Biological Restoration of water and land.
The problem is not only the amount of water available in the world’s rivers, lakes, and aquifers, but the pollution of those resources from human contamination, including bacteria, toxins, and nutrient loading.
Fortunately, this triple threat of nutrient loading, bacteria, and toxins – can be mitigated using organic, biological methods, generally known as “bioremediation.” Bioremediation Certain microbes, bacteria, fungi, and plants can remove or metabolise pollutants in soil or water, including assisting in the removal of industrial chemicals, petroleum products, and pesticides.
Some compounds – certain heavy metals, such as cadmium or lead, for example – resist bioremediation.
“How,” Goldstein and Johnson ask, “can we imagine a form of production that can both reproduce beautiful lives and unmake the infrastructure of our ecologically catastrophic social formation?” Ecological restoration To create successful biological design, we not only have to ask, “How does nature solve this physical challenge?” but also ask: “What is natural economics?” The economy of an ecosystem is non-hierarchical It is a web of shared relationships that contribute materials, energy and services to other parts of the network, as growth fluctuates within natural limits.
Lake Winnipeg in Canada suffered from high levels of phosphorus loading from the surrounding community, causing severe algae blooms.
In the 1990s, John Liu, an American who had been living in China for over 30 years, joined a Chinese government ecological rehabilitation initiative to restore the Loess Plateau economy by restoring the ecosystem.
“Landscape restoration,” explains Lui, “starts with restoring ecological function.
Real economy is understanding that natural ecological functions that create air, water, food and energy are vastly more valuable than anything that has ever been produced or bought and sold.
“Why fresh water shortages will cause the next great global crisis,” The Guardian, March 2015.