Starhawk: Cleaning up New Orleans

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.



A very interesting article, the rest is here.
Part II
Part III
Part IV