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The icing on the cake might be the fact that electric mowers are cheaper to run, using about as much electricity as an ordinary toaster. Most electric mower owners spend about $5 a year on electricity to keep their grass trimmed. The nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute reports that replacing half of the 1.3 million or so gas mowers in the US with electric models would be like taking 2 million cars off the road, in terms of emissions.

Going electric has some trade-offs. Electric mowers tend to cost up to $150 more than their gas-powered counterparts, and the plug-in varieties can only go 100 feet from the closest outlet without an extension cord. Cordless models last only 30 to 60 minutes on a charge, depending on battery size and type, though that’s sufficient for the average lawn (just remember to recharge it in time for the next mow).

And, of course, just because electric mowers don’t consume fossil fuels or spew emissions directly doesn’t mean they are totally green-friendly. Most household electricity comes from coal-fired power plants, the dirtiest of all energy sources. Running an electric mower on electricity generated from clean and renewable sources (solar, wind, or hydro power) would be the greenest of all.

They may be small engines but they are big polluters.

Frank O'Donnell: On a summer day, these engines can produce up to 10 percent or more of the smog-forming pollution in urban areas.

That's Frank O'Donnell with Clean Air Watch. He says the new technology should be an economic wash for consumers. You may pay, say, $17 more for a lawn mower, but will pay $18 less to fuel the more efficient engine over time. And then, there are health care savings. The EPA's Bill Charmly says the new products could result in $4 billion in health care savings annually.

Bill Charmly: Respiratory illnesses, increased mortality rates, hospital visits, asthma attack increases, so this program will help reduce all of those impacts.

The researchers also made some assumptions. For example, they estimated, based on past studies, that the average American mows a half-acre lawn 26 times each year while walking about 2 mph. Assumptions that the average working lifespan of a gasoline mower is eight years and of a lead-acid battery about 4 1/2 years helped the engineers calculate how much fuel or electricity each model of mower would use, and thus how much pollution it would cause.

With all that taken into account, the study confirmed the conventional wisdom in some ways. Most prominent, it found that gasoline-powered mowers result in as much as 1,500 times more carbon monoxide, 31 times more hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides and 18 times more carbon dioxide than the electric varieties. All the compounds are ingredients of smog, which has been tied to health problems including asthma in schoolchildren in heavily polluted cities.

Nationwide, gas-powered mowers are estimated to produce as much as one-tenth of the smog-forming pollutants from all mobile sources, said Phil Carlson, an engineer at the National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory. Although the EPA’s regulations have reduced mowers’ pollution by 70 percent since 1997, the agency is working on a third set of regulations expected to make mowers still cleaner after 2010, he said.

The researchers also made some assumptions. For example, they estimated, based on past studies, that the average American mows a half-acre lawn 26 times each year while walking about 2 mph. Assumptions that the average working lifespan of a gasoline mower is eight years and of a lead-acid battery about 4 1/2 years helped the engineers calculate how much fuel or electricity each model of mower would use, and thus how much pollution it would cause.

With all that taken into account, the study confirmed the conventional wisdom in some ways. Most prominent, it found that gasoline-powered mowers result in as much as 1,500 times more carbon monoxide, 31 times more hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides and 18 times more carbon dioxide than the electric varieties. All the compounds are ingredients of smog, which has been tied to health problems including asthma in schoolchildren in heavily polluted cities.

Nationwide, gas-powered mowers are estimated to produce as much as one-tenth of the smog-forming pollutants from all mobile sources, said Phil Carlson, an engineer at the National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory. Although the EPA’s regulations have reduced mowers’ pollution by 70 percent since 1997, the agency is working on a third set of regulations expected to make mowers still cleaner after 2010, he said.

With oil prices at historic highs, the quest is on to turn such plant materials into a replacement for gasoline—call it grass­o­line. Since 2007, U.S. energy policy has been shaped by the premise that we can brew enough biofuels to replace 35 billion gallons of gasoline by 2017, and 60 billion by 2030. Corn ethanol has been a bust, blamed for wasting water, exhausting croplands, and causing tortilla shortages in Mexico and rice shortages in Asia. For all these problems, it currently contributes the equivalent of only about 4.2 billion gallons of gas a year. And the carbon dioxide emitted in the process of growing and fermenting corn and then distilling and burning ethanol is nearly as much as that emitted by extracting, refining, and burning gasoline.

Wood and grasses seem to hold more promise. They contain chains of thousands of glucose molecules that could be made into so-called cellulosic ethanol and then burned like gasoline, while releasing just 15 percent of gasoline’s greenhouse-gas emissions. But there’s a catch. Wood has evolved to keep its sugars to itself, covering them with lignin—a substance that gives cell walls rigidity—and then locking them in a matrix of cellulose and hemicellulose protected by complex chemical bonds. Because these sugars are so hard to get at, our output of cellulosic ethanol is still, after decades of research, just 1.5 million gallons a year—less than 1 percent of one day’s gasoline consumption.

Enter Janine Benyus, the driving force behind the movement. Benyus is the biologist-cum-evangelist who first defined its contours in her 1997 book, Biomimcry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. In it, she detailed how companies could study nonpolluting, energy-efficient manufacturing technologies that have evolved in the natural world over billions of years, delivering in the process a lesson on the importance of living in harmony with nature.

In the ensuing decade, with concerns of sustainability coming to the fore for companies and consumers alike, Benyus has proved well placed to continue preaching her philosophy. Named by Time magazine as an environmental hero of 2007, she's now preparing to take the wraps off the sequel book, Nature's 100 Best Technologies,

From the limited amount of information available, it is suggested the Viagra-analogue is best extracted by steeping the detached small flowers in neat alcohol. An infusion of about 20g of flowers in 100ml of fluid liberates the active principle. A quality full-strength vodka (at least 40 per cent) is also effective. Mr Bennell added: "There is some confusion whether oral consumption or topical application is more effective."

But not everyone is happy about this new discovery. One woman shopping at a Wyvales in Dorking yesterday said: "It's amazing. My husband has never shown any interest in gardening before, but now he's out there night and day fussing over his heathers. Frankly, I preferred it when he left the garden to me and wasn't so frisky."

Berry: I don’t think we’re just stories — we’re living souls, too — but we’d be nothing without stories. Of course, stories that belong to a landscape are different from stories that don’t. In Arctic Dreams Lopez talks about how the Eskimos, the native Alaskan people, have a cultural landscape — the landscape as they know it — that is always a little different from the actual landscape, which nobody ever will fully know.

In a functioning culture the landscape is full of stories. Stories adhere to it. And they’re most interesting when they’re told within the landscape. If, say, an oral-history project records somebody’s story and puts it in the university archives, then it’s a different story. It’s become isolated, misplaced, displaced.

Because the stomachs of cattle are meant to digest grass, not grain, cattle raised industrially thrive only in the sense that they gain weight quickly. This diet made it possible to remove cattle from their natural environment and encourage the efficiency of mass confinement and slaughter. But it causes enough health problems that administration of antibiotics is routine, so much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten the usefulness of medicines that treat people.

Those grain-fed animals, in turn, are contributing to health problems among the world’s wealthier citizens — heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes. The argument that meat provides useful protein makes sense, if the quantities are small. But the “you gotta eat meat” claim collapses at American levels. Even if the amount of meat we eat weren’t harmful, it’s way more than enough.

Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources.

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.

Just this week, the president of Brazil announced emergency measures to halt the burning and cutting of the country’s rain forests for crop and grazing land. In the last five months alone, the government says, 1,250 square miles were lost.

The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, which one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, says is resulting in a “relentless growth in livestock production.”

Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.