Using plants to cleanse the land

 

Most people around the world have some legends about what lies under the earth, and whatever it is – devils, dragons, spirits and monsters of all kinds – it is almost always something to be avoided. We can easily imagine how such stories began – for a thousand generations humans must have come across volcanic fumes, exposed tar pits or other such hazards, and concluded that what lies under the earth is meant to stay there.

In the last century or two, however, humans have gone the opposite direction in a big way. Around the same time that scientists were discovering all manner of useful metals, fossil fuels gave us the means to extract them, and soon we were digging the biggest pits, the deepest holes, the longest tunnels the world had ever seen. All this was, remember, to take what were often extremely toxic materials --- our bodies did not evolve to cope with lead, cadmium or mercury – put them in machines and compounds for humans to use, and spread them throughout the places where humans lived. We're starting to suspect this wasn't a good idea.

One of these elements is 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 the world. Lead causes brain damage and erratic behaviour if absorbed into the human body, and its rise and fall correlates with the U.S. crime rate in the 20th 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 U.S. Geological Survey tested 300 streams across the United States 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 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.

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. 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 biomass 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.

 

 

The Blog is now a Book

Thanks to everyone who reads this blog for your patience in the last few months; I haven’t posted much because I was working on a big project. Now that I’m holding the hard copy, I can make the announcement: Academica Press has now published my first book, the culmination of 20 years of interviews with elderly people in rural Ireland.  

Most people here know that I spent decades in the countryside there raising a daughter and experimenting with  gardening, beekeeping, food preservation and self-sufficient crafts. I learned a lot from my neighbours, who grew up without modern technology in traditional communities, and pulled together hundreds of interviews, memoirs, diaries and other sources to create a picture of a sustainable, old-fashioned world.  

I’ll be posting excerpts of the book here over the next several months, as well as on my blog, on my web site and in magazines articles. I'll be working on an audiobook and will be doing speaking gigs about it, so contact me about that. In the meantime, if you’re interested, feel free to purchase a copy here.

Big Announcement coming soon

If you're wondering why I haven't posted as often as I used to on this blog, I'm hoping that will change soon; I've been working on a big project that is going to press as we speak. 

The Potential of Libraries

Most of us take libraries for granted, without appreciating what amazing things they are. Imagine having to buy even a fraction of the books, CDs and movies we can borrow freely from even the most meager local branch, whose total inventory might be worth millions.

They also serve you and your neighbours in other, less appreciated ways. Many offer free internet access to everyone, including the millions who are not online. They often act as a community centre, hosting meetings and events of everything from the Boy Scouts to the PTA to the local Tidy Town volunteers.

Your branch might offer weekly storytelling for children or night courses for adults. I knew one library that featured the art of local painters, perhaps their only recognition, and another that published short-run collections of local students’ fiction, giving aspiring teen writers like myself a start. A library might offer bound volumes of now-extinct local newspapers, records and other information forgotten in an age of Google.

Even more useful than the books or activities, though, is the principle behind libraries, that we and our neighbours can pool our resources and hold things in common that all of us occasionally need. Most of the Western World, however, adopted this principle for books and then stopped, never extending it to other obvious areas of life.

In fact, the trend of the last few decades has been the opposite – people bought more and more of their own private stocks of anything, no matter how expensive or little-used: a row of ten family homes might have ten rakes, ten chainsaws, ten barbecue pits and ten Dora the Explorer videos, each of which is used for only a few hours a year.

Those same neighbours could save a lot of money, though, if they pitch in and buy a shed full of tools together – a rake, shovels, saws, hammers and so on. Most of the tools would be there when needed, but each contributor would spend only a tenth of the price on them. There might be more wear on the tools, but there might also be more people taking care of them and making them last longer.

Any small community could also keep a library of seeds. Many garden megacenters carry only a few varieties of anything, often shipped from around the world, sometimes genetically engineered to yield only a single year’s crop. A seed library would be inexpensive insurance against unforeseen events – drought, fuel shortage, worsening economy -- that might make seeds might be harder to come by and more urgently needed.

Everyone needs medical care sooner or later, and while prescription medicines should not be casually traded or used past their sell-by dates, many other first aid items could be kept together in a neighbourhood or apartment building – bandages and plasters of various sizes, surgical spirits (rubbing alcohol to Americans), hydrogen peroxide and painkillers, as well as thermometers, blood pressure wraps, swabs and other basics.

Food doesn’t exactly lend itself to re-use, but cooking supplies do, and many people have things like steamers, pressure cookers, woks, fryers and other expensive equipment that they use rarely and that could be kept in a common stock.

Any parent knows that children love new toys but are quickly bored with them, and they gradually accumulate in a child’s room until digging through them becomes an archaeological project. If each family were to frequently clean out the toys their children don’t use, however, they could create a toy library for the community, whose toys could be used and re-used.

