Put solar panels where it's sunny, wind farms where it's windy. If only it were that simple.

Choosing the best sites for renewable energy projects is a challenge for clean-power developers; selecting the right location and securing permits can take months, even years. That's because seemingly prime parcels may have endangered species, tricky topography or poor access to transmission lines. The local government could be hostile to incentive programs. Banks and utilities need to know exactly how much power is going to come off a site hour by hour and how much money it will make — none of it evident without a deep dive by lawyers and investigators.

Now a former gaming executive believes that he has come up with a way to do it faster and more cheaply using the 3-D animation modeling that helped make the video game the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion into a big hit and a ray-tracing technology used on the “Toy Story” movies. Continue reading >>

Guerilla gardening has been part of the Los Angeles landscape for a while now, with green devotees doing their best to literally cultivate patches of natural growth in between the city's concrete cracks.

But now the on-the-go gardener can be even quicker: Find one of Greenaid's bright-green converted gumball machines, deposit 50 cents, turn the handle (watch for passersby) and throw! Give the jawcracker-sized sphere a few days to break apart and watch its combination of clay, compost and seeds sprout new growth.

The designers behind this fusion of new consciousness and old technology are Daniel Phillips and Kim Karlsrud, who met while students at Otis College of Art and Design.

A clutch of empty gumball machines given to them as a gift germinated with their desire to creatively impact the environment as part of their studio's practice. The result was repurposing the machines and inventing region-specific seed bombs they make themselves during a three-day process.

There are now about 20 machines scattered through Los Angeles, and a handful sprinkled across the Midwest and Northeast. They hope the machines will proliferate nationally.

“A lightbulb goes off,” says Phillips, when people see how easy, nevermind fun, it is to seed-bomb their 'hood and then see the results literally spring up before their eyes. 

Eco-conscious travel is about to become a lot easier. Beginning as early as January, electric cars will be available at the nation's two largest auto rental companies. Enterprise Rent-A-Car, North America's largest car rental firm, unveiled plans last week to offer about 500 Nissan Leaf all-electric cars, initially at dealerships in Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland and Seattle.

The announcement came a few months after Hertz, the world's largest car rental company, said it planned to offer Nissan Leafs next year at a handful of locations in the U.S. and Europe, including New York, Washington and San Francisco. A fully charged Leaf has a range of about 100 miles.

Hertz and Enterprise already offer hybrid models such as the Toyota Prius. But some questions about renting electric cars have yet to be answered. For example, representatives for each company say the price of renting a Leaf will probably be higher than the rates for traditional gas-burning vehicles. But they have yet to announce exact rates.

“The details are still being worked out,” said Lee Broughton, director of sustainability for Enterprise.

Perhaps a bigger concern for travelers who rent electric cars is whether they would have to pay a penalty for returning the vehicles with depleted batteries.

It is a key question because fully recharging a Leaf takes up to eight hours at a charging station and 20 hours from a standard home outlet.

If travelers don't have time to recharge an electric rental car before returning it, the rental firm must take the vehicle out of service to recharge it. Enterprise and Hertz representatives said they were still working out a solution.

-- Hugo Martin

Photo: A Nissan Leaf electric vehicle on display at Santana Row in San Jose. Enterprise and Hertz plan to offer the vehicles as rentals. Credit: Masaru Oka / MCT

TRANSPORTATION ISSUE: We've all seen them: the blue signs announcing a nearby electric-car charging station. Follow the arrows, and most of them lead to old technology. Many don't even work.

But that's about to change, and change quickly, as the first mass-market electric cars — from Nissan, General Motors, SmartCar, Ford, Fiat and other manufacturers — hit U.S. roads this winter.

Continue reading after the jump...

As confusing as the arguments about shopping for produce might be, they've got nothing on seafood. But here's the thing: This stuff really matters, maybe even more than the questions about land-based foods. Even before the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the populations of some of the world's most important food fish were balancing on a razor.

That's why I'm so grateful to have “Four Fish,” a terrific new book by Paul Greenberg that helps explore some of those complexities. These days it seems like there is another food issues book coming out every five minutes, but if you're going to read only one, this should be it.

Greenberg made a smart choice in writing the book by focusing on only four iconic fish, covering the basics of their biology and the history of their use by man, and then using them as launching points for further explorations.

So he starts with salmon, which leads into initial discussions of overfishing and then into aquaculture and its problems. Sea bass turns into a case study of how aquaculture can be done right. Cod is not only the emblematic story of a fishery gone bad but also how it can turn around … and just what “turning around” really means. Finally, tuna (especially bluefin) represents the current worst-case scenario, one from which, even with immediate action, recovery will be difficult.

While the book is deeply researched and factual, it is by no means dry. In exploring these fish, Greenberg takes us to a Yu' Pik fishing camp in Alaska, to a “branzino” farm off a Greek island, to a barramundi farm in Australia and a tuna farm in Baja.

That may sound like a lot of fish farming, which, as we all know, is a bad thing. Well, maybe not. What makes the book work so well is that Green-berg is both an idealist and a realist. He doesn't look at the problems of seafood from a narrow ideological perspective.

Aquaculture may be imperfect — and, at times, even hazardous — but given that the global population is growing rapidly and that people are demanding more and more fish to eat, do we have an alternative? Already farmed seafood accounts for almost half of global seafood consumption. That seems to be a bell that can't be un-rung.

