[Lapg] Bioremediating New Orleans: Round Two Begins

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

Bioremediating New Orleans:  Round Two Begins

By Starhawk



2-10-06



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 one s 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.



2-13-06



Two days of intense research, followed by the forum and two days of 
training.  The forum went well, with about a hundred people crowded into 
the gutted front room of the church that is hosting Common Ground s 
Community Center on the east side of town.  We had the usual technical 
problems Juniper s great maps that showed so clearly on the computer didn t 
show up at all when projected onscreen, but otherwise lots of good 
information and enthusiasm.



Because of the hurricane, the EPA has now tested New Orleans for a whole 
host of contaminants. The EPA has not tested the back yards of Brooklyn or 
Chicago or Detroit but chances are if they did they would find many of the 
same contaminants as in New Orleans. Katrina didn t create the arsenic or 
the diesel fuels, she just spread them around.   Some came from industrial 
spills and refineries, of course.  But the lead and the arsenic, probably 
the most wide-spread contaminants, were already in the soil. Louisiana has 
a generally high background level of arsenic in its soils, but much of what 
is here now probably comes from using treated lumber, herbicides, 
pesticides and lawn chemicals.  One piece of data seems to highlight this 
issue:  the Sun Done garden, an organic garden for fifteen years, tests in 
the safe zone for all the major contaminants, including arsenic.  Other 
backyards, just a few blocks away, test high.  Thinking about how to 
bioremediate these toxins brings us back around to think about how insane 
it is to be putting them onto the ground in the first place.  On the larger 
scale, bioremediation means learning to grow food organically and live 
sustainably I the first place.



Saturday we began our training at the Sun Done Community Garden, one of 
sixty coordinated by a nonprofit called Parkway Partners.  It s a big piece 
of ground, maybe half an acre, tucked between the back yards of houses in a 
residential area that flooded heavily and is still mostly deserted.  When I 
was here in November, the garden was a shambles, the greenhouse in pieces 
on the ground, only one or two beds in shape to plant.  Now, the Common 
Ground crew, spurred by Lisa and Emily, have done a miraculous work of 
transformation.  The raised beds and reconfigured and are growing greens 
and vegetables that we ve been eating at the Community Center.  The 
greenhouse has been re-erected, covered with new plastic, and fittled with 
gutters and rain catchment that have filled half a dozen barrels of water 
from last night s downpour.  There s a small compost toilet in the back and 
room for seating and training inside the greenhouse.



We were expecting somewhere between ten and thirty people, and made 
handouts for fifty, thinking we d have extras.  But people begin swarming 
in, and soon the greenhouse is filled and overflowing.



We spend the day going over the toxins that have been found in New Orleans 
soil, and the three basic methods of bioremediating them using 
microorganisms, using fungi and mushrooms, and using plants.  We divide 
people into different groups for hands-on practice, making compost, 
starting worm bins (worm castings are the major source for the 
microorganisms we culture), starting seeds and taking cuttings, and 
inoculating strata with mushroom spawn.



And then we spent Sunday teaching about fungi and using plants to 
accumulate heavy metals. Part of our project will be to put up a website 
with all our data and information, and to do some documented trials to 
learn much, much more about how all this might work.  There s lots more to 
tell, but I m going to send this first report out now, while I have 
internet access.  More later, Starhawk



Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of The Earth Path, Webs of 
Power: Notes from the Global Uprisin, The Fifth SacredThing 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 <http://www.earthactivisttraining.org/> and 
works with the RANT trainer s collective, www.rantcollective.net 
<http://www.rantcollective.net/>  that offers training and support for 
mobilizations around global justice and peace issues.



Donations to support the work can be made at

www.rantcollective.net <http://www.rantcollective.net/>



Tax deductible checks can be sent to:



Tax deductible donations can also be sent to:
ACT
1405 Hillmount St.
Austin, Texas
78704
U.S.A.Sta
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Starhawk is a lifelong activist in peace and global justice movements, a 
leader in the feminist and earth-based spirituality movements, author or 
coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, 
Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, and her latest, The Earth 
Path.

Starhawk's website is www.starhawk.org, and more of her writings and 
information on her schedule and activities can be found there.
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