Local pub

Not far from us, in Newtownmoneenalunagh. That's not a typo.

Published at First Things

Good news, everyone; First Things, a superb Christian magazine that I've been reading for years (note the blogroll on the side there), has just published a piece I wrote about folk music through the generations. It's behind a paywall, but not expensive to buy. Check it out.

Days of the forges

My first memory is of the forge; I don’t know what age. It’s a memory filled with sounds and smells, the sounds of men’s voices and the clatter of hooves coming down the street, another horse on its way, people warning me to stay out of the way and to watch the hind legs, of course. It was like a painting all crowded with people.

I remember as a child I turned the light on for my father -- I had to use a stick to reach the switch, I was so small. I must have been holding this iron for my father in the yard, and he struck before I removed my hand from the place, and he hit my thumb with the sledgehammer, and all that was troubling me was that I might curse – I remember the trouble he went to stop me cursing at the time.

You can imagine there were a lot of carts at the time, and those wheels had metal bands, so blacksmiths were kept in business until a few decades ago.

Every anvil must have its own musical tone when struck, and you could tell at a distance whose it was. I remember this anvil, and it was different than any before or since.

--  Remembrances of a blacksmithing apprentice on Radio Telefis Eireann, June 2013.

Farm work

"My father was one man and ten men. He was the local vet here. He was the butcher. He was a storyteller. He was a farmer. And everything that was to be done in the village, he was involved in it. And he was the slaughterman.

There were many here who killed pigs, but my father was the best – every time he stuck a pig, the heart rent in two halves when you opened it. Then he’d go to Scotland in June, do the little bit of the harvest we had to do. Come home at Christmas with a few pounds. He might buy a few cows or pigs and sell them again in March for the price of going over again to Scotland. I began going there myself, to help with the harvest, when I was eleven. 

You got the boat on the north wall of Dublin – a boat full of cattle. Eighteen hours at sea, in a hold I cannot describe. When you got to Scotland the cattle were let off, and when the boat went to Clyde and we were let off, not much different than the cattle.

You had to keep a steady pace picking the potatoes; you put a 13-year-old out at this day and age at a 30-yards, you think they'd be able to?

At the end of the day, when you were done with the harvest, you had to make your own bed. I mean you actually built one – you got a tick, filled it with straw, and packed it between vegetable boxes."

- Remembrances of Irish growing up in the mid-20th century, as recorded in an interview by Radio Telefis Eireann documentary "Leaving Belmullet," 2005. Photo used with permission of Irish History Links

Men of the island

"There was a hat which was left on some kind of post or other. At the time, the men of Achill would have worn a cap, but when going into town … he would put on this formal hat and then leave it again when he returned"

"Paul Henry, who visited the island in 1912, said that 'the habitations of the islanders are very singular. Their houses were of rude stones rounded by the tide, procured from the beach, un-cemented.'"

"They are rounded at the gables and roofed with fern, heath and shingles, fastened with straw bands. In the village of Dua, consisting of about 40 cabins, there is not a single chimney. Some of the wealthier graziers, however, have an odd custom of residing in such houses, or in houses of a still more simple construction, only in the summer months, when the season for fishing is on, and their cattle are brought down to the coast to feed on the young herbage. These hovels they call Booley houses."

"At one point Henry reported watching a race of two men around the island, for the right to be the first to ask a certain woman to marry them, 'which was by no means uncommon.'"

-- From interviews on the Radio Telefis Eireann documentary "Leave Your Hat at the Sound," broadcast 1974. Photo of the men of Aran island, courtesy of Irishhistorylinks.com. 

My article on Ferguson published at American Conservative

Check it out. 

I admit it's unusual for me to write something about current events; this blog, and most of my writings for Grit and Mother Earth News, deals broadly with traditional ways of life. That still covers a lot of ground, so on any given day this blog might cover things like:

• Interviews with elderly people here, who remember life before electricity or cars; 
• Archived stories on everyday life in Ireland from several decades ago; 
• Our attempts to grow and make more things ourselves; 
• Articles I write for popular magazines, like Grit and Mother Earth News;
• My not-quite-homeschooling lessons with my daughter; 
• Recipes I come up with with traditional life, and 
• Pretty pictures.

