Support Grassroots Bioremediation in New Orleans

[This is also posted prominently at our website, http://reclaimthecommons.net]

Support Grassroots Bioremediation
in Hurricane-Ravaged New Orleans!

The Alliance for Community Trainers -- a new 501c3 organization
facilitated by Starhawk, one of the founders of Reclaim the Commons in
2004 -- will help support efforts to clean up New Orleans using the
natural methods of bioremediation: using bacteria, plants and fungi to
break down toxins and restore the health of the soil. A report on the
first phase is below. The next phase, this winter and spring, will
expand the project and include a training program for local people,
with the aim of forming a worker's collective who can carry on the
healing work as a source of right livelihood.But the work needs
resources. So Starhawk is asking you to share some of yours. A
donation to ACT is tax-deductible, and will go to support this valuable
work. ACT will help fund the bioremediation efforts in New Orleans,
including training and documenting the work and producing materials that
can be used by others. ACT will fund scholarships to our Earth
Activist
Trainings that combine a permaculture design course with a focus on organizing
skills and a grounding in earth-based spirituality. And ACT will help provide the
training and organizing support for actions and mobilizations on issues of global
justice and peace.

You can donate online at <http://www.starhawk.org/> or you can send a check made
out to ACT to 1405 Hillmont; Austin, Texas 78704. Checks can be earmarked for
special projects, like scholarships or bioremediation. Online donations will go
wherever funds are most needed. Both are tax deductible.
Starhawk writes: "We have over $16,000 in scholarship requests for the January EAT
course, and others coming up in May in California, July in England and September
in Missouri. <http://www.earthactivisttraining.org/>. We need funds to set up
biobrewers, spawn farms, to support trainings and produce visual materials and
videos that can explain the biology to people who lack formal education. And we
need funds to help respond to issues and emergencies in the coming year.""I know
many of us are short on funds this year. But money is like seed: it needs to be
spread to grow. A donation to ACT will seed projects that will return their
value ten times over in health, empowerment, and hope. We receive no government
support nor big foundation grants; we depend on individuals like you to make our
projects possible. Thank you for helping us to continue this vital work."
Bioremediation in New Orleans
Nov. 23, 2005
By Starhawk
I’m just back from another week in New Orleans. This time three of us, myself,
Juniper and Scotty, had a special mission—to set up a small bioremediation
demonstration as a beginning seed for a long term project. Over Thanksgiving
Week, Common Ground has sponsored the Road Trip for Relief, an effort to bring
hundreds of volunteers into the Ninth Ward, one of the areas most devastated by
Hurricane Katrina.


“Bioremediation” means cleaning soil and water and restoring it to health
using biological allies: beneficial bacteria, plants, and fungi.
Restoration on the scale of New Orleans is, of course, a huge and overwhelming
project. Nevertheless, there are many techniques that are fairly simple,
natural, and applicable on a small scale, and Common Ground has been working
on a proposal to fund and train a worker’s cooperative that would be able to
put them into practice.

The first stage of this whole process, of course, is finding out what toxins
are actually present. For the last two months, Juniper, an environmental
engineer, has been taking soil samples from many areas in New Orleans, getting
them tested, and collating data from other organizations. What she’s
found is that, while there are certainly hot spots of contamination, most of
New Orleans is no worse than it was before the flood. Lead and arsenic are
fairly common—but they were present before the flood, the result of
generations of lead paint on old buildings, auto exhaust, and chemicals
applied to lawns to kill dandelions. In some places, anything from oil
tanks to household chemicals may have spilled, and residues remain. Water
borne disease germs are less of an issue now that most areas have dried out
and been exposed to sunlight.

There are two great sources of inspiration for our work this last week. One
is Dr. Elaine Ingham, http://www.soilfoodweb.org, an expert on soil biology and the
brewing up of compost teas full of beneficial bacteria that can break down
toxins and restore life to the soil. The other is Paul Stametz,
http://www.fungi.com, who does pioneering work on the use of mushrooms and
beneficial fungi to clean up toxic soil. Scott Kellogg, who has studied
with both of them, works with the Rhizome Collective in Austin, which has
transformed an old warehouse into an educational and social center, and is
bioremediating a large brownfield (damaged, toxic land) to restore it to
health and become an environmental education center. He has studied with
both Elaine Ingham and Paul Stametz, and has brought down a pump and barrels
to set up a hundred gallon compost tea brewery.

