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Can we do the same with golf courses?

I think it was George Carlin that said put affordable housing on golf courses?

More seriously, if you have a brownfield ex industrial site, will trees etc grow ok there? Does converting brownfield sites to meadows or forests pose any risks to nearby humans?

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Speaking of brownfield, you may (more likely not) be surprised to know that golf courses are pretty nasty places themselves. You can find soils contaminated with arsenic, mercury, and cadmium from fungicides.

So those rolling green links might not be the cheapest places to establish new housing when you include the remediation.

Oof, that's pretty bad. I did not know that. Do you happen to know if forests would help clean that soil?

Feels kind of appropriate if you could grow forest on a site for 50 to 100 years or more. Then harvest the wood with all the nasty stuff in it. Then bury all that contaminated wood somewhere deep. Then build houses on the newly clean earth.

You can build new soil on top of contaminated soil to bury it. Here’s a permaculture site in an old rail bed in nyc that has nasty stuff lurking beneath many layers of new soil[0].

Not really sure if trees uptake heavy metals.

0: https://youtu.be/UqyK_9iybD8?si=rx7iCjsTu1Zn6YbO

They won’t, but certain fungi will break them down.

How does fungi break down the heavy metals?

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