I usually stay away from anything overtly political, as I want to stick to subjects I know well. Since I grew up next door to Ferguson, Missouri and have friends and family in the area, this is something that --- literally -- hits home for me.

I'm pleased The American Conservative wanted to run my piece. Even if you're of a more left-of-center bent, as at least a few of my readers are, I recommend you read TAC; they represent a thoughtful, principled kind of conservatism that contrasts sharply with some of the sneering and taunting I used to hear, from both sides, in the mainstream US media. They've run other pieces of mine in the past --  this about peak oil, and this about the collapse of the Irish economy.

More tomorrow.

.....and we're back.

Scotland was fantastic -- more on that later.

For now, I will just say that when we returned to the world of phones and internet, I found that the place near where I grew up, in Ferguson, Missouri, was a war zone. My family and friends are okay, and my sympathies go out to everyone caught in the middle of the tragedy.

I wrote a piece about it, and expect it to be published in the next few days -- more on that this week.

Off for the week

The Girl and I are on holiday in Glasgow; don't be offended if I take a few days to answer correspondence. More next week.

New at Grit magazine: Using plants to clean contaminated soil

New article here.

In the last couple of centuries humans have done a strange thing: we’ve dug the biggest pits, the deepest holes, and the longest tunnels the world has ever seen, all to find the most insidious and subtle poisons known to our mammalian bodies, remove them from deep inside rocks where they had lain sequestered for eons, and concentrate them in the places where most of us live. We’re starting to think this maybe wasn’t a good idea.

Take lead, which last- century humans put into containers, car parts, pipes, paints and many other products -- and even in petroleum, spreading lead-tainted exhaust across a world. Lead causes brain damage and erratic behaviour if absorbed into the human body, and its rise and fall correlates with the US crime rate in the 20^th century – the more lead was around children, the more crime appeared a generation later. It’s been banned from paints and auto fuel, of course, but it lingers on old buildings and in soil.

Or take mercury: burning coal releases it into air and water, and thence into animals like fish – a  2009 study by the US Geological Survey tested 300 streams across the USA and found that every fish tested contained mercury, a quarter at unsafe levels.

You could go on with a list of such heavy metals – cadmium, zinc, copper – right down the periodic table. Most of all, we have pulled out coal and oil and used it not just to fuel up the car and turn on the lights, but to generate hundreds of thousands of petrochemicals with unpronounceable names as long as sentences and often-unpleasant effects.

I say “we,” of course, but this isn’t a guilt trip; most of this was before your time, and you didn’t vote for it anyway. You and I use small amounts of heavy metals and fossil fuels in our own lives – driving, flying, heating, buying plastic products, just looking at this on a computer – but it’s very difficult to avoid doing so and still living in the modern world.

The consequence of so many people doing so many of these things, though, is that any urban area --- and many rural ones – will have splotches on the map with large quantities of toxic materials in the ground. If you live where a gasoline station used to be, or a factory, a garbage dump, or any number of other things, you might have things in your soil you don’t want in your stroganoff.

If you think you just won’t live in places, or just move away from them, congratulations: you’re thinking the same thing as everyone else. That presents a problem, as everyone who can live somewhere else will do so, and everyone who can’t live somewhere else will live on contaminated sites. Realistically, this means the poor, the elderly and other vulnerable people have to live with everyone else’s toxic waste – which is often the case already.

Other methods, like removing tonnes of contaminated soil, involve years of work and vast sums of money we don’t have anymore. If you could remove all the affected soil, moreover, where would you put it, aside from somewhere else that would then be contaminated?

What we need is a device that can suck toxins out of the soil and either turn them into something harmless, or concentrate them in something lightweight and removable. No one has much money lying around to invent such a device, though, much less to manufacture millions of them and send them to sites around the world for free. Thus, these hypothetical devices would be even better if they already appeared around the world, or were lightweight and easily transportable.

