Bellamy has come under lots of criticism for his controversial views on climate change – he’s said previously that he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming, and that glaciers are actually advancing, not retreating.

I certainly don’t agree with him on this, but the Green Weekend was more about getting holidaymakers to spot birds and creepycrawlies so I didn’t like to bring it up. And the kids bloody loved him.

While we were chatting about wildlife, one of the main issues he described was way in which conifers have radically changed the British landscape and its biological make-up.

I was aware that conifers are not native to the UK, but hadn’t really appreciated how they came to be here and the threat they pose to our ecosystems, so I did a bit more research.

Apparently, just after the First World War, whole swathes of native woodland were chopped down to replace it with quick-growing conifers like the Sitka spruce from North America. We needed a ready supply of wooden pit props for use in coal-mining; at one point during the war, we’d almost run out of them and couldn’t import them because of the German blockade, and we couldn’t take that same risk again. So the Forestry Commission was set up, and quickly set about intensive tree farming of monoculture conifers.

The Independent’s Michael McCarthy says:

Over the hills of England, Wales and Scotland the great austere blocks of huddled conifers began to spread, 150,000 hectares by 1939, and then at a gathering pace after the Second World War: 310,000 hectares in the Fifties, 365,000 hectares in the Sixties. No matter that nobody liked it. No matter that much of our ancient broadleaved woodland, its value unrecognised, was being cut down at the same time. No matter that sites of beauty and conservation value were being swamped. The dark monoculture advanced remorselessly, until by 1980 the woodland cover of Britain, which in 1919 had been the lowest of any major European country, at less than 5% of the land, had doubled to over two million hectares.

The impact of this (apart from them looking so dark and ominous compared to our native broadleaved forests) is that it changed habitats for wildlife. Conifers don’t let light through to the forest floor. They have also been blamed for acidifying water - making some lakes and rivers un-liveable for fish.

David Bellamy’s answer is to cut down all the conifers and transform our landscape back to how it was a few thousand years ago; I’m not sure the Christmas tree industry would be too pleased.

He also emphasised how radically agriculture has changed the UK landscape. “All the best land is covered with cereals now – that’s why we don’t see bees and butterflies anymore,” he explained.

We also had a good discussion  about the need to get more young people into countryside careers. “Young people don’t know about or don’t want to be farmers and gamekeepers anymore,” he said.

Agriculture was certainly never on my radar as a potential career-path, and I can’t remember a single classmate for whom it was. The growth in sales of locally-sourced produce in the UK is enouraging, but with the number of young people going into agriculture on the decline, who’s going to grow it all? I’ll sit and eat my onions from Lincolnshire and spinach from Kent quite happily – but would I be happy to get out there and do the hard work?

David’s suggestion is some kind of national eco-service: “If I were prime minister, I’d make every child between school and university go and work in the countryside and learn how to look after it”, he says.

One of the six tennets of the RSPB’s ‘Letter To The Future” campaign is for the government to commit more money to getting school children out of the classroom and into the countryside and nature reserves to experience wildlife for themselves.

If so few young people are even familiar with the countryside, we  can’t be surprised if they don’t consider working in it to be a feasible career choice.

I was a guest of the Malaysia Tourist Board, which won Gold for its rainforest-inspired garden, designed by James Wong (off the Grow Your Own Drugs programme on TV).

The garden was really beautiful, with square stone slabs like stepping-stones on a shallow lake, and shiny foliage of different greens, shapes and textures.

I heard a few visitors grumble that there weren’t actually any flowers, but I loved it – much more to my taste than rows of rhodedendrons or pots of pansies.

A soundtrack of bird and animal noises played softly in the background and it was so relaxing I almost fell asleep on the Minister of
Tourism.

Dato Sri Dr Ng Yen Yen, the minister, told me all about the flowers in her own garden, and about the government’s plan to create a Malaysian version of the Royal Horticultural Society, to get more Malaysians involved in and excited by gardening.

I also had an interesting chat with James himself, about how gardeners often tend to want to grow species from far-away places, instead of appreciating what grows in their ‘own back yard’.

“When I was growing up in Malaysia, all I wanted to do was grow English roses and a perfect striped lawn,” he says. “They’d struggle against the climate. It’s only recently that Malaysians are realising there are so many things around them that are more beautiful than any rose. I hope we’ve shown that our normal plants can win gold on the world stage.”

