In the 1940’s a farmer north-west of Sydney devised a new way to interact with the landscape in order to minimize the loss of topsoil due to erosion, store water and enhance the ability of the soil to regenerate and keep healthy.
The farmer was P.A.Yeoman, and is regarded by many as a pioneer in sustainable farming.
Yeomans developed the Keyline sustainable agricultural system and built the first on farm irrigation dams in Australia.
Recently the property where he developed the system has been sold to a developer, who eagerly wants to turn it into a housing estate.

A group of locals, scientists and heritage officers set off a campaign to prevent such development.
Below is a video of the group itself from ABC’s 7:30 Report, who aired the story in December.

You can also read an article from the local press here, and get in contact with the opposing group here

The United Nations declared 2010 to be the International Year of Biodiversity. It is a celebration of life on earth and of the value of biodiversity for our lives. The world is invited to take action in 2010 to safeguard the variety of life on earth: biodiversity

UN Secretary General Welcome Message for the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity from CBD on Vimeo.

Hi all, Weedyconnection got feautured in the local Sydney media last week, with an article about urban foraging, read the article here, while today there was a broadcasting of an interview for ABC Radio National’s Bush Telegraph.
Readers can download the sound here, or listen to the stream here.

The Blue Mountains, part of the geological formation which stretch from north to south on the east coast of Australia.
The Blue Mountains are the one just west of Sydney, the first big natural impediment for the colonizers of the continent in early 19th Century.
It took British sanctioned explorer about 25 years to find a way through, although there is evidence that earlier settlers succeeded before with the aid of Aboriginal australians, who were living and crossing the mountains for millennia. The Red Hands Cave, near today’s Glenbrook and the Kings Tableland Aboriginal Site testimony over 20,000 years of custodianship.

Custodianship. Aboriginal australians were living on this continent as hunter-gatherer for more than 40,000 years (some evidence dates even earlier).
They had an understanding of the environment unparalleled by any technologically advanced settler.

You have been reading Collapse, by Jared Diamond.
The chapter about Australia (Mining Australia, pg 378) is a fast-paced attempt at depicting the continent as a modern-day example of unsustainable occupancy: erosion, top soil depletion, rising salinity, overgrazing, unrestrained mining of natural and geological resources.

Diamond is right, Australia is an extremely old continent, one were last tectonic activity was so long ago that by now the wind and the water managed to level down most of it.

This image says a lot. No picks, just slow erosion of anything standing on the way of the wind.
The wind that famously brought a striking dust storm all the way to Sydney City.
That dust is what is happening to Australia’s top soil, blowing away.
Diamond writes ‘Australia has been and still is “mining” its renewable resources as if they were mining minerals. That is, they are being over exploited at rates faster than their renewal rates, with the result that they are declining. At present rates, Australia’s forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and iron reserves, which is ironic in view of fact that the former are renewable but the latter aren’t.’

This is an extremely successful book, from a rather remarkable man. The level of success exerted Jennifer Marohasy, Director, Environment Unit, Institute of Public Affairs, to come out with an official-sounding response.
In her report Australia’s Environment Undergoing Renewal, Not Collapse, she argue against Diamond’s assertions as being formulated using second-hands accounts from (bitterly stated) environmental activists. She writes: ‘Sadly, the chapter concerning Australia is full of factually incorrect information. His general philosophical approach and disregard for the evidence is an affront to his profession and to science’.
Marohasy writes a graph-filled report addressing one by one the claims of Diamonds, presenting a progressive, thoughtful and effective use of resources by farmers, fisherman and governing bodies of Australia.

Now then, we all are concerned about the environment, the future of our children and are driven to make sure there is a tomorrow for them.
We also know that statistics can be read in different ways.
Jennifer Marohasy has been a popular academic in the Howard’s years, presenting paper and reports from the director’s chair of a privately subsidized lobbying group, the Australian Environment Foundation. She’s widely recognized as a Global-warming sceptic.

You saw on the other hand another propaganda exercise recently, The power of community:how Cuba survived Peak Oil, a documentary about the inspiring solutions Cubans had to resort to face the collapse of their economy following the withdraw of the Soviet Union as the major supporter and economic partner of the little republic.
The Cuban had to rethink they’re whole production system, started to turn their lawns into vegetable patches and diverted their effort into micro-economies.
Now, I met plenty of ex-cuban who are not that happy to go down the streets flag in hands to herald a totalitarian system as the answer to world complexities, yet, read through the lines.