It would be best, in fact, if these machines cost nothing to create, and once created could make more of themselves, at an exponential rate. While we’re at it, it would also be nice if the devices also prevented soil erosion, fed bees and other pollinators, and provided shade, beauty, a home for wildlife, and possibly firewood.

Thankfully, we have these machines now. Certain plants, it turns out, have a particular gift for sucking up specific chemicals, either as a quirk of their biology or as a way to make themselves poisonous and avoid being eaten. When these plants are sown on contaminated ground, they absorb the contaminants into their tissues, gradually reducing the amount in the soil until it is safe for humans.

Called phyto-remediation, this process has become one of the newest and most promising fields of biology. Similar methods use mushrooms in what is called myco-remediation, or use bacteria and have unfortunate names like bio-sparging, bio-slurping and bio-venting, but we’ll restrict ourselves here to plants.

The basic method is straightforward: find out what toxins lurk in your patch of ground, and come up with a regimen of plants appropriate for the climate that hyper-accumulate those particular toxins.

“Toxins,” of course, covers a lot of ground, and the vagueness of the word allows it to be used in all kinds of unproductive ways – for example, every fake New Age cure that claims to rid your body of unspecified “toxins.” So to get more specific, let’s separate toxins into two of the most common categories: metals and petrochemicals.

Petrochemicals generally have familiar atoms like carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, the same things that make up chocolate sundaes, flower gardens, testosterone, newspaper, and most of the world around us. Those same elements in different combinations, however, make common but un-tasty compounds like gasoline, or lethal poisons like Agent Orange -- it’s all in how many atoms are put together in what arrangement.

If a plant can absorb, let’s say, the cancer-causing benzo-pyrene – C20H12, found in coal tar – with some oxygen (O) and then separate it into C12H22O11 and H2O, the petroleum-based poison would become sugar water. I’m not saying this is the actual chemical process, by the way – just an example of how chemical combinations can make something deadly or delicious.

When the toxins are metals, of course, they cannot be broken down into other elements any more than lead could be changed to gold. Some plants can absorb the metal and metabolise it into some kind of molecule, however, making it less easy to be absorbed by the human body and thus safer to be around. Sometimes the metals can even help us; some biologists have even proposed using certain edible plants to accumulate zinc from contaminated soils and feeding the plants to people with a zinc deficiency.

After the plants are harvested with the metals concentrated in their tissues, they can be burned, and the metal stays in the ash – a small amount of space and weight to dispose of, compared to the tonnes of contaminated earth. The ash might even be able to be mined for the metals, for complete recycling.

One example comes from Brazil, where abandoned gold mines are leaking mercury and other heavy metals into the soil and water. Mercury is one of the most toxic of heavy metals, and once in the soil it is soaked up by grass, which is eaten by cows, which are eaten by … you get the idea. Farmers are now growing maize and canola plants in the area, though, which soak up heavy metals quite nicely – gold as well as mercury. One scientists overseeing the project estimated farmers could get a kilogram of gold per hectare from doing this, which would help pay for the clean-up.

Mustard greens were used to remove 45% of the excess lead from a yard in Boston to ensure the safety of children who play there. Pumpkin vines were used to clean up an old Magic Marker factory site in Trenton, New Jersey, while Alpine pennycress helped clean up abandoned mines in Britain. Hydroponically grown sunflowers were used to absorb radioactive metals near the Chernobyl nuclear site in the Ukraine as well as a uranium plant in Ohio.

Blue Sheep fescue helps clean up lead, as do water ferns and members of the cabbage family. Smooth water hyssop takes up copper and mercury, while water hyacinths suck up mercury, lead, cadmium, zinc, cesium, strontium-90, uranium and various pesticides. Sunflowers slurp a wide range of compounds – not just the uranium and strontium-90 from radioactive sites, but also cesium, methyl bromide and many more. Bladder campion accumulates zinc and copper, while Indian mustard greens concentrate selenium, sulphur, lead, chromium, cadmium, nickel, zinc, and copper.

Perhaps the most magnificent hyperaccumulator, though, is the simple willow tree, Salix viminalis; it slurps up copper, zinc, cadmium, selenium, silver, chromium, uranium, petrochemicals and many others. Also, once its bio-mass has concentrated the heavy metals, it can be harvested and used for many practical things.

