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Bioremediating New Orleans: Round Two Begins
by Starhawk
February 13, 2006
Flying into New Orleans reading Jared Diamond's Collapse, a whole history of societies throughout history that have collapsed, mostly through destroying their environment, deforestation, soil erosion, and related mistakes. I can't help thinking that historians of the future will look back on New Orleans' destruction in last summers' hurricanes with the same kind of incredulity as we ponder the Easter Islanders' cutting of their last trees. "How could they not have seen what they were doing?" they might ask. "They knew that hurricanes would come, that the levees were inadequate." That historian might go on to mark the summer of the hurricanes as the watershed moment for the American Empire, the point where its collapse became evident, if not in the lack of preparations for the disaster, then in the utter failure of every major institution to respond adequately. "It wasn't the beginning of the end, but it was the point where the end became visible."
Or not. They might come to a different conclusions. If they were here with me in the Common Ground office called the House of Excellence, sitting in on our Bioremediation team meeting, watching Emily's eyes light up with excitement as she says, "We're really doing it - we're really going to clean the whole thing up!" In the front room is a bank of computers with open, free internet access open to the community. In the side rooms are offices, a small kitchen. A young man with wild, dark hair spends half an hour reading one of the Narnia books to a three young girls here for daycare. Jen, Randy, Juniper and I are all deep in books on phytoremediation and beneficial fungi and compost teas and doing computer searches as we pull together the material for tomorrow's public forum on the toxic residues here in New Orleans and our plan for the weekend's bioremediation training. Working with these young women - it's like having a team of Hermione Graingers at our disposal, young, incredibly smart, beautiful, and willing to dive into books and internet sites and come up with answers to almost any question, if answers exist. Juniper, who middle aged, beautiful and incredibly smart, and in fact in her day job is a respected environmental engineer, shows us her map - she has taken the EPA testing data, 75,000 pieces of information posted on their website in obscure and intimidating detail, put it together with her own data and plotted it on a map that shows the sites tested and the toxins found for all of New Orleans.
Now that we know where the hot spots are, (or at least, the ones they've tested) and what the problems are, we can decide what will be the most effective ways to clean them up, using beneficial bacteria, or mushrooms, or plants. It sounds simple, but there are many complexities. Petrochemicals can be broken down by bacteria and fungi, but heavy metals are elements, and can't be broken down. Some plants and mushrooms will extract them from the soil, but some of them need different conditions to work well. Lead, for example, is most soluble when the soil is acidic, and needs special chelating agents to be taken up in quantities. Arsenic, one of the most common pollutants, is most soluble when the soil is alkaline. We can find references to plants that will take it up, but where the hell do we get seeds for Alpine Pennycress or spores of Ladder Brakefern? The methods we would use to uptake metals in plants are exactly contradictory to those we might use to bind them into the soil in a form that will be less harmful to other life forms. Which do we do?
It's exciting. It's also uncharted territory. Lots of people have worked on bioremediation, in the lab, on highly toxic sites, in well funded cleanup efforts. We don't know of anyone who has tried it on a low-budget, mass movement backyard scale.
Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of The Earth Path, Webs
of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, The Fifth Sacred Thing and other
books on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality. She teaches
Earth Activist Trainings that combine permaculture design and activist
skills, www.earthactivisttraining.org
Donations to help support Starhawk's trainings and work can be sent to:
ACT
1405 Hillmount Street
Austin, Texas 78704
USA