Category Archives: The Scary Stuff

Plant Power: Phytoremediation (Arsenic in soil, Part III)

Fern4 malibuwater.com
Chinese brake fern (Pteris vittata L.) Source: Brake fern remediation

Today I get to write about one of my absolute favorite gardening topics, and for once I’m not being ironic. Phytoremediation isn’t going to make it onto most people’s gardening hit lists, and it’s not a fad that’s going to take the nation’s gardens by storm the way a new rose or hellebore might. But for me it’s proof positive of the extraordinary power of plants; it’s hope in a polluted world; it’s a spot of green in the brownfields of industry; it’s good sense in the midst of madness.

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Readers’ Questions: Arsenic from pressure-treated wood, Part II

Welcome back, everyone, and in case you just tuned in, we’re talking with Jen about her vegetable garden and the unpleasant possibility that she may be growing toxic vegetables and feeding them to her family.

Unfortunately, the best place for the garden turned out to be right by an old telephone pole, which was probably treated with the wood-preservative copper chromate arsenate (CCA), and we all know what that means: it means that arsenic (along with smaller quantities of copper and chrome) could be leaching from the pole into the soil, where it would get taken up by vegetables. Which are eaten by her children. That’s pretty scary.

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Readers' Questions: Arsenic from pressure-treated wood, Part II

Welcome back, everyone, and in case you just tuned in, we're talking with Jen about her vegetable garden and the unpleasant possibility that she may be growing toxic vegetables and feeding them to her family.

Unfortunately, the best place for the garden turned out to be right by an old telephone pole, which was probably treated with the wood-preservative copper chromate arsenate (CCA), and we all know what that means: it means that arsenic (along with smaller quantities of copper and chrome) could be leaching from the pole into the soil, where it would get taken up by vegetables. Which are eaten by her children. That's pretty scary.

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Compost, trucking, and other garbage

(Scroll to the bottom for today's bit on Black History Month.)

I find myself today at TruckFlix.com, a website for truck drivers. Interesting. Of course, it is compost that has led me here, albeit via a circuitous route. Here’s a sort of overview of the process: Compost, yard-waste, garbage, landfills, municipal solid waste, cities, New York City.

Put it all together and you get the question, What does New York City do with its garbage?

The answer is that it exports it by truck and rail to Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Virginia, besides sending a fair amount upstate.

Something I’ve learned while digging through the garbage recently: nothing is straightforward, and some of the stories are so ludicrous, so intricate and unlikely, that it’s hard to decide whether to laugh or cry. Toronto, for instance, has been sued by no fewer than three First Peoples (the Oneida, the Chippewa, and the Munsee) over its newly purchased Green Lane Landfill site. And that’s just the tip of that particular garbage pile.

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Acidic Oceans? Keep Gardening!

(Scroll to the bottom for today's featured black artist, politician, or gardener, all in honor of Black History Month.)

I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s weekend, so I saved this one, but on Friday the NY Times reported that carbon dioxide is making the oceans so acidic that shellfish, coral reefs, and the balance of life in the ocean in general is threatened. This from a panel of a hundred and fifty-five (155) scientists from twenty-six (26) countries.

The carbon dioxide, of course, comes primarily from burning fossil fuels, and the acid comes from what happens to that CO2 when it dissolves in the ocean: it becomes carbolic acid, a.k.a. phenol, a poison so potent and so easy to produce that the Nazis used it in their extermination programs.

The world’s oceans serve as a wonderful carbon sink, removing a quarter to a third of the human-produced carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but apparently even they have a limit.

Moral: KEEP THOSE GARDENS GOING, and compost like a maniac. Photosynthesis and soil are the other two great carbon sinks besides the oceans, so the more green things we can grow, the better. Organic matter (compost, in case you didn’t get it) also sequesters (stores) carbon in the soil. The best, as in longest-term, form for these purposes is humus, the enormously complex organic (as in, containing carbon) molecules that help stabilize soil, improve water retention, and perform dozens of other things that are good for your garden. They last for hundreds of years, so the carbon they contain is locked up for a long time. Oh, and yes, composting does produce humus!

Original article:
Rising Acidity Is Threatening Food Web of Oceans, Science Panel Says
By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: January 30, 2009

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Oscar Micheaux

African-American of the Day: Drawn at random from Molefi Kete Asante’s list of 100 Greatest African Americans. (Asante, a prolific professor of African-American studies, started the first PhD program in that field at Temple University in1987.) I downloaded the list from the Wikipedia article on it, checked off the 40 or so I know (gulp) and am curious to see who some of the others are. I don’t know much about his list—it’s also the basis of a book by the same name—but what the heck.

Oscar Micheaux, (1884-1951) turns out to be one of the most—if not the most—prolific film makers of the silent era, producing and directing forty-four full-length films over the thirty years ending in 1948. A controversial figure, he focused on race issues in his films, even taking on the racism in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. He was the first black filmmaker whose work was shown in mainstream (i.e., “white”) theaters, and he gave the great actor and basso profundo (the lowest of all singing parts) Paul Robeson his first film part, in his 1924 Body and Soul.