Eat meat, eat trees: climate activists bustle in Durban

If you care about the planet, you'll stop eating meat. That's the message of a group of young South Koreans who rise early every morning to make 4,000 vegetarian sandwiches and give them away for free. The UN climate talks in this Indian Ocean port city have pinned down thousands of negotiators in serious indoor talks for two weeks.
But thousands of others - activists and business people and the simply curious - are having fun pushing their wares in a busy environmentalist market of ideas and products outside the main venue. Black tea kettles perch on cooking rings, spewing steam created by the concentrated summertime rays of solar cookers.
Mouth-watering young lettuce sprouts out of plastic litre-bottle cases stacked into the event's award-winning Climate Smart Cape Town exhibit. The group is a coalition of 27 private and public groups in the Cape Town area. Shri Shri Soham Baba, also known as Babaji, travelled from his cave-home in the high Himalyas of India to plant a lavender tree at the main entrance to the Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre in this Indian Ocean port city where talks are slated to end on Saturday.
Swathed in gleaming golden robes and carrying an ornate silver watering kettle, Babaji said he came to Durban because he realised he "must do much more for mother nature" - and to meditate for help in fighting climate change. Two of his glacier caves are melting, he told dpa. At lower altitudes in the Himalyas, he said healing herbs are dying out, leaving people without means to treat illness.
Babaji said he had written to then-UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar (1982 to 1991) asking for help with the deteriorating environment, but never received an answer. He now runs a world-wide mission programme based in the Netherlands to help the poor.
The Korean sandwich-makers also claimed a spiritual inspiration, citing a California-based activist organisation called suprememastertv.com that appears to be connected to the teacher, artist and philanthropist Chang Hai. "We're trying to save the planet by being vegan," Santina Dong, 29, told dpa as she handed out food. "We have to do something so there are more forests, and more food."
South Africans passing by the scene seemed baffled, and some walked on. Others couldn't resist their curiosity - or morning hunger - and munched away. Deforestation plays a major role in global warming, because felling trees for harvest or grazing and farmland destroys the world's carbon dioxide sponge. About 20 per cent of global carbon emissions are traced to rapid deforestation in places like the Amazon and the Congo basin.
One of the major efforts under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the umbrella for the Kyoto Protocol under discussion in Durban, is to preserve forests with economic incentives. Kyoto provides a carbon credit and trading system that collects money from excessive producers of greenhouse gasses and pays it to projects that lower carbon in poor countries. But very little of that money goes to re-forestation schemes, a matter under dispute.
Forest worries brought Sailesh Rao to Durban for his first visit to climate talks, on behalf of his California-based organisation Climate Healers. He said that forests could absorb half of all carbon emissions if deforestation stopped today. The felling of trees to feed cattle and other animals for a world that is "eating its way up the food chain" was destroying the sponge. "We are eating our way to extinction," he said.