Top speed: 70mph

Charge time: 7 hours

Distance between charges: 100 miles

Price: £55,000

***

Tesla Roadster

Top speed: 130mph

Charge time: 3.5 hours

Distance between charges: 220 miles

Price: £94,000

***

Lightning

Top speed: 130mph

Charge time: 10 minutes with a special converter (two hours without it)

Distance between charges: 188 miles

Price: £120,000

With good looks and racing car technology, the Lightning is at the forefront of electric car revolution. It can do 0 to 60mph faster than many petrol sports cars but without the maintenance hassle. However, a guilt-free sports car experience doesn't come cheap.

***

NICE / Fiat Micro-Vett e500 electric

Top speed: 60mph

Charge time: 6-8 hours

Distance between charges: 75miles

Price: £25,000

This Italian-made motor won Europe's Car of the Year and has an advanced electric drive system. Like the Aixam Mega City it also comes with lithium-ion batteries which means higher speeds and a longer range than some other electric cars on the market.

***

Aixam Mega City

Top speed: 40mph

Charge time: 5-8 hours

Distance between charges: 60 miles.

Price: £14,175

For a two-seater, surprisingly roomy and has a large boot. Like all electric cars it's exempt from road taxand is one of the most popular electric vehicles in Britain with 180 already on the road.

***

G-Wiz L-ion

Top speed: 51mph

Charge time: 6 hours

Distance between charges: 75 miles

Price: £15,795

A nippier upgrade to the two-seater G-Wiz seen on the streets of London over the last few years. A bit boxy, but it's the world's first mainstream lithium-ion powered electric vehicle.

***

Mitsubishi i-MiEV

Top speed: 87mph

Charge time: 20 minutes

Distance between charges: 100 miles

Price: £29,300

One of the fastest electric cars but what really sets this Japanese-designed car apart is its remarkable charge time of only 20 minutes, making it super-convenient. The batteries are hidden beneath the floor, leaving room for a surprising amount of space for four people.

***

Mini E BMW

Top speed: 95mph

Charge time: 2.5 hours with a special converter, 8 hours without)

Distance between charges: 156 miles

Price: Still being trialed

The Mini's electric makeover is truly stylish. Trials will be held across the UK in autumn but apply well in advance through Mini for a test drive. It boasts safe handling for dynamic stability control and the power-assisted steering reacts to driving conditions.

Additional reporting by Kate Proctor

... and the biker's option

Xero's eScooter Classic

Top speed: 30mph

Charge time: 6-8 hours

Distance between charges: 25 miles

Price: £1,499

Dan Barber, who rides a conventional petrol-powered scooter, tested Xero's eScooter Classic. He says: "The main thing you notice is how quiet this is. You don't get any sense it's started until it moves. That makes it very difficult to tell how fast you're going – but the brakes are nicely responsive and the acceleration okay.

"I own a Vespa GT and this doesn't have the same growl to it, or oomph when you're picking up speed. In fact, it felt a bit like driving a milk float. One of the major plus points is that, despite being a similar size to a petrol bike, it's much easier to manoeuvre (backing it up, for instance) because it's lighter. On the downside, because it's so light I would be really worried about being carried off by a side wind. Looks-wise, it's striking, a bit faux-retro, and a bit flashy. The biggest downside is that it is legally restricted to go no faster than 30mph. This could prove tricky if you needed to accelerate out of difficulty.

I prefer my classic Vespa for all its sins, but the price is excellent for a new scooter, there's little maintenance involved – and it's good for the environment."

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