Will Sydney get its own urban farm? In the first of our series on city farms, we look at the proposal to put an organic farm at Callan Park in the city’s inner west.

The proposal draws ideas from successful farms that have ready been established in places like Melbourne and London. And the site is a beautiful location right on the harbour and in the grounds of the now abandoned mental hospital.

It all sounds good, apart from the fact that the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority have not included the farm in their plans for the whole site and a final decision is going to be made on its future use soon.

Audio podcast
In this interview I speak with Rod Simpson and Andrew Jackson from Sydney City Farm. Andrew is the head of this non-profit organisation and Rod is the architect and designer behind the plan. You can listen here to the Sydney City Farm interview. It starts with Rod Simpson.

How to support the Sydney City Farm
If you think the farm is a good idea, there’s a couple of things you can do. Join the mailing list at www.sydneycityfarm.org and write to the New South Wales Planning Minister and to the Vice Chancellor of Sydney Uni to ask them to include the farm in their plans.

More info on Sydney City Farm
More on the farm in this article from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Do your own thing
If you want to join or start a community garden where you live, check out the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network.

The good professor has a message for the sceptics who still don’t believe in climate change and the scaremongers who would have us believe the sky will fall in if we re-gear our economy to lower our carbon emissions. Listen to the podcast interview with Ross Garnaut on climate change.

The program for this week is on climate change. And specifically the Garnaut Review and where Australia is headed. We have an interview with Professor Ross Garnaut and comments from leading green and business groups. Check out the show live to air on Thursday 17 July at 9am - streamed live at 2ser or on your wireless at 107.3fm. You can also download segments onto your ipod through the itunes store.

And we have these videos from the Garnaut Forum. In fact you can even rate what he has to say. In this video, the good professor lashes out at the sceptics (in his own gentile way):

Here’s what Ross said when asked why Australia should act when other countries aren’t:

And here’s what Professor Garnaut had to say about compensating the coal industry:

A carbon emissions trading scheme is coming soon. In 18 months in fact. But what will it look like?

It seems the two majors parties are heading for a showdown on the shape of it. And thrown into the mix is a newly configured senate. A strange assortment of new powerbrokers - The Greens, Family First and Mr X - may well determine the new scheme’s fate.

This segment came out of our regular review of key environment news. Each week we speak to one of the country’s leading environmental journalists to find out what’s happening. This week, we talk to Ben Cubby, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Chief Environment Reporter. Listen to The Environment Show’s interview on the latest carbon trading scheme news.

The car lobby is given the right of reply in this podcast. I speak with Alan Evans, President of the NRMA, Australia’s largest motoring body. He says the GetUp organisation need to get real. To build public transport to all parts of Sydney and into the country is simply not going to happen. That people are always going to have a need for mobility. And since most of the growth of the traffic in our cities is commercial operators, do we really want to see refrigerators being wheeled onto a train instead? Listen to the interview with Alan Evans from the NRMA - on cars, public transport, fuel price increases and peak oil.

This commercial takes the p**s out of the government’s FuelWatch scheme. Made by GetUp to make the point that we need long term planning for a sustainable transport system.

Watch the FuelWatch commercial.

In this interview I speak with Bruce Robinson, Convenor of the Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil. (ASPO is a leading international group of concerned scientists on the issue.)

Bruce says governments should be informing people and preparing our economies now for peak oil, the inevitable declining rate of oil production.
Listen to the podcast interview with Bruce Robinson (from the Association for the Study of Peak Oil.)

In case you hadnt noticed, the price of oil is on the march. And there’s analysts saying we’ll look back at 2008 in the years to come and think we were lucky. That petrol was cheap.

So what is happening with oil?

There’s no doubt the world’s demand for oil is increasing in a big way. What is in contention is the world’s supply.

A growing number of experts are saying we won’t be able to keep up with the world’s insatiable demand. And in fact, we’ve reached a tipping point. The term they’re using is ‘peak oil’.

In this interview, Michael Lardelli from the University of Adelaide sounds the alarm bells. Listen to the interview with Michael Lardelli on peak oil.

Australia’s no. 1 environmental podcast is launching a weekly half-hour program on Radio 2ser. (107.3fm in Sydney.) It’s Thursdays 9 to 9.30 am.

We also have a number of other media channels on the go:

Check out The Environment Show’s online community and social network. The site allows you to meet other like-minded souls, create your own groups, post ideas on the environment, ask questions, put up photos of pristine natural environments you’ve travelled to, and promote your environmental cause or enterprise. Like facebook, only better.

(Actually, we have an Environment Show facebook group for the diehard facebook fans, but we think our official site (on ning) may be better. Check them out and decide for yourself.)

And at the Environment Show, we’re interested in visuals as as well as audio. You’re welcome to join our community site and post photos directly to it or join the Flickr site for The Environment Show Community. Show off the pristine, natural places you’ve been to. And any shots to do with environmental issues or innovations.

Catch you on the airwaves. The first shows cover peak oil, planning cities for people and permaculture. And we’ve lined up a weekly check-in with Ben Cubby, environment reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald. Hope you can join us. Cheers, Phil.

Sharks have had a pretty bad rap for a long time. Now a new film, busts the myths about sharks and highlights the dire situation for shark populations around the world.

Rob Stewart, an underwater photographer, set out to show the beauty of sharks in his film ‘Sharkwater’, but stumbled instead onto the billion dollar shark fin industry. He found sharks having their fins cut off and their bodies thrown back in the ocean on a large scale. All to supply the demand for shark fin soup in Asia.

I went to see the film, then tracked down the director - who was in Paris on his way to Cannes - to flesh out the story. Click here to listen to the interview with the PR Manager for sharks, Rob Stewart.

Check out the trailer and the making of the Sharkwater film.

And if you want to help, you can adopt a shark through the Nature Conservation Council. They’re one of the few organisations campaigning to protect sharks in Australia.