Earth Repair: A Grassroots Guide to Healing Toxic and Damaged Landscapes

Packed with valuable, firsthand information from visionaries in the field, Earth Repair empowers communities and individuals to take action and heal contaminated and damaged land. Earth Repair describes a host of powerful grassroots bioremediation techniques, including:

• Microbial remediation – using microorganisms to break down and bind contaminants
• Phytoremediation – using plants to extract, bind, and transform toxins
• Mycoremediation – using fungi to clean up contaminated soil and water.

Encompassing everything from remediating and regenerating abandoned city lots for urban farmers and gardeners, to recovering from environmental disasters and industrial catastrophes such as oil spills, Earth Repair is a fertile toolbox of radical remedies for toxic realities. It is essential reading for anyone who wishes to transform environmental despair into constructive action and ecological resilience.

New Audio Segments: The Earth Repair Audiobook includes the following new bonus audio segments that profile current bioremediators and innovative projects:

• Women in Bioremediation: From mycoremediation in the Amazon with Lexie Groper and the Amisacho Project, to catching up with Jess Ann Rubin of MycoEvolve about her project using fungi and plants to filter contaminated agricultural runoff in Vermont, learn about some of the powerful women who are expanding the field and practice of bioremediation at the community level. Interviews also include Olga Tzogas from SmugTown Mushrooms & New Moon Mycology Summit, Nance Klehm of Social Ecologies, and bioremediation artist Kaitlin Bryson.
• Healing from the Ashes: Community Responses to Wildfire: In recent years, fire survivors, mycologists, and impacted communities in California have mobilized bioremediation responses to protect their watersheds from the threat of toxic ash and debris in the aftermath of wildfire. Learn from the Butte Remediation mycoremediation project following the catastrophic 2018 Camp Fire and the CoRenewal wildfire remediation and watershed defense work through their 2020 Post-Fire Biofiltration Initiative.

Leila Darwish is a community organizer, bioremediation educator, permaculture practitioner, urban gardener, author, and disaster recovery worker. Her grassroots organizing has centered on environmental justice issues in communities struggling with either the threat of, or the enduring legacy of, toxic contamination of their land and drinking water. She has taught numerous bioremediation and oil spill response courses in communities across North America. Her work is rooted in environmental and social justice, inspired by the power of community action, ecological resilience, mutual aid, and regenerative earth repair. http://www.earthrepair.ca