It was intriguing to compare the terms and concepts we use to describe sustainable food in the UK compared to other European countries. In Copenhagen, the words ‘biological’ and ‘ecological’ seemed fairly interchangeable with the term ‘organic’, though I’d never heard them used before myself.

From speaking to Danish and Dutch journalists, organic/biological food seems to be the bigger trend in those countries, but there is less emphasis on ‘local produce’. In the UK, I think we’re hotter on ‘locally-sourced produce’ at the moment – ‘buying British’ is definitely the in thing right now. And while I’ve eaten in plenty of restaurants which go big on their local food, I haven’t come across so many which categorise themselves overtly as ‘organic’ (or fewer that serve meat, at least). Our being an island perhaps makes us more inclined towards self-sufficiency, whereas food can be transported by land between European countries more easily.

We ate at Copenhagen’s BioM restaurant and had an interesting chat with chef Brian Johansen. The restaurant strives to be as organic as possible, even down to organic-cotton tea towels and organic paint on the walls. Brian is proud to sell organic Naturefrisk cola, which he admits is “the second worst cola in Denmark”.

The chefs do use local and seasonal produce when they can, freezing berries in the summer so they can still make marmalade in the winter. But they are more concerned about the organicity of their produce than about it being locally sourced. They buy organically-grown fruit grown in Kenya, for example. I asked Brian what their thinking behind this is – surely the food miles created by importing such produce offsets the environmental benefits of organic farming?

“It’s a tough decision between polluting the water in our backyards, and polluting the sky,” Brian says. “If you pollute the sky, it’s all around everyone, but at least they’re getting better soil in Africa where it’s growing. I don’t want to buy local if it’s contaminated with chemicals,” he explains.

I see his point but can’t agree with him entirely; if we don’t prevent global warming from irrevocably damaging the planet, won’t the quality of soil in Africa or anywhere be rather irrelevant?

Food miles aside, the most intriguing term I heard in Copenhagen was ‘biodynamic‘ – a concept developed via anthroposophy, which takes organic farming to a whole new and rather far-fetched level:

“The light of the sun, moon, planets and stars …contributes to the life, growth and form of the plant. By understanding the gesture and effect of each rhythm, we can time our ground preparation, sowing, cultivating and harvesting to the advantage of the crops we are raising.”

Apparently, all Denmark’s best wines (yes, they make wine and it’s rather nice) are currently made with grapes grown biodynamically.

Whatever’s next? Horoscopes for horesradish? Tarot cards for turnips?

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…..

I knew about the impact elephants can have, tearing down vegetation.

I’ve read about the impact of cattle and invasive species like cane toads and crown-of-thorns starfish too.

But it was news to me that the common carp is also a bad guy! Apparently they uproot vegetation and can majorly affect their environment. They spend millions of dollars a year trying to control populations in the Australia and the States.

If elephants, locusts, cattle and goats are the bad guys, then bats, birds and lizards are the good guys….or so a feature I spotted on Wired Science says.

Bats, birds and lizards eat insects, thereby protecting plants from being eaten by those insects.

If birds make plants more likely to grow, then perhaps it’s safe to deduce that not having birds means plants won’t grow.

Which could tie up the total lack of bird visitors to my balcony with my total failure to grow any plants and veggies on said balcony….

I made a brilliant job of hanging a lardy-cake and sunflower hearts over the handrail too!

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.

I suppose I’d presumed that frog-eating nations (for it’s not just the French – America buys almost as many) had some kind of frog farms where frogs are bred for eating, but the Guardian says not. Commercial frog farming has been banned in France since 1980 and it imports nearly all its frogs legs (up to 4,000 tonnes) deep-frozen from Indonesia.

It seems absolute madness that frogs be transported from the wilds of Indonesia for human consumption. If you’re really desperate for frogs legs, you’d have thought they’d be pretty cheap to keep and breed right here in Europe.

Also this week, I noticed that the Zoological Society of London has successfully bred some frogs from Montserrat in the Caribbean. Leptodactylus fallax frogs have laid four batches of tadpoles this week. ZSL’s site says the frog is endangered because of a fungal infection, but the fact that this frog is also known as the “mountain chicken frog” gives you some idea of why else it might be under threat! They used to be found on seven Caribbean islands but are now on only Monsterrat and Dominica.

Fortunately my very favourite frogs – the bright green red-eyed treefrogs with sucker blobs on the ends of their fingers – don’t tend to have much meat on them, so are less appealing from a culinary point of view. However, numbers of all frogs are still massively declining.

There are more than 6,000 amphibians on the International Union of Conservation for Nature’s Red List, and there is particular concern for those living in rainforests. Factors causing the decline are thought to include climate change, habitat loss, acid rain, pesticides, and pathogens. Nearly a third of the world’s amphibian species are said to be endangered or extinct.

Frogs are a ‘canary in the coal mine’ because they have permeable skins and feel the effect of changes to their surrounding environment very quickly. They are therefore a very good indicator of the general environmental health of an area. So it’s doubly-scary that they’re dying out so quickly.

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.