[Orange County, CA Permaculture] NEW PERMACULTURE BOOK A Grassroots Guide to Healing Toxic and Damaged Landscapes EARTH REPAIR by Leila Darwish

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

NEW PERMACULTURE BOOK
A Grassroots Guide to Healing Toxic and Damaged Landscapes 
EARTH REPAIR  by Leila Darwish http://earthrepair.ca

Millions of acres of land have been contaminated by pesticides, improperly handled chemicals, dirty energy projects, toxic waste, and other pollutants in Canada and the United States. This toxic legacy impacts the environment, our health, our watersheds, and land that could otherwise be used to grow healthy local food and medicines. Conventional clean-up techniques employed by government and industry are not only incredibly expensive and resource-intensive, but can also cause further damage to the environment. More and more communities find themselves increasingly unable to rely on those companies and governments who created the problems to step in and provide solutions.


How can we, the grassroots, work with the power of living systems to truly heal and transform toxic and damaged landscapes into thriving, healthy, and fertile places once more? How can we respond to environmental disasters in accessible and community empowering ways?

Earth Repair explores a host of powerful grassroots bioremediation techniques to assist with the recovery of the lands that nourish us, and to support the work many of us do everyday to grow healthy food and medicine amidst the polluted and damaged soils of our backyard gardens, community commons, and wild lands.

These techniques include:

Microbial remediation – using microorganisms to break down and bind contaminants
Phytoremediation – using plants to extract, bind, and transform toxins
Mycoremediation – using fungi to clean up contaminated soil and water.
Packed with valuable, firsthand information, recipes and remedies from visionaries in the field, Earth Repair empowers communities and individuals to take action and heal contaminated and damaged land. Encompassing everything from remediating and regenerating abandoned city lots for urban farmers and gardeners, to responding and recovering from environmental disasters and industrial catastrophes such as oil spills and nuclear fallout, this fertile toolbox is essential reading for anyone who wishes to transform environmental despair into constructive action.

Earth Repair was written to share helpful tools, skills, and inspiration with the many passionate folks who care deeply about the healing, regeneration, and resilience of the earth and their communities. It is a labor of love and research inspiration that comes from the work and the shared experience of many humble and inspiring earth workers, healers, and defenders. It is just a beginning exploration into the deep, vast, and living territories of grassroots bioremediation, one which I hope you will join me on and add to with your own forays, organizing, learning, skill sharing, and experiences. Earth Repair is not intended to be a one size fits all, new trendy solution of the day silver bullet book. When it comes to contamination and environmental damage, we are dealing with pretty serious stuff, that in many cases have accumulated over many many years. Every site is different, every landscape has a hidden history to uncover and its own unique web of life that needs to be reconnected and revived. This work will not be quick or glamorous, but it will be meaningful and should be approached with respect, ingenuity, creativity, and determination. It is a calling and responsibility that many of us are feeling a deep heartfelt need to answer. Many of the methods and tools profiled in the book are just to get us started on this evolving healing experiment. They are not guaranteed to work and they still have a lot of refining and growing up to do in their applications. Many of the stories shared are as much inspiration as cautionary tales. To do this work, we must learn about the foundations of the systems whose healing we are trying to assist. The true grassroots remediator is not someone who believes that mushrooms will save the world and wants to apply them to every situation. Instead they are willing to consider that we have many tools and allies at our disposal, that a lot of these work best in concert or in succession, and that the environmental conditions of the sites we are working with may favor one tool over another – again, there is no one size fits all approach. Earth Repair is a humble start of a compilation and toolkit of what we have at our disposal right now to repair our ecologies, our landscapes, our relations, our life support systems, and by default ourselves

A Glance at the Table of Contents

Introduction: A Manualfesto
Chapter 1: Decolonization and Environmental Justice
Chapter 2: Earth Repair and Grassroots Bioremediation
Chapter 3: Grassroots Bioremediation – Getting Started
Chapter 4: Microbial Remediation
Chapter 5: Phytoremediation
Chapter 6: Mycoremediation
Chapter 7: The Art of Healing Water
Chapter 8: Oil Spills – The Anatomy of an Environmental Disaster
Chapter 9: Oil Spills – Tools for the Grassroots Bioremediator
Chapter 10: Nuclear Energy and Remediating Radiation
Chapter 11: Self-Care for Earth Repair Responders and Healers Conclusion: Final Words for a Fertile Way Forward
Appendix 1: Contaminants 101
Appendix 2: Conventional Remediation Techniques

Leila Darwish is a community organizer, author, permaculture designer, educator, urban gardener, and grassroots herbalist with a deep commitment to environmental justice, decolonization, food sovereignty, and to providing accessible and transformative tools for communities dealing with toxic contamination of their land and drinking water.

Over the last decade, she has worked as a community organizer for different environmental organizations and community groups in Alberta, BC and the USA on campaigns such as tar sands, fracking, nuclear energy, coal, climate justice, water protection, and more. She has taught grassroots bioremediation for a diversity of groups and communities in Canada and the USA and just published her first book through New Society Publishers. It’s called “Earth Repair: A Grassroots Guide to Healing Toxic and Damaged Landscapes”.

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