permaculture

["sunsh8ine" <nature1@uniserve.com>]

"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.