Finally, to come full circle, you could keep books that might be useful in times to come – gardening, home health care, water filtration. You can recommend such publications to public libraries, and perhaps consider joining your local library board – I used to cover the library board as a reporter, and they are usually a small group of elderly people whose hard work and subtle power goes unappreciated.

One easy way to start would be for you and your colleagues to engage in a spring cleaning together – books you finally admit you aren’t going to read, clothes that might come back in style in ten years and rarely-used tools from the garage. People have more than they realise, and find less clutter a relief – and since many might fear abuse of the system, it’s often best to start with things people won’t miss anyway.

Such abuse – members not giving back what they borrow – can happen, but it happens in public book libraries too, and it is rarely fatal. Things like power tools, of course, are more expensive than books, so members might have to keep them secure and enforce membership fees, security deposits or late charges to make sure everyone plays by the rules.

The details will depend on your group, of course, and “group” here could be almost anything. It could be you and a few neighbours sharing a shed, your congregation storing some common goods at the church, the Girl Scouts asking to store a cabinet of seeds at City Hall, or the town’s 4-H Club keeping a shed of equipment for members to check out. It could be poker buddies going in on a chainsaw, or people in a college dormitory time-sharing their textbooks. The principle is the same – most of us have more than we need, and not enough.

Whatever the circumstance, though, try to gradually open it up to more and more people, even at a greater risk. A few scattered libraries create tiny pockets of assistance in a troubled culture, but an overlapping network of such collaborations would help restore something the culture has lost.

The Mother Night

 

Whether you grew up in Arizona or Australia, Florida or Johannesburg, you probably celebrated Christmas by displaying plants from Northern Europe – hanging holly, ivy and mistletoe in the house, and decorating an evergreen tree – whether they are appropriate for your climate or not. I used to wonder why these plants, and why Christmas was this time of year when we don’t actually know when Christ was born. Once I moved to rural Ireland, though, these things began to make sense.

You see, I’ve mentioned that we are less than a thousand miles from the Arctic Circle, the same latitude as part of Alaska. We don’t think of Ireland as being so far north; it rarely snows or freezes here, because it’s an island surrounded by a current from the Caribbean, which keeps the temperature from getting too cold. But it never gets that warm either, and the seasonal light changes are extreme.

At Midsummer – the longest day of the year – you can walk around in twilight after 11 pm and before 4 am. Until we moved here, I never understood the title of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his play in which lovers change their allegiances several times in a night. The longest day is the shortest night, so the title emphasizes how quickly love can turn – in a “Midsummer Night,” the equivalent of a “New York Minute.” 

Winter brings the opposite, with nights that can last for seventeen hours at a stretch, punctuated by several hours of sunset; the sun crouches low in the bushes, casting long shadows across agrey landscape. And those are the few hours of daylight before the long night comes again.

Where I live there are no streetlights, and until a few decades ago, no electricity at all, no light but candles and flames. As one Irish writer put it, “the nights were treacle-black, they haunted little children and big men alike. Outdoors was for spectres and hooved creatures with strange powers. Children of the long-legged day would look out petrified at the wild sea.”

In most of the Western world generations now have grown up with streetlights outside and houselights a flick away, and can little comprehend the unsettling power of long and absolute darkness.

No wonder people here used to spend the winters going from house to house, lantern or torch in hand, spending time with neighbours and singing songs, sharing dishes and telling stories. Even further back people here built some of the oldest monuments by humans – Newgrange just north of us, five thousand years old, and Stonehenge in England, built around the same time, and both aligned to mark the solstice of maximum darkness, what the Saxons would later call the Mother Night.

No wonder, then, that people here devoted the longest night to celebration, reminding each other that this too would pass. No wonder people brought indoors the plants that remained green and cheerful – holly, ivy, evergreens -- a reminder that the green world around us would return as the world was remade. No wonder it became the celebration day for the birth of Christ.

Christian holidays, like the faith itself, came to Europe from a very different culture and landscape, the desert lands to the far south and east. Once adopted by peoples of the long darkness, though, they were transformed. 

Whenever Christ was actually born, the obvious time to celebrate his birth was when -- after a long and harrowing plunge into the abyss -- the world seems to exhale, the days are born and grow again, and another year of life, with all its possibilities, appears before us.

Hallow's Eve

It was 19 years ago that I first arrived in Ireland a few days before Samhain -- Hallowe'en -- when The Girl was still a baby. I didn't realise then that this was the day for setting off fireworks here, like Independence Day in the USA, New Year's Eve in Germany or Guy Fawkes night in the UK. Local boys, it turned out, shot bottle rockets all night into the dark fields. Where our house was. 

Let me tell you, there's nothing a jet-lagged baby loves more than artillery outside the window. 

Sorry for not posting more, but I'm working on a big project to be announced soon.