Earth Repair

Author: Leila Darwish
Publisher: New Society Publishers
ISBN: 1550925296
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
Millions of acres of land have been contaminated by pesticides, improperly handled chemicals, dirty energy projects, toxic waste, and other pollutants in the United States alone. This toxic legacy impacts the environment, our health, our watersheds, and land that could otherwise be used to grow healthy local food and medicines. Conventional clean-up techniques employed by government and industry are tremendously expensive and resource-intensive and can cause further damage. More and more communities find themselves increasingly unable to rely on those companies and governments who created the problems to step in and provide solutions. 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 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. 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 and nuclear fallout, this fertile toolbox is essential reading for anyone who wishes to transform environmental despair into constructive action. Leila Darwish is a community organizer, urban gardener, and permaculture designer with a focus on using grassroots bioremediation to address environmental justice issues in communities struggling with toxic contamination of their land and drinking water.

Earth Repair

Author: Leila Darwish
Publisher: New Society Publishers
ISBN: 086571729X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
Details grassroots bioremediation techniques and strategies for transforming environmental despair into action, including the use of plants to extract toxins and fungi to clean contaminated water and soil.

Earth Repair

Author: Marcus Hall
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813923413
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
Just as the restoration of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment sparked enormous controversy in the art world, so are environmental restorationists intensely divided when it comes to finding ways to rehabilitate damaged ecosystems. Although environmental restoration is quickly becoming a widespread pursuit, debate over the methods and goals of this endeavor often halts progress. The same question confronts artistic and environmental restorationists: Which systems need restoring, and to what states should they be restored? In Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration, Marcus Hall explores the answer to this question while offering an alternative to the usual narrative of humans disrupting and spoiling the earth. Hall’s purpose is not to deny that humans have done lasting damage but to show that those who believed in restoration did not always agree on what they wanted to restore, or how, or to what form. With guidance from the pioneer conservationist George Perkins Marsh, the reader travels between the United States and Italy to see that restoration has taken many forms over the past two hundred years, from maintaining and repairing, to gardening and naturalizing. By contrasting land management in these two countries and elsewhere, Earth Repair clarifies different meanings of restoration, shows how such meanings have changed through time and place, and suggests how restorationists can apply these insights to their own practices.

Earth Building

Author: Laurence Keefe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113435018X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
A thorough examination of the use of earth as an eco-friendly building material, with full details on the properties of earth as a building material, appropriate construction techniques, and practical troubleshooting advice.

The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair

Author: Denis Hayes
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 9781559638098
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Everyone talks about the weather but no one ever does anything about it. Sadly, that old joke is no longer true. A large body of increasingly compelling scientific evidence is telling us that many things we do -- from the kinds of cars we drive to how we heat our homes -- are directly affecting our global climate in unprecedented and alarming ways. But what can any one person do about this vast, global problem? Help fix it! And it doesn't have to be a do-it-yourself project; we citizens and stewards of the earth can unite in greater numbers and power than ever before.In The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair, Earth Day leader and renewable energy expert Denis Hayes tells us how changes in individual, local, and national energy choices can slow or even stop the dangerous build-up of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, while at the same time saving us money, helping the economy, creating new jobs, and enhancing human health. A how-to home improvement guide for the planet, the book: describes the problem of global warming today as well as its likely effects in the future considers the sources of energy available to us, and explains why one of them is the Earth's best hope offers dozens of ways to painlessly reduce your own energy use provides action steps to affect the world's energy use and help change policy tells where to go for further help and more information The first Earth Day in 1970 helped launch the modern environmental movement. Rather than waiting for elected officials to take action to address environmental abuses, environmental maverick Denis Hayes and his compatriots took the lead in bringing the subject to the forefront of American consciousness. Through three decades, the idea of Earth Day has flourished, and now more than ever, individuals need to take matters into their own hands and create change from the ground up and from the whole earth down. As citizens and consumers, we hold a vast capacity for improving our environment and leaving a bright legacy for our children. For seasoned green veterans and environmental newcomers alike, The Official Earth Day Guide to Planet Repair is the must-have book for the next century.

