permaculture

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe@silcom.com>]

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”.