This guys saw that the way to a sustainable future is via self-sufficiency, not from oranges from Brazil or rice from China or apples from Israel.

You also went to see 2012. Sorry, you usually don’t take part in cheap Hollywood-style sensationalism (and cash-in consequences). You saw it and you can happily go back to your life as an outsider from main-culture movers. Thanks, but no thanks. Great computer generated imagery, but you your mind kept going back to a man you met recently, a past as an astrophysicist for one of the major agency in Europe who quietly and coldly stated: ‘I’ve seen the calculations, 2012 is coming and is just gonna be disastrous‘.
Ok, you replied, ‘but all I can do as a man is affect what is closest to me. I wouldn’t be able to stop the planets to align, all I can do is affect what is in reach on my hands. That’s where my effort is going’

An interview is coming up, on ABC Radio’s Bush Telegraph, you will talk with John Thorpe about foraging.
Interesting how Greg, the interviewer, really tried to get some controversy happening, at some point asking: ‘so Diego, tell me, would there be some Noxious Weeds you would forage? Dont worry, John is not listening‘ (?!)

Let’s be more clever about the issues, should we?

It’s hot in Sydney, amazingly so, and then cold when the low pressure finally breaks in.
Dogs have been nervous in the past few days too, the rising moon upsetting them, maybe. Surely little companions jumping in creeks to bark at the water or whatever else was there felt strange, so did a dog running across the park to attack another one without any apparent reason..

But this post is about White Creek, a small valley, a watercourse. Part rehabilitation site, part wildlife corridor, part storm drain pumping the water collapsing in early summer storms into Rozelle Bay, Sydney.

There are Dianellas fruiting at the moment, stacks of it, testimony of a council bent on regenaration.
Interesting to notice how those regeneration processes, aimed at bringing back the idyllic before-white-man paradise of plenty, biodiversity and healthy landscapes, get dictated by what’s available in the local nursery.

This is also the site for community-lead gardening, where a local nature lover, Kosta, spend his spare time and energy looking after some of the ‘common land’, planting all sorts, native and not, and setting up a commendable and successful project involving the local kids (and the local school in the process): The Pudding Club. The local budding gardeners get given a tree to plant and look after, with their own tag.
Rather cute.

While the council go to great extents to live-up to its green commitments, see here for a PDf of their intents.
This top-down attitude towards the residents and the environment went through a number of up and downs. Here there’s a site about the White Creek Wetlands project and here by contrast is a film about the consultation process undertaken by the council, with the not-so-happy residents responses, and few other bits and pieces of local drama..

You finally had time to stop.
You looked at this blog, limping along. Your head filled with stories you should write, should have wrote.
You then went to a journey across the blogsphere, in your links, to see what’s still alive.
It was bit sad, quite a few of the blogs were now discontinued, memento mori.
It made you realise that nothing is forever. It also made you realise that you outlived them all. Not that they are not relevant anymore, on the contrary, each one of them still stand as an important document, yet as you went through them it showed the peculiarity of blogs, seldom you get to read more than the first page, and when you realise the last post is more than 6 months old it gives you the impression that you’re walking into an abandoned house, humans haven’t been there from a while.

That is not the case for this blog though, on the contrary, so here you are, updating your readers (if any) with what actually did happen.
the regularity is nowhere near what it was like 3 years ago, when you started and you had so much to blab away, at some point there where 4-5 posts a week, not 3 a month.

But here it is.
You’re half-way through your traveling scholarship, and of the proposed itinerary you diligently accomplished a lot.
In March you went to work with Caretto-Spagna (see previous posts), to then go to work at the Australian pavilion of the Biennale di Venezia, with Healy-Cordeiro, to then attend a four month residency at the Cittadellarte, Fondazione Pistoletto, to then present a game for a group show at the Parco Arte Vivente in Torino. Yep, you did it.
You never wrote a game, but thanks to your stubborn self, you powered through all of the obstacles and managed to do it. In the process you learned a new language, MSL, a non-standard language invented by Riccardo Berta, a researcher at the University of Genova who helped me out in this ordeal.

So anyway, you did it, as you announced back in march, created a virtual platform to entice younger audiences into discovering the botany growing under their feet.