This got me thinking about the impact of flying and shipping plants and trees from one side of the world to the other to make our gardens look pretty.  There’s often talk about ‘food miles’ but what about ‘plant miles’?

My other favourite gardens at the show included the Global Stone Bee-Friendly Garden, which had a giant message reminding visitors of Albert Einstein’s prophecy that ‘when the last bee disappears off the face of the earth, man only has four years to live” (see my earlier feature on the decline of the honey bee).

I also loved Bradstone Biodiversity Garden which had insect-friendly flowers and log-piles, and a stone pavilion with crevices for nesting birds and bamboo canes to house insects.

The Eden Project garden was huge, if a little bonkers, with rows of old washing machine doors. It did well in the competition but I wasn’t sure if buying the biggest plot of the Show might have anything to do with it.

I was also fascinated by the Naturally Norway garden which was promoting the use of kebony instead of tropical timber for decking and pavilions. Kebony is made using the byproducts of sugar-cane production to harden sustainable wood species like pine and maple, and it looked stunning.

I wasn’t convinced by the Daily Telegraph garden, which seemed to have gone for the overgrown, disused railway track look. I didn’t find it particularly, beautiful, relaxing or interesting but I must have missed the point as it was the overall winner for 2010. Shows what I know…..

There are several wildlife-identifying ones which might have come in handy on my Big Garden Birdwatch a few weeks back. There’s one called Pollution which tells you how badly the air around you right now is polluted. Adam also recommends GoodGuide – a buyer’s guide along the lines of Ethical Consumer. You can even scan in barcodes while you’re shopping to find out a product’s environmental and social credentials but I’ve scanned everything in my kitchen cupboards to no avail – it’s very US-centric at the moment.

However the app I got most excited about was a free-of-charge app called Skeptical Science. It arms you with a whole list of climate change sceptics’ arguments – and the scientific rebuttal of them. There are 28 arguments under the subheading ‘It’s Not Happening’; 54 under ‘It’s Not Us’; and 6 under ‘It’s Not Bad’.

I wish I’d had this app a couple of weeks back when my friend Dave came round for dinner. He befuddled me with talk of ‘sunspots’ being the possible cause of global warming as opposed to CO2 emissions. I knew this couldn’t be right but I hadn’t read much about this particular argument so I didn’t have much of a come-back.

But with a few taps on my iPhone, this new app gives me a link to the sceptics’ argument in action (in this case, a BBC story  on the sun being hotter now than it has been for the last 1,000 years), and then the scientific counter-argument, a lovely graph, and a whole list of studies and experts which refute the sunspot theory.

Simples!

In the afternoon, we heard about big cat conservation Tessa McGregor, who heads up Biosphere’s snow leopard project in the stunning Altai Mountains of Central Asia. We also heard from Chris Gerrard of the Wildlife Trust who set up the Great Fen Project in Cambridgeshire (see my Greentraveller.co.uk blog on that one).

But the morning concentrated on marine conservation, starting with a lecture by Kristian Teleki, one of the vice presidents at SeaWeb, and not-for-profit communications organisation which educates and engages the public on the threats facing the ocean.

Some of the facts with which he began his presentation were a horrifying recap:

• The area of the seafloor dredged each year is 150 times the area of forest cut down worldwide
• 90% of all the ocean’s big fish are gone
• Outside Europe and North America, 80% of sewage enters the coastal ocean untreated – and that includes the Caribbean

As well as the issues of over-fishing, pollution and warming of the ocean by climate change, Kristian also told us a lot about what he termed the ‘souring’ of the ocean. The increasing acidity of the ocean does not get as much coverage as the increasing temperature, and I certainly didn’t know much about it myself. The ocean absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but it forms a mild carbonic acid when it does so, making it harder for corals, shellfish, and anything else that forms calcium, to calcify. By 2100, 70% of our deep sea corals might be in acidic water. If the pH of the ocean drops to pH 7.3, half of all the mussels in the ocean will die. If it reaches pH 7, there will be 100% mortality of scallops.

But the most interesting thing I took away from Kristian’s presentation was his emphasis on needing to understand human behaviour in order to achieve anything in conservation.