Structural Repair of Traditional Buildings

Author: PEB Robson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317741897
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
This book will be of interest to everyone involved in the repair, maintenance and refurbishment of traditional buildings. Its purpose is to promote the successful structural repair of masonry, timber and unfired earth. The book begins by explaining how traditional structures work and how they are affected by the behaviour of the soil that supports them. It goes on to explain how the structural design of buildings has to cope with uncertainty. Techniques for doing so are well established for new buildings, but the viewpoint changes when existing buildings need to be repaired or refurbished. The most common sources of structural damage are listed. The more serious and progressive ones are described in detail, as an aid to diagnosis and prognosis. An understanding of prognosis enables repairers to decide whether urgent intervention is necessary or whether the problem can be allowed to run its course. A straightforward method is proposed for arriving at the most suitable remedy. Several typical repairs are illustrated. The book covers many allied topics, including the principles of conservation, health and safety and preventative maintenance. A chapter is devoted to the special needs of insured perils.

Earth Emotions

Author: Glenn A. Albrecht
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501715240
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
As climate change and development pressures overwhelm the environment, our emotional relationships with Earth are also in crisis. Pessimism and distress are overwhelming people the world over. In this maelstrom of emotion, solastalgia, the homesickness you have when you are still at home, has become, writes Glenn A. Albrecht, one of the defining emotions of the twenty-first century. Earth Emotions examines our positive and negative Earth emotions. It explains the author's concept of solastalgia and other well-known eco-emotions such as biophilia and topophilia. Albrecht introduces us to the many new words needed to describe the full range of our emotional responses to the emergent state of the world. We need this creation of a hopeful vocabulary of positive emotions, argues Albrecht, so that we can extract ourselves out of environmental desolation and reignite our millennia-old biophilia—love of life—for our home planet. To do so, he proposes a dramatic change from the current human-dominated Anthropocene era to one that will be founded, materially, ethically, politically, and spiritually on the revolution in thinking being delivered by contemporary symbiotic science. Albrecht names this period the Symbiocene. With the current and coming generations, "Generation Symbiocene," Albrecht sees reason for optimism. The battle between the forces of destruction and the forces of creation will be won by Generation Symbiocene, and Earth Emotions presents an ethical and emotional odyssey for that victory.

Earth Repair Gardening; The Lazy Gardener's Guide to Saving the Earth

Author: Kate L Wall
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780648731825
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
Sit back, relax and let your garden offset some of your carbon footprint. Finally, here is the information we all need to make a real and positive contribution towards climate change, while doing what we love most - gardening! Earth Repair Gardening guides the reader through the garden, discussing options for reducing our environmental impact at every turn. We are encouraged to make those changes that suit us best when it comes to gardening more sustainably. This is not a one size fits all, it delves into the complexity of choices available to us, guiding us to the best outcome for our own situation. By doing less work, we can grow more as our gardens become working carbon sinks. This book teaches us about knowing, respecting and caring for the earth we live and garden on. This book will make you a better gardener, it will make your garden more fabulous, and it will help you make this world a better place.

Old House Care and Repair

Author: Janet Collings
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317704991
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
Owners of old houses are often baffled by the confusing advice they receive from their builders, architects or surveyors who may be more familiar with repairing modern buildings than dealing with the issues associated with traditional houses. Old houses generally require a different approach, one, for instance, which takes account of their need to 'breathe'. Modern solutions do not always recognise that need. This book will help owners, builders and all construction professionals make the decisions that are right for old buildings. It illustrates the long term benefits of using more traditional solutions on older houses rather than modern materials like cement based mortars, sealants or impervious paints. It offers practical guidance on: How to get the right professional advice; Legal requirements for listed buildings; Problems with damp and rot; Use of lime mortars, plasters and renders; Why old buildings need to breathe; Planning applications; and, Trees, outbuildings and gardens.

After Geoengineering

Author: Holly Jean Buck
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786637995
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
Climate engineering is a dystopian project. But as the human species hurtles ever faster towards its own extinction, geoengineering as a temporary fix, to buy time for carbon removal, is a seductive idea. We are right to fear that geoengineering will be used to maintain the status quo, but is there another possible future after geoengineering? Can these technologies and practices be used to bring carbon levels back down to pre-industrial levels? Are there possibilities for massive intentional intervention in the climate that are democratic, decentralised, or participatory? These questions are provocative, because they go against a binary that has become common sense: geoengineering is assumed to be on the side of industrial agriculture, inequality and ecomodernism, in opposition to degrowth, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture and climate justice. After Geoengineering rejects this binary, to ask: what if the people seized the means of climate production? Both critical and utopian, the book examines the possible futures after geoengineering. Rejecting the idea that geoengineering is some kind of easy work-around, Holly Buck outlines the kind of social transformation that would be necessary to enact a programme of geoengineering in the first place.