Here and here there are a number of images of people using the device, while here is a start of a dedicated internet space for the venture, still in its early stages, but present.

this is what you did in the gallery space..punk art.
as your work was in a pocket PC in the form of a game, you didnt want to hide all of the accumulated hours of work spent on this table to make it work, so decided to collapse the table, secure the elements and leave it as testimony of process..
over stating it?
maybe.
fellow residents love it thou.
your ‘piling system’ of stuff, congregated by the end of a 4 month residency, got to be rather big ..
this is a cleaned up version of it.

play the game at www.weedyconnection.com/bedaforager/play/
it’s a prototype, comments welcome.
play it on site at Cittadellarte, Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella Italy
dowload the game, save it offline.
you’d like to know if it works

UNIDEE IN PROGRESS 2009
OPEN STUDIO
da venerdì 9 ottobre a domenica 11 ottobre
from Friday 9th October to Sunday 11th October

Programma / Programme

:: venerdi 9 ottobre / Friday 9th October
18.30: Piñata
19.30: Open studio
19.30 – 22.00: Digging for Desires in Casa del Mago, performance by Saioa Olmo Alonso
20.30: Apericena

:: sabato 10 ottobre / Saturday 10th October
10.30 – 21.30: Open studio
10.30 – 11.30 & 16.00 – 19.00: bedaForager, by Diego Bonetto
10.30 – 11.30 & 15.00 – 22.00: Digging for Desires in Casa del Mago, performance by Saioa Olmo Alonso
11.30 – 12.30: Speed Dating
14.00 -16.00: Tavola Ronda / Round Table
16.00 – 20.00: Do It Yourself, workshop with Marcela Ceballos González
17.00 – 19.00: Questions about Money, interview by Diego del Pozo
18.00 & 19.00: Video Programme, by Camille de Galbert & Diego del Pozo
18.00 – 20.00: Landing Desires, performance by Saioa Olmo Alonso
20.00: Aperitivo
21.30: Musica / Music

:: domenica 11 ottobre / Sunday 11th October
11.30 – 18.00: Open studio
11.30 – 13.00 & 14.30 – 18.00: bedaForager, by Diego Bonetto
11.30 – 13.00 & 14.30 – 18.00: Digging for Desires in Casa del Mago, performance by Saioa Olmo Alonso
15.00 & 16.00 & 17.00: Video Programme, by Camille de Galbert & Diego del Pozo

Residenti / Residents:
Asiya Wadud, Bona Park, Camille de Galbert, Cecilia Guida, David Behar-Perahia, Diego Bonetto, Diego del Pozo Barriuso, Hani Amra, Julia Staniszewska, Marcela Ceballos González, Natalia Gil Medina, Saioa Olmo Alonso, Sumakshi Singh, Yana Kostova

Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, via Serralunga 27 – 13900 Biella (Italia)
unidee@cittadellarte.it – www.cittadellarte.it – http://unidee2009.wordpress.com

You found a pubblication distributed via the Free Range Activist Network (FRAW), a loose collection of actions and initiatives with the common goal of improoving living experiences towards a world concerned more with sustainability than economy.

Their website is a portal to a number of amazing projects, indicative of the effort of many.
Below is a rather precious document about wild food foraging and how to approach it.

See the full version here

Wild Food and Foraging
Some ideas for harvesting wild foods

Version 1.2, October 2008. Produced by the Free Range Energy Beyond Oil Project
web: http://www.fraw.org.uk/food/ email: ebo@fraw.org.uk?

Wild food is an increasingly popular issue, being perceived as either a ‘free’ source of food or something that we can enjoy as a form of ‘gastro-recreation’. From the work of John Seymour and Richard Mabey in the 70’s, to the more recent TV programmes of Ray Mears and Bear Grylls, food foraging is promoted as an improving outdoor activity. But this approach often misses one of the most important points – wild food isn’t an end in itself, but it’s something that we can integrate into our existing food sourcing and preparation activity to add diversity and character to our diet.

The key thing about this briefing is that it’s not a “guide” to foraging and wild food – there’s plenty of them out there already, and we see no need to endlessly replicate this information. Instead we outline a framework for how you might learn more about wild food, develop your skills for food foraging, and most importantly finding ways to integrate your use of wild food within a more sustainable approach to planning your own ‘food system’. There are plenty of good books out there on wild food – and we’ve listed a number in the bibliography at the end. What we do in this guide is try and help you get your head around the process of collecting wild foods.

