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  • From: "sunsh8ine" <nature1@uniserve.com>
  • To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Bioremediation in New Orleans
  • Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 02:46:55 -0800


"War will stop when we no longer praise it." Alice Walker, in The Universal
Response - Living With the Word
Bioremediation in New Orleans







By Starhawk

I'm just bac k from another week in New Orleans. This time three
of us, myself, Juniper and Scotty, had a special mission-to set up a small
bioremediation demonstration as a beginning seed for a long term project.
Over Thanksgiving Week, Common Ground has sponsored the Road Trip for
Relief, an effort to bring hundreds of volunteers into the Ninth Ward, one of
the areas most devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

"Bioremediation" means cleaning soil and water and restoring it
to health using biological allies: beneficial bacteria, plants, and fungi.
Restoration on the scale of New Orleans is, of course, a huge and
overwhelming project. Nevertheless, there are many techniques that are
fairly simple, natural, and applicable on a small scale, and Common Ground
has been working on a proposal to fund and train a worker's cooperative that
would be able to put them into practice.

The first stage of this whole process, of course, is finding out
what toxins are actually present. For the last two months, Juniper, an
environmental engineer, has been taking soil samples from many areas in New
Orleans, getting them tested, and collating data from other organizations.
What she's found is that, while there are certainly hot spots of
contamination, most of New Orleans is no worse than it was before the flood.
Lead and arsenic are fairly common-but they were present before the flood,
the result of generations of lead paint on old buildings, auto exhaust, and
chemicals applied to lawns to kill dandelions. In some places, anything from
oil tanks to household chemicals may have spilled, and residues remain.
Water borne disease germs are less of an issue now that most areas have dried
out and been exposed to sunlight.

There are two great sources of inspiration for our work this last
week. One is Dr. Elaine Ingham, www.soilfoodweb.org
<http://www.soilfoodweb.org/> , an expert on soil biology and the brewing up
of compost teas full of beneficial bacteria that can break down toxins and
restore life to the soil. The other is Paul Stametz, www.fungi.com
<http://www.fungi.com/> , who does pioneering work on the use of mushrooms
and beneficial fungi to clean up toxic soil. Scott Kellogg, who has studied
with both of them, works with the Rhizome Collective in Austin, which has
transformed an old warehouse into an educational and social center, and is
bioremediating a large brownfield (damaged, toxic land) to restore it to
health and become an environmental education center. He has studied with
both Elaine Ingham and Paul Stametz, and has brought down a pump and barrels
to set up a hundred gallon compost tea brewery.

So, over the last week, we've made contact with a number of the
really great people in New Orleans who are already doing sustainability work:
the New Orleans Farm and Food Network, Parkway Partners, the Laughing Crow
nursery, the Laughing Buddha nursery, and others. We've done a small
training for local people at the home of a woman who has already had lead
abatement done in her backyard before the hurricane. We've done a training
for forty-fifty of the volunteers who have come down for the Roadtrip, and
got them all excited and inspired. We've started a small amount of oyster
mushrooms growing in coffee grounds, created a Powerpoint on bioremediation
and several visual displays, sheet mulched a small piece of ground that was
covered with garbage, built a compost bin, and brewed up 100 gallons of
bioremediation brew. After I had to leave, Juniper and Scotty led a group to
apply the brew to our little sheet mulched patch by the warehouse, and to two
other sites that had been identified as needing remediation. We also put in
a graywater system for the outdoor showers, consulted on the solar hot water
heating and its augmentation by a kettle over a wood fire.

The week went fast. Doing projects in New Orleans, I've found,
can be hellish or easy. The easy part is a result of the grim aftermath of
the flood: there are lots of resources around to scavenge. It's as if
everyone in New Orleans opened their door and shoveled out all or most of
their belonging onto the street, They are all ruined and moldy, of course,
but among them are things that can be salvaged, wood and building materials
that can be reused, and almost anything you might think of. So, in driving
around looking for 2 x 4s for the shower builders, I found a huge plastic tub
with holes in the bottom, perfect for a compost bin, and an equally large
stainless steel tub. Taking a wrong turn on my way to the bridge one
morning, I passed a stack of giant cardboard boxes, perfect for sheet mulch.
The round, bamboo skeleton of a broken swing chair made a perfect cover for
the compost.