One of SeaWeb’s key aims is to help get the right message out. He said the doom-and-gloom coverage that the mainstream media give to conservation issues is hugely counter-productive:

“Bad headlines make our job harder. The average person on the street thinks, why should I give my money?…Stories that the reefs will be dead by 2020, dead by 2040 – how are we possibly going to sell this to governments when they think we should be putting our money towards something else?”

Armageddon-style headlines about the future of our planet definitely make me sit up and take notice. Personally, they make me all the more determined to try to do my bit. But I can see how for others it could cement a notion that there’s no point trying.

I don’t think that Kristian means the media should be telling only ‘good news stories’ about conservation. Rather, we should be framing all the bad news with more positive messages about what has been and can be achieved when everyone works together.

The massive expansion of tourism over the last 40 years has led to the rapid decline in the quality of the reef.

Coral everywhere faces the threat of bleaching because water is getting warmer because of climate change. But in highly-developed Cancun, pollution by sewage and chemicals and overfishing mean the coral in this region is dying faster than anywhere else.

The Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network says the amount of reef surface covered by live coral in the Caribbean has fallen about 80% in the past 30 years. In the Pacific, between Hawaii and Indonesia, meanwhile, reefs have been losing about 1% of their coral coverage annually over the past 25 years. eTurboNews spoke to Cancun dive instructors who said they were worried they might not have a job for much longer.

Cancun knew it needed to address the problem, but the country desperately needs its tourist dollars, and Cancun couldn’t turn divers and snorkellers away.

By building the underwater museum – which in effect becomes an artificial reef – there is something new for divers and snorkellers to explore, and the existing coral reef is given chance to recover from years of damage. I doubt it’ll ever get back to its original condition but coral will colonise the inert concrete of the sculptures, creating new coral coverage.

I must admit, the thought of an ‘underwater museum’ didn’t really float my boat at first – I dive to see wildlife, not for cultural enrichment.

But when I checked out the website of Jason de Caires Taylor, the British artist behind the project, I really warmed to the  idea.

‘Museum’ is a bit misleading – it will be more of a sculpture garden, with more than 300 life-size sculptures, such as an army of Mayan warriors, and a ‘dream catcher’ where visitors can leave a message in a bottle. I recognised the photos of his existing project – Taylor built the Underwater Gallery at Moliniere Bay in Grenada.

His description of what it’s like to experience artwork underwater sounds fantastic:

“Underwater and devoid of white walls the viewer is unrestrained in their interaction with the work. Buoyancy and weightlessness enable a detached physical experience, encouraging encounters that are perceptual and personal. As time passes and the works change, they reshape and redefine the underwater landscape in unpredictable ways.”

And the sculptures that have been submerged for some time, now covered in coral polyps and other growth, are really stunning.

Sinking a load of concrete statues is not going to solve the massive and complex threats that coral reefs around the world face but the Underwater Museum does seem like an exciting and innovative step in the right direction.

It’s going through an exciting period right now. It’s hoping to sign codeshare agreements with international players like Continental Airlines, Copa, Mexicana and Iberia in the near future.

This means passengers won’t have to check their luggage back in at Costa Rica’s San Jose airport before they fly onto their final destination with NatureAir.

The airline currently flies only within Costa Rica and to Panama and Nicaragua, but commercial director Alexi Khajavi told me he hopes to expand into Colombia, Honduras and Guatemala soon too.

The airline is based in Costa Rica and offsets all of the carbon emissions it creates by supporting reforestation and conservation projects. It also uses some of the most fuel-efficient aircraft on the market, and runs its craft on biofuel. In May this year, it won a prestigious award for conservation from the World Travel and Tourism Council.

“In one year, what we emit through 100,000 flights is the same as a Boeing 747 in one flight from New York to Heathrow,” Alexi says.

When you see the vast list of ways in which NatureAir gives back – both to the environment and to local communities – you might suppose the airline would struggle to make a profit, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“None of our sustainable practices would matter if we weren’t a profit-making business, which we are,” says Alexi. “We’ve taken market share, and we’re growing at a rate of 20% per year.”

I can’t see why other domestic and regional airlines have not followed suit; committing to carbon neutrality certainly seems to have been a successful business model for NatureAir. Alexi points out that NatureAir’s typical client is environmentally-conscious and does not mind paying slightly more for their ticket, in order to fly with a more sustainable airline.