Motivations and practical limitations
There’s a rather romanticised, over-simplified view of wild food; you go out, pick some food and bring it home to eat. In reality it’s a little more difficult: the idealised plants shown in books are often not so easily found in the countryside, especially outside of their prime flowering season; the local geology and climate of your area can have a pronounced effect on what species grow where, and how well/if they grow; in many areas of the UK, especially where mechanised arable farming dominates, the rural biodiversity has been decimated for the last fifty years and so finding the diversity of plants listed in the wild food books is not that easy (although you might find small, undisturbed pockets here and there). For these reasons foraging isn’t something that can be taught or demonstrated – it’s something that must be learned and understood through practical experience.

Collecting wild food is not like going to the supermarket – you don’t just turn up and eat! You need to get to know an area, understand the wild ecology and how it varies from site to site, and in order to do this you’ll need to visit your foraging area(s) on a regular basis. Some plants, or rather the parts of the plant that we’re interested in (flowers, fresh leaf tips or berries) might only be available for a few weeks, or even a few days, and to be there at the right time you have to regularly visit and ‘live with’ the land.

The need to gain “understanding” of wild foods is also important when we select influences to develop our own knowledge. If we follow the ’survivalist’ mode of learning (generalising, Bear Grylls and similar types of survival programmes) we learn to take from nature without necessarily understanding the relationships between plants, the environment and the sustainable use of those resources – in this sense wild food is just something you do for a day out. Instead we’d recommend that you concentrate on integrating wild foods into your everyday diet by understanding how they grow, the seasons for different wild foods, and the use of additional skills such as preserving (e.g. jam making) to make the short wild food season stretch to a larger part of the year.

To get the most from wild foods we have to develop an understanding of the ecology of the countryside and how that influences what’s available, but also the historic relationship of rural communities to wild foods in order to understand what we can do with them (similar to the approach of Ray Mears and other ethno-botanists who try to understand how humans have historically used plants as a sustainable resource).

Some rules and restrictions
Wild food shouldn’t be seen as an unrestricted natural larder – the free counterpart to the modern supermarket. Quite apart from the ecological implications, there simply isn’t enough land for our present population to live like hunter-gathers (the Stone Age hunter-gatherer population of the British Isles numbered only a few hundred thousand). For this reason you have to be very careful how you harvest wild foods, both to protect the environment and your own health:

* Don’t strip the food resource bare – only pick a small amount from each stand in order to preserve the plant (especially important for annual plant species where removing all the flowers or seeds in one year will largely eliminate the population in the following few years);
* Don’t keep picking from the same areas – try and vary the location in order to lessen your impacts (this is especially important near the urban fringe where others might be picking too);
* Don’t pick from protected areas such as wildlife reserves, sites of special scientific interest (SSSI) etc. – some of the endangered species that are protected on that site may be dependent upon the same food plants that you pick!;
* Yanking stalks from plants can damage them and encourage disease (especially perennials and shrubs) – if possible use a knife to cut the stems (see the later section on ‘knives’);
* If you can’t clearly and unequivocally identify something, don’t eat it – there are a number of edible plants that look similar to inedible or toxic species (e.g., cow parsley and fool’s parsley);
* Always consider potential hazards, not just physical (e.g. falling in a ditch/river or cuts from thorns) but also pollution – this is especially true in urban areas where historic land uses and more recent fly tipping can contaminate land, but even in rural areas agricultural run-off, road run-off and waste dumping can give rise to toxic contamination;
* For many common wild foods (a.k.a. “weeds”) you can easily take a few plants or seeds and sow them in your own garden where they may also grow easily (perhaps as, if not more, easily than many domesticated/cultivated species) – this will reduce your impact on the countryside.

Learning to forage
Developing ways to integrate wild foods into your life is a process of learning – in turn that means committing time to go out into the countryside, learning to identify plants at different stages of the growing season, and learning the various methods to cook and preserve the produce that you harvest.

We’ve broken down this process into four steps:

Step 1. Pick your foraging area(s)
The first thing to do is pick an area. That requires that you have access to the countryside (see section 2). You can forage in many cities and towns but this can be fraught with difficulties: many open spaces in towns may have been subject to previous contaminating land uses (or why would the area not have been developed already!) or they might be fly-tipped; the deposition of pollutants from nearby industrial processes might create problems of contamination; and in urban areas the management of open spaces by local authorities is often, to save money, based upon chemicals. Looking at old maps in the local library will tell you about previous polluting land uses, and the local council will have information about any noxious processes in your area at the present (from the council’s ‘pollution control register’).

