520 Oil, Illness, and Human Rights
A new way to clean spilled oil?
After a diesel fuel spill in the USA, different companies were asked to see
what they could do to clean it up. The soil where the oil spilled was mounded
up in piles, and each company was given one pile to work with.
One of the companies was a small business devoted to growing and selling
edible mushrooms. The man who ran the business had seen mushrooms
growing after forest fires and other natural disasters. He believed mushrooms
had the power to restore damaged land. His team went to work filling their
oil-soaked pile with the root fibers of oyster mushrooms. Then they covered
the pile and waited.
When they uncovered the pile 6 weeks later, what they saw was amazing.
The soil was covered with huge mushrooms, some as big as 30 cm across.
They took the mushrooms and soil to a laboratory and tested them.
The mushrooms had no trace of oil or any of the toxic chemicals that oil
contains. The mushrooms had completely cleaned the soil!
The exciting part of the story is what happened next. After the mushrooms
matured, f lies came in and laid eggs in them. Maggots appeared, birds
f lew in, and other small animals began to eat the mushrooms and the
maggots. The birds and animals carried in seeds, and plants started growing.
The polluted pile of dirt was transformed into a rich garden of life.
This method worked in the experiment, but no one knows yet if it will
work as well in all conditions and all places. More work needs to be done to
find out if mushrooms or other “natural remedies” can clean up oil spills.
A Community Guide to Environmental Health 2012