Alexi would certainly welcome other airlines copying NatureAir’s example: “We will always be the first airline to go carbon neutral but we don’t want to be the only one,” he says. “The aviation business is going in this direction. You’ve either got to get on the bus or you’re going to get run over.”

I was impressed to hear that Alexi’s colleagues are attending Copenhagen next month to represent the aviation industry alongside five or six massive international carriers. A “David and Goliath situation” by Alexi’s own admission but NatureAir seems to have just the kind of forward-thinking the aviation industry so desperately needs.

The story today is that the sitters-in have now left the turbine blade factory, after bailiffs obtained authorisation to enter and chuck them out.

I had not realised that, until almost exactly one year ago, Vestas had a blade factory in Campbeltown, Scotland. It closed the factory down, making 96 people redundant, because it said the factory was losing money. It would “invest in another plant in the Isle of Wight” instead.

I’m not sure how a factory there would be any more profitable than in Scotland, but it pumped time and effort into relocating….only to have to close one year on because of lack of demand for its product.

The frustrating thing is, Vestas as a global company is doing very well. In the US it has seen high demand, so it’s now increasing production of turbines over there. But demand in the UK and Europe has completely slumped.

Coming just a month after Miliband’s Low Carbon Transition Plan, in which he committed to building more wind farms and creating more green jobs, I am confused. I must be missing something. Why can’t Miliband order lots of nice, new turbines from Vestas, then everybody’s happy?

It seems the government will step in to save banks and car manufacturers in trouble, but won’t do anything to support the wind power industry it’s just pledged it will grow. Vestas says there is a lack of political will to get controversial wind farms up and running in the UK. “Investors take the path of least resistance and so will we – and that seems to be not in the UK at the moment,” said John Childs.

On the other hand, the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union says the DECC did offer Vestas a rescue package, but Vestas ‘kicked the legs’ from under it.

I’m not sure who to believe, but one thing’s for sure. With all protesting done and dusted, popping into the factory for a warm drink and to escape the rain at my music festival is no longer an option. Kagoules and wellies it is, then.

It’s basically a glorified slideshow, by former US vice-president Al Gore, which means it doesn’t have much in the way of cinematography. But the message he gives about climate change is convincing and powerful, even if I’d heard most of it before.

I did still learn a lot. I’ve seen lots of diagrams of how a rise in sea level will devastate low-lying areas across the world like India, but had never thought about the effect of a warmer climate upon mosquitoes. Cities like Nairobi and Harari were built above the ‘mosquito line’, he says, but as the Earth arms up, mosquitoes will survive at higher and higher altitudes, bringing malaria with them.

The other point which made a real impact on me was the image of Earth by night. I’ve seen lots of images which show light pollution from space, but he showed a slide with huge red areas – swathes of forest being burned each night.

Gore’s film received a lot of criticism at the time and since. Critics highlighted inaccuracies in the science he presented, for example:

He shows an animation of a polar bear not able to find any ice to rest on, so it drowns. Tom Moriarty points out that in the cited study, four dead polar bears actually died in a storm, not from lack of ice.

The way in which Gore links Hurricane Katrina to global warming is a matter of dispute.

His prediction on how much the sea level could rise this century is massively greater than that predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Lake Chad in the Sahara desert is also said to have been shrinking way before CO2 levels started to rise.

The film has now been put on the National Curriculum here in the UK, and I was interested to read about the opposition to this. A court finally ruled that if teachers do show the film, they have to make pupils aware that it is a political work, promoting only one side of the argument, and they have to draw attention to nine specific, complicated, inaccuracies. That must take longer than the film itself.

I was a bit surprised that An Inconvenient Truth is not the highest-grossing documentary ever in the US. It is only fifth, after Fahrenheit 9/11, March of the Penguins (which I loved), Earth and Sicko. More people went to watch a penguin love-story at the cinema than went to see An Inconvenient Truth.

So my final verdict on the film?

It’s definitely worth a watch. It’s well-presented, funny in places, and strikes a good balance between shocking the audience and giving hope for the future.

It’s a shame that some of the science he presented has been so successfully contested. I think his argument would have been plenty strong enough without the Hurricane Katrina references and so on which have weakened his case.

And did the movie have the massive impact that Al Gore hoped?

It would appear not. Matthew C.Nesbit in the States says “public opinion on climate change has changed very little over the past two years”.  There seem to be rumours that An Inconvenient Truth Part II is on the way….I hope it makes a greater impact than the first one if it is.