In order to develop your knowledge of plants you’ll need to have easy, regular access to the area in order to ‘live with it’ – getting to know/understand the diversity of different plants and fruits over the year and being able to get there at just the right time to harvest them. The best way to do this is to incorporate it into some form of regular recreation – going for walks, exercise, or just walking the dog.

The diversity of plants is governed by existing land uses – especially agriculture, since some plants (especially annual ‘weeds’) may have been sprayed out of existence – and the geology or soil type of the area. The soil type influences the acidity of the soil and certain plants will only grow where the soil is acid or alkaline, or in the case of a number of species that hug the coast, salty. Some plants love wet or boggy ground, whilst others will only grow in well drained soil. The reason for this variation is the ecology of plants – in order to thrive certain plants have developed preferences that give them advantages in certain ecological niches this allow them to grow faster than the other plants around them.

In order to manage your impact on the land you need to forage over as large an area as possible – and better still, on more than one site. With experience you might find that you forage on more than one area in order to source different types of plant – e.g., a woodland area, hedgerows, grasslands and by waterways. As you develop your knowledge you can also forage in these different environments in order to get a regular supply of something edible over the course of the year.

Step 2. Over a year or two walk your foraging area regularly and try to identify as much as you can
Books give pictures of lovely flowering plants, but as the flowering season might only be a few weeks often when you come across these plants they won’t be in flower. To understand which plant is which you need to be able to see it at different stages in its life-cycle, and to do that you have to go out regularly. This might sound a chore but it’s extremely good for you. It’s not just about getting regular exercise, but having regular contact with wild places is good psychologically (Google or Wikipedia the word ‘biophilia’).

To forage from the land you will of course need to have legal access otherwise you will be committing the civil offence of ‘trespass’. There are four ways to access the land legally:

* Roads. This brings with it the problem of contamination from the road (e.g., the benzene from the exhaust or heavy metals from the wearing tyres) and for this reason quiet back roads are far better (and safer) than major roads.
* Public rights of way. The Ordnance Survey map – the orange 1:25,000 scale is the best – shows public rights of way that you can walk to access the countryside. Any land/woodland the paths cross is fair game, but only those hedgerows that the path runs alongside are accessible.
* Access land. Certain areas, either by agreement or because they’re common land, have been opened up for the public to roam across them. These areas are shown on the orange 1:25,000 scale Ordnance Survey maps as a beige shading with an orange/brown shaded boundary. But, legally, if you pick wild foods on access land you lose your rights of access and you are once again trespassing on private property.
* Get permission (if you know who owns it), in which case you’re free to do what you like.

All nature reserves, be they local or legally protected sites of special scientific interest, should be avoided since, either by law or by the conditions of access, picking is usually not permitted. Public parks are technically open to the public, although you may not want to pick anything there because of the tendency for these areas to be regularly sprayed.

Step 3. Gradually begin to collect wild foods
As you use books to develop your skills at identifying plants you’ll be able to begin picking leaves and fruits, and even excavating roots. Due to the historical importance of wild foods picking them is not a criminal offence. Section 4, subsection 3, of the Theft Act 1968 makes it clear that –

A person who picks mushrooms growing wild on any land, or who picks flowers, fruit or foliage from a plant growing wild on any land, does not (although not in possession of the land) steal what he picks unless he does it for reward or for sale or other commercial purpose. For the purpose of this subsection ‘mushroom’ includes any fungus, and ‘plant’ includes any shrub or tree.

Whilst picking may not be theft, it might be theft if you uproot a tree or shrub and take it away (certain roots, like dandelion or burdock are a grey area since as ‘weeds’ they have no economic value). The exception is of course plants which are protected or endangered species – these are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act (section 13/Schedule and other regulations (you can get a list from your local library, or on-line, but most wild food guides will tell you whether the species is protected). Damaging these plants is a criminal offence. Also, unlike plants, all wild animals are someone’s property, and taking them is technically poaching (but there is a grey area relating to finding an animal that’s died without being trapped or shot – e.g. road kill).

The reason that you need to observe plants over their whole growing cycle is that most identification books show them in flower – at which point there is often little doubt about identifying them. By watching the plants grow and then identifying them for certain when they flower you’ll be able to identify them with greater certainty at any time of the year. However, the golden rule of foraging still applies – if you don’t know what it is, don’t eat it!

