Mangroves on a Landfill
placesjournal.org
placesjournal.org
I have no idea how to make the restorative stuff go more mainstream, but it's really impressive to watch small communities or determined individuals entirely change a landscape in a few decades.
A few I've enjoyed:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T39QHprz-x8
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSPkcpGmflE
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4OBcRHX1Bc
Supposedly it takes very little time, little investment (a few people doing most of it by hand with some guidance) and works like magic (e.g. Al Baydha Project).
Why isn't there a "revolution" happening and every neighboring area also adopting that approach?
So much of it seems so obvious, I'd expect some people with excavators building some berms in the US deserts and the place exploding with life in a year or three. But it doesn't happen. Why? Are there any issues that aren't shown in the films? Are there powerful enemies (who wants to keep the desert deserted?) that are lobbying against it?
Conventional argiculture is the simple and lazy version where instead of trying to understand your local ecosystem you just douse everything in fertilizer, pesticide, etc so you don't have to care what is happening in your soil.
Even if it's not well understood broadly in society, it does seem like it would spread neighbor-to-neighbor on a local level. I don't get it.
I recall years ago when SuperCritical Water Oxidation (SCWO) was a thing that they were eager to point out that fully oxidized lead is less toxic, and that SCWO oxidizes basically everything you put into it (including the ceramic liner). When SCWO proved difficult to scale up to industrial levels, they researched using it just for cleanup of superfund sites.
I've seen some comments in the few papers I've read on soil fungi that some oxidize toxic metals and others compartmentalize them so they don't affect cellular processes.
The amount of garbage in that one location alone makes things like banning disposable straws, etc seem pointless in comparison.
The shade and roots might even attract enough fish to provide the plants with fertilizer.
Mangroves can handle salt water. The issue is that they aren't actually free-floating forests out in the ocean, which is what GP would need for their idea.