1. Leonardo Di Caprio

Yes he’s made some insufferable movies, but he’s one of the most active eco-warriors on the celeb circuit. He’s got his own foundation, and is on the board of various organisations like Global Green. He puts most of his time, effort and money into environmental documentaries and films like The 11th Hour now. Maybe spending that much time with a chunk of iceberg in Titanic really hit home the effects of climate change.

2. Stella McCartney

She’s big into animal rights and has also been an enthusiastic backer of the Meat Free Monday campaign which I’ve written about before. Apparently all her workshops and offices are powered by green energy supplier Ecotrocity and she’s working more and more with organic cotton. I know Heather Mills does some similar work on animal rights and veganism but I’m sorry, I can’t stand the woman.

3. Cameron Diaz

Cameron’s been an eco-goddess for years – she drives an eco-friendly Prius, she recycles, and she helped Al Gore launch his Save Our Souls initiative. She’s been busy this year, appearing on the covers of Vogue and Marie Claire in eco-couture. And I admire her for putting herself up for scrutiny by saying she simply doesn’t want kids. That’s one sure way we can solve the human population explosion.

4. Sting

I’ve always quite fancied Sting and he was one of my earliest eco influences – we watched a video at primary school of him singing Yanomamo about a tribe in Brazil. He and his missus did great work setting up the Rainforest Foundation but he rightfully got some flack recently, regarding the amount of carbon emissions created by Police’s global tour.

5. Daryl Hannah (aka the mermaid out of Splash)

Daryl has set up an entire website about leading an eco-friendly lifestyle. She was arrested just last week for protesting about the blowing up of mountains by coal companies in West Virginia. Her house is almost entirely solar-powered too.

6. Orlando Bloom

Orlando is heavily involved in Global Green, and last year he went to Antarctica to see evidence of the effects of global warming for himself. He’s built (or still building) an eco house right here in London though I’m yet to work out where…

7. Ed Norton

I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a single Edward Norton film, but this actor has been greening away for years. He set up a scheme called Solar Neighbours to bring solar power to low-income homes in the States.

8. Matt Damon

Matt has launched a clean water charity, water.org, just this month.  The charity aims to help the 890 million people who don’t have access to clean drinking water. It’s not the first campaign he’s thrown his weight behind – he supported GreenDime.com, a campaign against junk mail, too. Matt, we salute you.

9. Gwyneth Paltrow (and Chris Martin)

Husband Chris is very vocal about his strict vegetarianism but Gwyneth wins for her great ethical-living website, with weekly newsletters that she seems to write herself. Recently she’s teamed up with Cameron Diaz in a Hollywood-super-eco-tag team.

10. Michael Jackson

The King Of Pop (RIP) is on the list more because of what he could have been. ‘Earth Song’ was his biggest-selling record in the UK – bigger than Billie Jean and Bad and everything (shocker). I just think it’s a shame he didn’t continue championing environmental issues a bit more during his lifetime as he could have achieved a lot.

• more than 1.2 million people will have green jobs
• 7 million homes will have had green makeovers
• 40% of electricity will be from renewable sources, nuclear or clean coal
• gas imported will be halved
• cars will emit 40% less carbon than they do now
• carbon emissions are to be reduced by 34% of levels in 1990.

It also said the average household energy bill will be £92 more per year by then.

So, what’s everyone made of it?

The green sphere has sounded positive notes. WWF said: “This is possibly the first time a UK Government has shown it is serious about this issue”. However, there are criticisms from all camps.

Friends of the Earth was disappointed the government said it would only reduce carbon emissions to 34% of 1990 levels instead of the 40% it was advised to commit to.

Greenpeace said that expecting us to make “smarter choices” on transport and the obsession with green driving “puts the onus on us as individuals, rather than pushing forward a wholesale rethink of transport that’s so desperately needed.”

And WWF said the government has not provided the necessary incentives to make investors turn away from coal and move towards low carbon, green energy.

I think that some of the measures laid out in the plan, like “pumping up [car] tyres and driving at an appropriate speed, meaning less fuel is burned”, are a little pathetic weighted against the sheer number of cars on the road and the number of planes in the sky. Efforts to reduce both of these seem only a tiny part of the transition plan.