So, over the last week, we’ve made contact with a number of the really great
people in New Orleans who are already doing sustainability work: the New
Orleans Farm and Food Network, Parkway Partners, the Laughing Crow nursery,
the Laughing Buddha nursery, and others. We’ve done a small training for
local people at the home of a woman who has already had lead abatement done
in her backyard before the hurricane. We’ve done a training for forty-fifty
of the volunteers who have come down for the Roadtrip, and got them all
excited and inspired. We’ve started a small amount of oyster mushrooms
growing in coffee grounds, created a Powerpoint on bioremediation and
several visual displays, sheet mulched a small piece of ground that was
covered with garbage, built a compost bin, and brewed up 100 gallons of
bioremediation brew. After I had to leave, Juniper and Scotty led a group
to apply the brew to our little sheet mulched patch by the
warehouse, and to two other sites that had been identified as needing
remediation. We also put in a graywater system for the outdoor showers,
consulted on the solar hot water heating and its augmentation by a kettle over
a wood fire.

The week went fast. Doing projects in New Orleans, I’ve found, can be
hellish or easy. The easy part is a result of the grim aftermath of the
flood: there are lots of resources around to scavenge. It’s as if everyone
in New Orleans opened their door and shoveled out all or most of their
belonging onto the street, They are all ruined and moldy, of course, but
among them are things that can be salvaged, wood and building materials that
can be reused, and almost anything you might think of. So, in driving
around looking for 2 x 4s for the shower builders, I found a huge plastic tub
with holes in the bottom, perfect for a compost bin, and an equally large
stainless steel tub. Taking a wrong turn on my way to the bridge one
morning, I passed a stack of giant cardboard boxes, perfect for sheet mulch.
The round, bamboo skeleton of a broken swing chair made a perfect cover for
the compost.

The hellish aspect is that if you need something specific, a plumbing part or
a valve that fits a particular pipe, and you don’t happen to have it, the
hardware and plumbing stores that are open are usually far away and suck
energy like collapsing dwarf stars. Enter in, and you may never emerge.
After frustrating hours in the Home Depot Line, you escape gratefully, and
almost always immediately remember something you forgot to buy. If you
don’t remember it at that moment, you remember it as soon as you get back to
the worksite.

The solar showers, cobbled together out of the innards of discarded water
heaters, plywood boxes and pieces of plastic, fed with enormously long
hoses, were simple in design but extremely complicated to put together. And
at best, they would provide a very inadequate amount of hot water for the
number of people who needed to shower. We’re praying for a miracle, like
the lamp of sacred oil in the Chanukah story, enough to last only for a day
that lasted eight days. I’m telling the Goddess that if she makes that sixty
gallons of possibly only lukewarm water provide hot showers for a hundred
and fifty people, I’ll declare a new festival in her honor, and every year
we’ll make little replicas of solar hot water heaters and give presents to
dirty children. But just in case, we build a firepit.

The police in Algiers have continued to harass Common Ground. One morning
they arrest Jimmy, a sweet-faced young man who looks as innocent and sunny as
an eight year old child, for double parking while he is loading supplies from
the depot. This takes time and energy to deal with, just as we are preparing
for the arrival of the hordes of willing workers. But in the ninth ward,
the police are more chill. New Orleans has a law that police have to live
in the districts where they work, so the Ninth Ward cops have all lost their
homes, and many have lost friends and family members. They appreciate that
people have come down here to help.

The other heavenly part of work down here is that you get to hang out with
people at their best—people who have come to do something good for other
people, who have volunteered to live in uncomfortable conditions and take on
some truly nasty, dirty jobs—cleaning out black mold, for instance—just
because they want to help. There’s always a lot of stress in these
situations, and people don’t always get along perfectly. There are
irritations and frustrations. But overall, it’s just really, really good to
be with people who are actively doing something to help a really bad
situation.

And their work inspires generosity. Kaysey and Nick from the Covington
Farmers’ Market come down and cook our opening meal. She had offered to
cook a meal for us but didn’t originally bargain on feeding a hundred and
fifty of our friends But she graciously rose to the occasion, producing a
fragrant and delicious meal of rice and beans with fresh produce and
fresh-baked breads. Meanwhile, a group from the Mission from Minnesota who
have been sending truckloads of supplies down to Mississippi for weeks manages
to get more donations than they need, and spends the money on eight hundred
pounds of turkey for Common Ground’s Thanksgiving feast.

Generosity generates abundance. That’s something the idealogues of greed
don’t get. “Solidarity, not charity’ is Common Ground’s motto, and people
feel good when they are standing in solidarity with others, giving of
themselves, doing something instead of feeling helpless. The tragedy and
destruction here have been immense.

But so is the hope.