Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - [permaculture] NEW PERMACULTURE BOOK A Grassroots Guide to Healing Toxic and Damaged Landscapes EARTH REPAIR by Leila Darwish

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe@silcom.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] NEW PERMACULTURE BOOK A Grassroots Guide to Healing Toxic and Damaged Landscapes EARTH REPAIR by Leila Darwish
  • Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2015 06:15:07 -0700

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”.






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page