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Monthly archives: July 2010

Sweden’s most beautiful patient

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Baltic-Sea

The Baltic Sea. Photo: Mauri Rautkari / WWF-Canon.

From July and the two years lying ahead Swedens chairs the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission. Therefore the organisation WWF has spent this summer putting the spotlight on the Baltic Sea. It is home for unique eco systems with a fantastic flora and fauna. But this environment is a very vulnerable one, largely affected by eutrophication (when nutrients leak out from the agriculture, for example) and too intensive fishing as well as “ordinary” pollution.

This summer we haven’t seen any algal bloom filling our shores here in the Stockholm archipelago. The winds have been on our side, pushing the blooming algae towards the South. But the accumulation of algae is nevertheless big. According to WWF an area that is 1000 kilometers long and 300 kilometers wide is now filled with blooming algae. This is one of the largest bloomings since the record year of 2005.

algal-bloom

Algal bloom at its worst. Photo: Päivi Rosqvist / WWF-Finland.

So why is a bunch of microscopic plants such a big problem? In normal quantities they aren’t, but fed by all the things we let out into the ocean they grow uncontrollably. And when the algae die they consume a lot of the available oxygen in the water, creating a dead environment around them. Now an area in the Baltic Sea double the size of Denmark consist of dead sea bead.

But it isn’t too late to change this, says WWF. During the last years, stocks of fish are slowly starting to recover and the euthrophication subtances in the water are getting less concentrated.

Nevertheless we keep doing a lot of things to these waters that would never go unobserved if they happened on land, claims WWF. Below is a video clip from their campaign. The final text says: “Strange? This happens in the Baltic Sea every day”.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

July 30, 2010

When rain = good weather

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Vinterviken-community-garden

The community garden in Vinterviken.

I have earlier mentioned my budding career as a vegetable grower. During the spring and summer I have started cultivating food in a community garden in Vinterviken (homepage in Swedish only, but with some beautiful photos). Together with other beginners and some more experienced persons, I have started learning how to grow my own food.

With the inspiration from this study circel I have also started growing vegetables together with some of my neighbours between the blocks of flats where I live.

These last few weeks have been extremely warm to be Sweden, and I don’t know how many rounds I have made with heavy, splashing

cherry-tomatoes

The first, historical, tomatoes in my windowsill ready to be picked.

watering-cans, doing my best to soak the poor plants. But a few days ago the rain finally came. Never before have I been so happy hearing large raindrops beat against my window.

But there was one thing we hadn’t thought about. When the work finally started bearing fruit we realised we hadn’t even spoken about how to share the vegetables between us! It’s just been such a nice thing having a common project, getting to know some of the neighbours and doing some digging.

When insanely fresh broccoli, all kinds of lettuce and a chubby squash appear in my kitchen and I can finally start picking the cherry tomatoes in my living room windowsill, it’s nevertheless a great reward for the work. And also good from an environmental point of view. Because there simply is no more locally produced food than home grown.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

July 26, 2010

How to talk about the environment without spoiling your holidays

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climate-communication

Illustration: Erick Arango Marcano

As some might have noted, it would be a bit of an exaggerations to say that everything I write about is positive. Although I myself am fully convinced that a society which is in balance with the ecological limits of this planet would be a very nice place to live in, being a journalist who writes about green issues often means writing about different types of warnings and alarms.

As one of our columnists in the climate magazine Effekt, the climate commited lawyer Lina Hjorth, recently pointed out: Being aware of the threats that climate change implies doesn’t always make you the smoothest lunch company. A pleasant conversation about the weather and the upcoming holidays can quickly turn into something completely different if you start discussing climate impacts of air travel when someone mentions his or her plans of flying to Thailand (which is not unlikely to happen, since about 400 000 Swedes visit Thailand every year).

Conversations like that often end with someone feeling accused and maybe guilty, which isn’t a good way of being convinced to change one’s lifestyle. So how should it be done, then? Lina Hjorth’s conclusion is that we are much more likely to start questioning the choices we make in life if we feel that the ideas are our own. Her recipe is to avoid attacs and just stick to spontaneous and discrete plantings of new ideas. In the middle of a whole different conversation, she usually mentions that she has stopped flying. “most people find that a bit weird, but also somehow picturesque – and all of a sudden we have a discussion about the consequences of flying and the importance of high-speed trains”, she writes.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

July 22, 2010

Love declarations for trees

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Tree-and-walks-map

Botkyrka's tree and walks map.

No matter where one lives I think we all get attached to its details and special places after living in the same place for a while.

Now the Stockholm municipality of Botkyrka has taken advantage of this fact. During the last year the local art gallery has collected people’s own favourite walks and, not the least, favourite tree nominations, and have now put together the most adorable map.

Apart from giving ideas about nice walks, the best part about this map is people’s stories about their favourite trees.

Yagmur about his special pine, which stands outside a school: “The tree is crooked, but means a lot for the school. It has been used as playhouse.”

Yagmurs-pine

"Yagmur's pine is pretty crooked."

Tommys-birch

"Tommy's birch looks like a candelabra."

Lena about her “couple tree”: “One beech and one oak tree have made a baby! One of them passes through the other. The oak has grown on both sides of the beech.”

Tommy about his favourite pine, which stands by a district heating station: “It’s a giant pine that I have spoken to every day for 23 years. This tree means so much to me, every time I’m there I give it a hug.”

Botkyrka’s special map isn’t the only one. With theme walks getting more and more popular (such as the Millennium tour, following the trails of the famous Stieg Larsson crime novel) Stockholm has also put together a ”Green Capital Tour” to celebrate its year as Green capital. It is a walk between six places symbolising different parts of the city’s environmental work. For example it shows how people can fish freely in the waters of the central city.

The walk can be done either with a conventional paper map or using a Gowalla service for smartphones.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

July 19, 2010

Wild animals invade the city

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wolf-cub

One of four wolf cubs born in Stockholm in May. Photo: Länsstyrelsen.

A friend of mine coming to Sweden for holidays from Paris wrote me a few days ago to know where to go to see wild animals. After thinking a while I realised she could actually do that in Stockholm.
Instinctively we might think that cities and wildlife are separate things. But just as humans are going through an urbanisation process, many animals do too.

Earlier this spring we had wolf cubs in the northern part of Stockholm, for the first time in 170 years. Wild boars are getting more common in the county and seals have been spotted in the very centre of the city, outside the Nationalmuseum when salmon smolt was planted in the waters there. There are also beavers and otters making their ways to urban waters looking for food and once in a while a moose gets lost and end up in a villa garden.

No need to mention rats – according to some people you can never get more than three meters away from one if you’re in a city – we also have other animals that live closely to humans. Bats are very shy, but only in Stockholm there are 12 different kinds, and late at night they can be seen flying around between the houses hunting mosquitos. And we have rabbits, lots of them. After some people let their rabbits out in the 1980:s, there were an estimated 5000 rabbits living in the central areas of Stockholm a few years ago!

moose

Unashamed moose. Photo: Kristian Wiklund/Flickr.

But the animals I confront most here are actually roe deer and hares. Having been fed by people during the winter, the roe deer in my neighbourhood have become so tame they barely even bother to leave when I come close. And no matter how beautiful they are, it’s not as fun when they munch on my carefully planted lettuce and beetroots…

A roe deer caught in the act. Photo: Stefan Perneborg/Flickr.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

July 15, 2010