Producer and director Aaron Woolf’s new film “King Corn” has provoked a rich debate among moviegoers about the wisdom of U.S. farm subsidies, but taking on big corn was so difficult  it has left him poor. 

The film profiles two recent East Coast college graduates, who after reading reports of the declining nutritional value of U.S. food,  move to Iowa to grow one acre of corn.

The neophyte farmers attempt to follow the corn they grow from the field to the plate and don’t always like what they see.  Family farmers tell them that U.S. subsidies and competition from big farms cause them to grow “the poorest quality corn the world’s ever seen.”  The two young men visit Colorado feed lots where scientists tell them that corn feed causes so many ulcers in cows that farmers have to pump them full of antibiotics. They go to Brooklyn, New York where doctors tell them that consumption of “liquid candy” soft drinks made with high fructose corn syrup have helped lead to high rates of diabetes in the city where one in eight people suffer from the disease.

Woolf said at a showing of the film at the Reuters Americas headquarters in New York this week that the film is $100,000 debt.  “This was a film that was really really hard to raise money for,” he said.  He said he could not afford to take on agricultural giants like Cargill and ADM in the film because, “It’s very hard to make a documentary in America and get corporate buy-in.”

Now Woolf has to moonlight in order to get back in the black, but he’s still concentrating on food - in a the next few weeks he will open an organic grocery store in Brooklyn.

Not everyone believes trading the right to pollute greenhouse gases will stop global warming, as vociferously demonstrated at a New York carbon conference.  Shouting “Renounce this treachery!” two self-dubbed “greenwash guerrillas” invaded a Point Carbon conference in New York’s Javits Center on Tuesday. The activists from a group called Rising Tide,  passed security posing as convention delegates. Then they rushed the stage just before U.S. Congressman Jay Inslee, a Washington Democrat, was set to speak.  The extreme greens, organic farmer Jessica Starr, and graphic artist David Lee, came down from their home Maine to bestow the 700 carbon traders, environmentalists, and bankers attending the meet with a deed to the sky, and a key to the sky.

Many environmental groups support carbon trading, believing it can unleash the power of capitalism to support innovation that will reduce emissions blamed for warming the earth. They cite similar U.S. markets that cut acid rain pollution. Carbon markets work by setting an emissions level that industry must meet. Heavy greenhouse gas emitters, like coal-fired power plants, can buy credits from companies and countries that invest in carbon cutting projects to meet their limits.  Billions of dollars worth of credits have traded in such markets, mainly in the European Union.

But some greens believe carbon trading in effect privatizes the atmosphere under false pretenses.  At best it puts money in the pockets of traders and brokers for projects that probably would have eventually happened anyway, and at worst could support energy sources and technologies that could increase emissions or other environmental and social problems, they say.

Point Carbon workers escorted the activists from the stage without bothering to alert convention security. ”It’s not fun to have people to take over your stage,” said Veronique Bugnion, Point Carbon’s North America director. But she took pride in the fact that interest in carbon markets in the United States, the only developed country besides Australia that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, is rising. “It means the subject is important enough to notice one way or the other.”

Not everyone got the message. One delegate from a New York-based company that identifies carbon reduction opportunities in India said she had no idea the conference had been invaded. “I thought it was a congratulatory thing, kind of a ‘thanks’ for figuring out how to fight global warming,” she said.

It sounds like Rising Tide will be polishing its techniques. Brian Sloan, who does outreach for the group, vowed that Tuesday’s invasion was the just the kickoff of a campaign against “false solutions” and that greenwash guerillas could soon invade a venue near you.

How would you rate the infiltration?

There’s a growing buzz about making renewable fuel biodiesel from farmed algae. Single celled algae are some of the planet’s oldest, fastest multiplying forms of life. They also happen to have a big hunger for greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, and the resulting biodiesel could cut emissions from cars. Scientists have been talking about it for decades and the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab will soon reopen federal research into making fuel from pond scum. Small companies are venturing in too.  Since the greenhouses where algae is farmed can be built in marginal areas like deserts or scrub lands, growing feedstock for the fuel shouldn’t take up rich farm land — one of the downsides of U.S. ethanol made from corn. To be sure, algae oil has a long journey if it will ever be a viable source of motor fuel. So far major oil companies have mostly ignored it. And corn farmers have big friends in the U.S. Congress that could keep that business dominating the biofuels scene. But Glen Kertz, a plant scientist and CEO of algae company Valcent Products. Inc, says an algae lobby is forming this year. Big Oil. Big Corn. What do you think? Will Big Algae ever take shape?

