benevolant allies

Bioremediation. Inciting life back into wounded soil.

Compacted, contaminated, and misused soils need help if we plan to grow food, or anything else. I do not buy the technology-will-save-us argument, and most of us earthworkers could not afford the technology anyway. One of the main permaculture tenents is "Use biological resources whenever possible." Benevolant biological allies abound: here, I have gathered what I know, and have found, regarding using life to bring life back to wounded Earth.

To start with, OM.
The sound that began the universe, in Hindu mythology, is also the acronym for Organic Matter. Biodegraded biomass, humus, compost, black soil.
Organic matter seems to buffer all defeciencies and excesses for plants. Plants can take up more nutrients when soil has high levels of organic matter, and the harmful effects of allelopathic debris, like cedar needles or walnut leaves, are ameolierated.

Compost is a shrapnel approach, as Oliver would say, in that you get a lot of coverage for your bang. Not only does compost help retain moisture, and supply nutrients, but it is full of the biological activity that breaks down complex chemical bonds into useable units that plants can uptake.

Go into a forest and observe the forest floor. Think about the leaf cycles and how the forest maintains its fertility. Think about the primary decomposers: birds, beetles, fungi, worms, and the itty-bitty bugs and bacteria we don't often see.

Ideally, as humans our intervention is an acceleration of succession.

To conceptualize succession, imagine a landslide or a clearcut. What are the first plants to appear after the devastation? What next, which prepares the way for what? What is the ecosystem climax?

A good way to observe succession is to observe ruderal ecologies. The plants that first come in to heal the Earth are, poignantly, the plants which heal humans as well. Many 'weeds' are also indicator species, revealing a content of the soil below. Biomining is a large scale application of it.

In the clearcuts of BC, first come the annuals, then the alders -which are a deciduous, fast growing, nitrogen-fixer that support mushroom growth and add lots of organic matter,- and provide a shade layer for the next succession of trees. And so on, the forest builds until it reaches its stable climax we see as 'old growth'.

So what can we add to accelerate this natural succession?

Soil needs to be alive. Organic matter, insects, micro-organisms and fungi are the primary decomposers that work in harmony to break it all down so that the plants can use it.

Currently, Paul Stamets is researching, discovering, and cultivating fungi that break down petrochemicals, filter water, denature toxic wastes, accelerate the growth of planted trees, hold together eroding roads, and improve human health. This Alternet article on him is great.

He has created a series of products called MycoGrow, which are mycorhyzal innoculants that improve plant growth. I have seen some experiments done with them, all that showed noticably improved growth with of the innoculated plants. I ordered some this spring and am doing my own set of experiments this summer.

Back on Cortes, our permaculture class spent a day with Paul Stamets and his crew, helping haul buckets of innoculated bark mulch up the clearcut he bought. There is even a photo of Gillie and I in action on Oli's blog.

Right now in New Orleans some really interesting projects are going on. In the aftermath of the hurricane, the land is toxified, houses are mold ridden, and the government could only provide some short term 'help'. A grassroots, low-tech, permaculture movement has created the Common Ground Collective. The little flick they posted, Solidarity Not Charity, is worth watching.
In the aftermath of the hurricane, the EPA did a series of soil tests which revealed varying soil toxicisity. There are lots of heavy metals in the soil, and some serious petroleum spills that occured. Starhawk, -author, witch, and permaculture designer-, is doing some large scale bioremediation projects there. On the bottom of her site, she has 5 blogs on the project, best read from the bottom up.

We spend the day going over the toxins that have been found in New Orleans’ soil, and the three basic methods of bioremediating them—using microorganisms, using fungi and mushrooms, and using plants. We divide people into different groups for hands-on practice, making compost, starting worm bins (worm castings are the major source for the microorganisms we culture), starting seeds and taking cuttings, and inoculating strata with mushroom spawn.

Some toxins, like diesel range organics, are big, chainlike molecules mostly composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and can be broken down into harmless substances like carbon dioxide and water. Beneficial bacteria can do the job, and so can enzymes released from fungal mycelium, the underground weblike matrix from which mushrooms emerge. We intend to do some trials with mushrooms, but its harder to grow mushrooms on a mass scale than it is to culture bacteria, so we’re starting with the brews of aerated compost tea. We’re also using a different preparation of micro-organisms, known as Efficient Micro-organisms, which is anaerobic and has many different uses. The house-gutting crews have been spraying it to counteract mold, with great effectiveness. They’ve had assistance from someone who does professional mold abatement and who has the equipment to do spore counts before and after. The bacteria and yeasts in the EM spray eat the mold spores and then colonize the surfaces mold grows on, preventing its regrowth. It’s non-toxic and much safer to use than bleach, and more effective. It’s success against mold has made me wonder if it would also be effective against Sudden Oak Death, the fungus-like disease that is devastating our forests in Northern California. The company that produces EM, and has donated a lot of it to Common Ground, has offered to bring a mobile processing unit down to New Orleans to produce it on a mass scale. But they have been unable to get the funding—nearly $200,000—they need in order to do so.

EM is mostly anaerobic—the organisms involved do not need or want air in order to reproduce. We’re also experimenting with EM sprayed on the soil, to see if it will help get life back into the dead, compacted, muddy sediments.

It’s exciting. It’s also uncharted territory. Lots of people have worked on bioremediation, in the lab, on highly toxic sites, in well funded cleanup efforts. We don’t know of anyone who has tried it on a low-budget, mass movement backyard scale.

And more, some underlying force of health and life and serendipity that we tap into when we do this healing work. There’s an excitement, a sheer raw energy unleashed that animates the digging forks and keeps us working joyfully and eagerly into the twilight. It’s as if the earth herself wants to be healed, and when we take on that work, we tap into an upwelling spring of life giving power. Out of nowhere, benevolent allies appear.

Somewhere in there she mentions they are using worm castings as the base for their 'biobrew'. It sure makes a lot of sense to me: worms are like little moving tubes that digest and purify all that passes through them, leaving life behind them.