Rather than condemning fish farming because of the mistakes of the past — of which there have been plenty — Greenberg is willing to look at possible alternatives, praising them when they seem to be working (farming sea bass, for instance) and shooting them down when they fail (cod don't seem to be economically viable for aquaculture, and farming tuna may actually take more fish out of the biomass than catching them does, since those fish are removed from the breeding pool).

Greenberg wraps up with short outlines of ideas to guide how we should be thinking about managing both global fisheries in general and aquaculture specifically.

The first includes some radical proposals: reducing the size of the world fishing fleet, converting large areas of the oceans to no-catch zones to enable fish populations to replenish, establishing global rules to protect far-ranging species, and protecting the “bottom of the food chain” animals now being used mostly for fish feed for aquaculture.

When it comes to farming, his guidelines seem much more immediately doable: emphasize fish and systems that can be grown most efficiently with the least destruction to the wild environment, and think more about polyculture rather than monoculture — growing several complementary species on a single farm rather than just one.

As Greenberg points out, why should ocean farming repeat the mistakes of land farming?

--Russ Parsons

Photos: Tunas are auctioned off in the morning at Tsukiji Market in Tokyo, the world's largest fish market; "Four Fish" book cover. Credits: Beatrice de Gea for the Times; Penguin Press.

Is it possible to save a generation without breaking any eggs?

That's the tricky question the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, FedEx and hundreds of volunteers faced in July as they dug up more than 70,000 turtle eggs on the gulf shore to transport them to the oil-free beaches of Cape Canaveral, Fla., where they'll be hatched in a warehouse and released into the ocean.

It's one of the most ambitious wildlife nest relocations ever attempted, biologists said, a risky experiment to prevent widespread mortality of five threatened and endangered turtle species.

“This is the largest egg translocation ever done in the U.S., and possibly in the world,” said Michelle Pico, director of marine programs at the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. “It's a grand experiment.”

Plans call for digging up hundreds of turtle nests on the Florida Panhandle and 80 in Alabama, each containing about 100 ping-pong sized eggs. Biologists layer the eggs and wet sand in Styrofoam coolers and load them onto customized, shock-absorbent wood pallets that are transported hundreds of miles in a giant FedEx truck.

“The sheer logistical challenges associated with it add a lot of uncertainty,” said Michael Ziccardi, a veterinarian at UC Davis who is coordinating sea turtle and marine mammal rescue efforts in the gulf.

But there isn't much of a choice. Leaving the eggs to hatch on oil-splattered Gulf of Mexico beaches, where baby turtles the size of limes would crawl into oil-tinged waters, would result in certain death, biologists concluded. Baby turtles typically swim into the sea and feast on sargassum, seaweed that in the gulf is now soaked with oil.

Nests have been moved in the past to save eggs from hurricanes or high tides, but are rarely moved such a great distance, said David Godfrey, executive director of the Sea Turtle Conservancy, a nonprofit rescue group in Florida. Moving a nest has been shown to decrease the number of turtles that survive by about 10%, although that number comes from studies in which the eggs are moved right after they are laid.

Even in good conditions, only about 1 in 1,000 turtles survive to adulthood. Some that hatch near developed coastal areas crawl toward the bright lights of civilization and become disoriented and never make it to sea. Others get tangled in fishing nets.

An organization called Share the Beach recruits volunteers to find and protect turtle nests along 47 miles of beach in Alabama during egg-laying months, roughly May through October.

Dozens of the group's volunteers, clad in bright green shirts and caps, watched recently as their team leader, Sherry Parks, and wildlife biologist Bruce Porter extracted 127 turtle eggs from a nest on a windy Alabama beach dotted with pastel cottages.

Porter donned blue plastic gloves and used his hands to dig a basketball-size hole in the fine white sand, gingerly feeling for the eggs, which were packed 2 feet down. He marked each white egg with a grease pen, indicating which side was the top. Parks cautiously lifted the eggs into a cooler, where they were packed with other eggs from the nest.

Ron and Margaret-Mary Shellito, the husband-and-wife team driving the 1,000-plus miles back and forth to Cape Canaveral, have shipped NASA's Mars Rover and government missiles while working for the transport firm. But they have never handled turtle eggs.

“Maybe someday down the line our grandchildren can say we were part of saving a species,” Margaret-Mary Shellito said.

--Alana Semuels

Photos: Volunteers from Alabama's Share the Beach organization excavate 127 turtle eggs from a nest in Gulf Shores; a volunteer holds a Kemp's Ridley sea turtle before releasing it into the Gulf of Mexico. Credits: Carolyn Cole for the Times; AP Photo/Pat Sullivan

A while back, we wrote about the stargazing parties held by the Southern California Desert Video Astronomers in Joshua Tree. For the gatherings, local astronomy enthusiasts bring out their observatory-grade telescopes and project images of the stars on several large screens for curious observers.The organizers relay the intergalactic images through advanced techonology called MallinCams, which cost about $2,000 and have the ability to project clear, color images never previously seen by the amateur astronomer.

Campers can pitch their tents, pop open a beer and witness the universe through some seriously souped-up technology.

This weekend the group will be doing a patriotic viewing, exploring the moon's waning crescent half phase and zooming in on the craters named for those known for their connections to freedom and liberty. The party is free, but reservations for the Joshua Tree Lake Campground are recommended.

If you can't make it to the July 4 weekend events, check out the SCDVA's schedule of events, as they've got plenty more coming up this summer.

--Krista Simmons

Photo courtesy of SCDVA