Of course, phytoremediation operates under certain limitations; the plants have to be able to grow in that climate, and should not be an invasive species that will take over the landscape, as kudzu did in the American South. The plants can only remove toxins as deep as their roots, so the technique might not solve groundwater contamination.

Most importantly, plants move at a different speed than we do, and even after the plants are harvested they are not likely to have eliminated the toxin. Reducing a toxin to safe levels takes time, and phytoremediation doesn’t remove a problem overnight.

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of this new field, though, is its scale, that the work to clean up toxic-waste sites could be done with no massive government project or corporate funding, with no bulldozers or construction equipment, without advanced and delicate technology beyond that to measure the toxin levels. The principles could be taught to every schoolchild or practiced by every land-owner, so that if anyone detects a certain toxin on their property, they will know what to plant to gradually remove it. The seeds and plants could be sold by any gardening or farm-supply store, so that some of our society’s most grandiose mistakes can be fixed by ordinary people, using natural means, using home-made experiments, hard work and patience, to restore our land to what it once was.

Thanks to Dr. David Leung of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand for his assistance in checking this article.      

Survey of US streams: “Mercury Found in Every Fish Tested, Scientists Say,” New York Times, August 19, 2009.

Effects of lead on crime: “America's Real Criminal Element: Lead,” Mother Jones magazine, January 2013

Effects of lead on crime: “How Lead Exposure Relates to Temporal Changes in IQ, Violent Crime, and Unwed Pregnancy,” Rick Nevin, Environmental Research, Volume 83, Issue 1, May 2000, Pages 1-22.

Effects of lead on crime: “Hazards of heavy metal contamination,” British Medical Bulletin, Volume 68, Issue 1, p. 167-182

Phytoremedation: Recent Advances Toward Improved Phytoremediation of Heavy Metal Pollution, Bentham Books, 2013.

Gold mines and mercury: Phytoremediation of Mercury-Contaminated Mine Wastes, Fabio Netto Moreno, Massey University 2004.

Playground in Boston: “New Jersey company cultivates pollution-eating plants Mustard greens, alfalfa help to clean up ravages of industry,” Baltimore Sun, March 30. 1997.

Playground in Boston: Blaylock, M.J., S. Dushenkov, D. Page, G. Montes, D. Vasudev, and Y. Kapulnik. Phytoremediation of a Pb-contaminated brownfield site in New Jersey. (1996), pp. 497-498. In Emerging Technologies in Hazardous Waste Management VIII, 1996 Extended Abstracts for the Special Symposium, Birmingham, Alabama, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Division, American Chemical Society, September 9-11, 1996.

Blue Sheep Fescue: Phytoremediation: A Green Technology to Remove Environmental Pollutants, p. 71 – 86, American Journal of Climate Change 2013.

“Metal armour protects plants from disease,” Planet Earth Online, 10 September 2010.

“Improving Plants for Zinc Acquisition,” Prachy Dixit and Susan Eapen, Bioremediation Technology: Recent Advances, M. H. Fulekar, Springer, 2010.

Bio-remediation and Bio-fortification: Two Sides of One Coin, by X. Yin and L. Yuan, Springer 2012.

New article at Mother Earth News

"Under the green and rolling hills of Scotland, several people lay buried for four thousand years. Around them lay what we guess to be their keepsakes; beads, a bronze knife, tools and a battle-axe. Most interesting, though, was that at least one of them – a teenager when he died, curled up like a baby – lay in what was guessed to be a wicker coracle, like those used on these islands into the 20^th century. He was buried in his boat.

Stop and consider a few things about this. First, its antiquity: Before the Ancient Greeks or the Hebrew prophets, before all but the earliest pyramids, there were Scots. Also, you don’t see boat-burials every day; perhaps it was the youth’s most prized possession, the Stone-Age equivalent of being buried in your Rolls-Royce. Finally, consider this was a giant basket, woven together by hand, and that it carried people safely across the cold waters."

My latest article, "A Short History of Woven Boats," is live at Mother Earth News: check it out.