A note about knives
As noted earlier, when harvesting foods it’s far better to cut the plant because it causes less damage, and you might also want to cut/peel and eat it on the spot. This of course necessitates carrying a knife which, in the current media panics about knife crime, is not a popular activity. Contrary to the view portrayed by the media it is not against the law to carry a knife provided that it conforms to certain restrictions. Section 139 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 makes it legal to carry a folding pen knife with a cutting blade no longer than three inches. Generally the following restrictions apply: no knife can be carried on any school premises (Offensive Weapons Act 1996); it must not be an ‘automatic’ or ‘gravity’ opened flick or butterfly knife (Offensive Weapons Act 1959); and it must not be disguised as something innocent (Criminal Justice Act 1988). Note that any knife which is not banned (as outlined in the list above) or has a blade longer than three inches (e.g., a hunting knife) can still be carried in public but you must have a good lawful reason for doing so (section 139, Criminal Justice Act 1988).

Step 4. Learn to cook at home in order to develop preserving skills
Many wild foods can be eaten raw – which, if you take a hunk of (own-made!) bread makes a wonderful picnic. Others need to be cooked. For example, young nettles need to be heated (over a flame or in boiling water) to neutralise the sting, but later in the season they have to be boiled in order to extract the edible pulp from the indigestible fibre.

Most wild food books give details on preparation, but to get real value from wild foods you need to preserve them to make them last for longer periods:

* the obvious option is jam making, but many berries can also be preserved in syrup (and if you keep your old jam/honey jars you can reuse them at no cost, and it’s better than recycling!);
* many berries and leaves can be frozen, or better still you can make raw fruit pies and then freeze them as an ‘oven ready’ meal;
* certain wild foods (e.g. the bulbs of ramsons) can be pickled like onions, or made into pickles/chutneys to extend their shelf life; and
* many leaves, berries, some mushrooms, and most wild herbs, can be hung and dried to extend their storage life (once dried, it’s a good idea to seal them in a jar to make them last longer), or to make herbal teas.

There are many good books on home preserving, jam making and freezing, so we won’t go into any more detail here.

What to look for
There are no hard and fast rules on what to pick because each area, and the environments in those areas (hedgerows, grasslands and waterways) are different. There are certain things which are ubiquitous, such as nettles, dandelions and elder. The other less obvious species listed in the many wild food books have to be sought out. The table on the previous page gives some ideas.

It’s best to begin with the really simple things that don’t require any extra effort to consume – edible leaves, berries and nuts. As you progress and find more things to eat you’ll probably get into cooking, especially the common foods that require cooking (nettles) or roasting (dandelion roots).

How far you go depends entirely on your own preference. If you just want to pick blackberries and make jam, that’s fine, but the important point is this – for the average person you cannot practically sustain your entire diet from wild food. Wild food produces nutrients at a lower cropping density than human agriculture, and so it’s impractical to think that we could sustain ourselves from wild food. What wild food can do is add diversity and practical fun to our diet. At the most basic level, wild food is a link we can use to understand and have a relationship with nature.

The Free Range Activism Website (FRAW) – http://www.fraw.org.uk/
© 2008 Paul Mobbs/The Free Range Network. This document has been released under The Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License (’by-nc-sa’, version 3).

You found this piece of advice from the Michael Mobbs website, it was compiled by Phil Mulvey, Managing Director, Environmental Earth Sciences (www.environmentalearthsciences.com) about issues of pollution when foraging in urban environments:

Can we eat fruit and produce from roadside trees and plants?

“During the 1990s a lot of research was done on lead emission from car exhausts on Main Roads. It was found that on busy roads lead emissions were limited to 30 cm high and within 15 metres of the edge of the road. There was no noticeable impact on less frequently used non arterial residential streets from car exhausts. The removal of lead from fuel in Australia has resulted in lead no longer being a health issue for emissions. Hydrocarbons and benzene degrade rapidly and do not impact plants, in fact they are a growth stimulant at low levels.

Road verges may historically have elevated metal levels and PAHs levels in soil from runoff of zinc roofing and from fill from unknown sources. This applies to all soil in the inner city area. Plants have protection mechanisms to prevent the uptake of lead. Copper and zinc are trace elements and can be taken up but this is beneficial for humans. It is recommended for all root crops grown in home or public gardens that the roots be washed and peeled before consumption. Furthermore as recommended by the Department of Health all food for consumption should be washed prior to consumption. If this simple common procedure is undertaken health impacts from food grown on roadside verges and other simple public land is not expected to cause any health issues”