Steve Sillett smiled as he told a recent after-hours gathering at New York’s American Museum of Natural History about the slice of the Mark Twain redwood tree.

Loggers cut down the tree in 1891. A slice was sent from California to the U.S. East Coast and wound up in the museum to teach the rest of the country about the mammoth trees, still believed to be the largest beings that have ever lived on the planet.

Now Sillett has his own message about redwoods.

The botanist, profiled in Richard Preston’s recent book, “The Wild Trees” has climbed some of the tallest known redwoods. Hundreds of feet high in the canopy he discovered the trees support a lost world of plants and animals, some of them previously unknown to scientists.

Pink earthworms, lungless salamanders, and plankton live in the soil and water that collects in spaces of the trees where lightening and wind storms have broken off their trunks and limbs. Bushes, lichen and other trees also live high up in the redwoods, which can grow new trucks when the old ones rot off after injury. After studying a plot of more than 100 redwoods for 10 years, Sillett found only a handful of the gnarliest, injured trees supported the great variety of life. The trees that were not hit by storms, some of them the tallest of the bunch, supported almost no other life. He calls them “boring.” Before loggers cut down 96 percent of the original redwood stands, the great diversity of life supported by the gnarly trees probably spanned from Big Sur, California to Southern Oregon.

“If we were going to try to restore old growth forest, it might be actually feasible to focus our attention on a few trees in the forest because those trees are carrying the bulk of the diversity,” Sillett told the gathering at the museum. He wants to accelerate the development of the canopy. “I think it can be done by strategic injury of the tree without compromising their health,” he said.

After the talk he told me the “injuries” he hopes to inflict are cutting off trunks and pulling down limbs of a small sample of redwoods that haven’t been hit by storms.

“I think we might be able to get some of these characteristics back into our managed forest landscape a heck of a lot sooner than if we just drew a line around it and protected it,” he said.

Natural injuries that create gnarly, interesting trees take thousands of years. Sillett hopes that with strategic injuries the remaining redwood stands can begin to be transformed into a kind of a coral reef of the sky in about 100 years.

At this year’s Taste of Chicago, billed as the world’s largest food festival, people weren’t the only ones digesting. Steps from the stands operated by city restaurants serving up delights like crawfish boils and turtle soup, red wigglers slithered in bins filled with rotting lettuce and carrot peels.

Volunteers from the University of Illinois brought the worms to the Taste to teach city dwellers how to make nutrient-rich soil from table scraps.

“People living in high rises can’t have compost bins, their neighbors won’t let them,” said Bill Rattan, who is studying to become a master gardener at the University of Illinois and was one of the volunteers who brought the worms to the 10-day feast.

“With a box of worms that they can put in their kitchen or on their balconies, they can turn their garbage into soil.”

Worm lovers say the practice — called vermicomposting — is environmentally sound because it saves fuel used to cart garbage to landfills. And the soil made by the worms is so full of nutrients it can replace chemical fertilizers.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says one pound of red wigglers, or about 800 to 1,000 of the worms , can eat up to half a pound of vegetable scraps a day.

Worms are good composters because their guts kill bacteria harmful to plants, also eliminating foul smells, and their castings, or excrement, are loaded with beneficial bacteria.

Cities on the West Coast like Seattle that have mandated reductions in their trash streams have been vermicomposting for years.

“The last four or five years have just been phenomenal, said Debbie Anderson at Rising Mist Organic Farm in Kansas who has sold worms and vermicomposting products for 7 years. “I’m just rushing to keep up with orders.”

Over the last two years her orders for worms have been growing from New York city. “Doormen see on the packages that tenants are getting worms and pretty soon more people from the same apartment building want worms,” she said. “It’s all part of recycling becoming more mainstream.”

The farm sells bags of pure worm castings for $21.50 per 10 pounds. It recently sold two tractor trailers worth of castings to the University of Wisconsin.