The hellish aspect is that if you need something specific, a
plumbing part or a valve that fits a particular pipe, and you don't happen to
have it, the hardware and plumbing stores that are open are usually far away
and suck energy like collapsing dwarf stars. Enter in, and you may never
emerge. After frustrating hours in the Home Depot Line, you escape
gratefully, and almost always immediately remember something you forgot to
buy. If you don't remember it at that moment, you remember it as soon as you
get back to the worksite.

The solar showers, cobbled together out of the innards of
discarded water heaters, plywood boxes and pieces of plastic, fed with
enormously long hoses, were simple in design but extremely complicated to put
together. And at best, they would provide a very inadequate amount of hot
water for the number of people who needed to shower. We're praying for a
miracle, like the lamp of sacred oil in the Chanukah story, enough to last
only for a day that lasted eight days. I'm telling the Goddess that if she
makes that sixty gallons of possibly only lukewarm water provide hot showers
for a hundred and fifty people, I'll declare a new festival in her honor, and
every year we'll make little replicas of solar hot water heaters and give
presents to dirty children. But just in case, we build a firepit.

The police in Algiers have continued to harass Common Ground.
One morning they arrest Jimmy, a sweet-faced young man who looks as innocent
and sunny as an eight year old child, for double parking while he is loading
supplies from the depot. This takes time and energy to deal with, just as we
are preparing for the arrival of the hordes of willing workers. But in the
ninth ward, the police are more chill. New Orleans has a law that police
have to live in the districts where they work, so the Ninth Ward cops have
all lost their homes, and many have lost friends and family members. They
appreciate that people have come down here to help.

The other heavenly part of work down here is that you get to hang
out with people at their best-people who have come to do something good for
other people, who have volunteered to live in uncomfortable conditions and
take on some truly nasty, dirty jobs-cleaning out black mold, for
instance-just because they want to help. There's always a lot of stress in
these situations, and people don't always get along perfectly. There are
irritations and frustrations. But overall, it's just really, really good to
be with people who are actively doing something to help a really bad
situation.

And their work inspires generosity. Kaysey and Nick from the
Covington Farmers' Market come down and cook our opening meal. She had
offered to cook a meal for us but didn't originally bargain on feeding a
hundred and fifty of our friends But she graciously rose to the occasion,
producing a fragrant and delicious meal of rice and beans with fresh produce
and fresh-baked breads. Meanwhile, a group from the Mission from Minnesota
who have been sending truckloads of supplies down to Mississippi for weeks
manages to get more donations than they need, and spends the money on eight
hundred pounds of turkey for Common Ground's Thanksgiving feast.

Generosity generates abundance. That's something the idealogues
of greed don't get. "Solidarity, not charity' is Common Ground's motto, and
people feel good when they are standing in solidarity with others, giving of
themselves, doing something instead of feeling helpless. The tragedy and
destruction here have been immense.

But so is the hope.



Starhawk

www.starhawk.org <http://www.starhawk.org/>



Feel free to post, forward, and reprint this article for non-commercial
purposes. All other rights reserved.



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.



Hundreds of groups are collecting money to aid hurricane victims. If you
want to help the efforts of these grassroots groups, you can donate directly
to Common Ground at their website:



www.commongroundrelief.org <http://www.commongroundrelief.org/>



www.pagancluster.org <http://www.pagancluster.org/>



Tax deductible donations can also be sent to:

ACT
1405 Hillmount St.
Austin, Texas
78704
U.S.A.



Come join us! If you have skills to offer, particularly medical training,
building skills, child care experience, counseling, or just a general
willingness to clean up garbage and do what needs to be done, there is lots
of work to do. Volunteers will be needed for months to come, as relief turns
to rebuilding. You can come for a short time or the long term.



For more information:
An e-mail to katrina@pagancluster.org will get a response as soon as possible.

There is also useful and updated information at the following web-sites:

http://www.commongroundrelief.org/

http://www.pagancluster.org/
http://www.vfproadtrips.org/




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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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