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The Land Is Ours

a landrights campaign for Britain

So. OK. From the beginning. I was depressed. I got an allotment. It was triangular. It made me happy. Digging must be good for you.

On a bright and shiny Easter day, I returned from an over eager early morning putting in my main crop potatoes and returned full of the joys to find an unexpected letter from the council on my doormat. And I was frightened to open it lest it was a late demand for poll tax evasion. But, it seems, Oxfordshire Council are much cleverer than that.

My allotments, along with all 140-odd others on the site, was contaminated with heavy metals, especially lead. Lovely.

The council advised us all to wash our hands and scrub and peel our veg and take extra care not to ingest the soil. And not to take young children onto the site who might eat the soil. They were going to do more testing.

I got depressed again. As you can imagine.

So I got on the case.

* * *

My allotment site - on the Trap Grounds on Port Meadow is, like many other allotment sites all over the country, on the site of a Victorian dump. It has been in cultivation since the 1920s. The council had got a soil survey done, or so they said, because digging for Victorian bottles on the site was disturbing the topsoil and they wondered if the disturbed soil was more contaminated.

I got hold of the report on the first round of tests. It turns out Oxford council had done two previous set of soil tests, in 1990, and 1993, which gave the same results, but the council had not alerted all allotment holders at that time.

The Trap Grounds area of Port Meadow has also been an area of recent major ?executive homes? building works. Yeah. Is it an attempt to scare us off the land? The council isn't saying.

And there are Guidelines on soil contamination, called 'Threshold Trigger' concentrations from the Interdepartmental Committee for Redevelopment of Contaminated Land (ICRCL) who set trigger concentrations for proposed end use of a site. These change according to whether the site is going to be used for allotments, domestic gardens, parks, open space, landscaped areas, buildings, and hard cover.

The ICRCL guidelines say that you can't cultivate veg on contaminated land but you can build houses on it, or tarmac over it. So the idea seems to be; if it's contaminated, leave it alone, turn it into a ?nature reserve?, or build houses on it. Makes sense, obviously.

I had my own soil survey done. At between 700 and 1000mg/kg, (that?s mg per kg of air-dried soil), the lead levels on our plots were two to three times higher than the ICRCL trigger concentrations for allotment sites (300mg/kg). And it's four to six times as high as the Dutch target value, which is also commonly quoted, for agricultural land (140mg/kg). The Dutch are quite hard-core about these things.

In the council tests, one plot contained 3000mg/kg of lead. The amount in an average polluted urban soil is about 150-200mg/kg, and this amount can be counteracted in a strong alkaline soil, or by liming the soil for the same effect, which limits heavy metal uptake in plants. There are other things in our soil, too; arsenic, boron, copper, mercury, nickel, and zinc. All, on one allotment plot or another, exceeded trigger concentrations.

* * *

All over the country, councils are taking allotments out of the hands of local people, and building on them. In the majority of cases, this is not being used for social housing, but private housing which can make a quick and easy buck. And, as I have said, building on contaminated land is an acceptable practice. Traditional ways of cleaning land using chemicals is expensive, needs specialists and renders the land pretty useless for cultivation afterwards.

Allotments are important. They are land that is ours already. Land which is already present in urban areas. They offer self-sufficiency, and a sense of community. They offer fresh air and exercise. They make sure essential plant cultivation skills are not lost, and develop new skills, like seed saving, thus giving us some kind of alternative to industrial agriculture. When that land is removed from the public domain, there i s rarely any other land available in urban areas for cultivation. There must be something that local communities can do when faced with the intractable problem of contamination.

* * *

OK, right. There is something that we can do. It's cheap, it needs no extra skills apart from those of general cultivation, and it cleans the land.

It's called phytoremedation; the use of plants, called hyperaccumulator species, to get contaminants out of the soil. Oh yes. Major excitement. It works on the same principle as reed beds used to filter pollutants out of water.

The US army have been experimenting with phytoremediation to get TNT and other chemicals out of the soil. Some academics in the Czech Republic have found that ?deadly nightshade? takes PCBs out of the soil. A US based company called Phytotech has recently been formed for such purposes, they using sunflowers to take radioactive metals from soil around Chernobyl. The US government have provided several million dollars to phytoremediation research, and research into its cousin, bioremediation, which uses micro-organisms to clean the soil.

The list goes on, however, it seems it is being used and researched mostly in the US and almos t exclusively by government or academic institution as, but this needn?t be the case. To my knowledge, this new science has never before been put into practice in a community context. From my understanding this is what it would be most suited to.

Getting heavy metals out of the soil is a difficult matter. Really cleaning the soil can take decades. It is not something that will happen overnight. The metals cannot, using naturally-occurring plants we know about at present, be changed into anything other than heavy metals. So phytoremedation does not always remove the pollution problem - it shifts it. The plants have to be cut down and land-filled. Alternatively - and this is the good bit - on very contaminated areas in which the hyperaccumulator plants take up a lot of heavy metals, the plants can be incinerated and the ore extracted. Alchemy.

* * *

Oh, yeah. It?s all well and good getting excited about plants, but there's one thing I forgot. People.

There were two representatives from the Trap Ground Allotment Association at the council meeting at which I presented a proposal for a experimental community-phytoremediation project. They didn't believe phytoremediation was a reality, even though there was academic research to back it up. Also they didn't want their allotment site used as a test ground, or to have any sort of project o n it, drawing attention, I suppose, to the contamination issue. What I do on my plot with my funky ideas is my business. They want to go on growing and eating their vegetables, quietly.

The people on the site who were concerned about this have already stopped cultivation and found plots elsewhere. The rest will have a shock when something else happens, or the council want to get stroppy in a few years. Or people stop taking plots because they don't want contaminated food and the council reclaim the site because it's underused. While all this was going on, a small road was built up to the site. They said it was for the sewage. Yeah. Shit likes to take a nice drive.

But the Trap Ground allotments isn't the only place this has happened in Oxford. Recently, the council did some (confidential - unlike on the Trap Grounds) testing on another local allotment site. These allotments are slightly different, the people are more varied economically and socially (those with the control at Trap Grounds Association are mostly well-off and retired). The site is more vulnerable to development, being tucked away from where people take their Sunday walks. The council have been openly pestering them for their vacant plots for a long time. And the Secretary of the site is interested.

Well anyway, she says, what's the difference between the contamination fr om pesticides from what you get in the shops and contamination from the food we grow? At least, once you've done your soil survey, you know what you're getting from your own stuff.

Regardless, a phytoremediation project on either of these sites would be perfect to deflect development. It would also add an extra string to either allotment association's bow, and bring the community together. Look, we can say, we're actively engaged in cleaning up our land. You can't build on it. Bugger off.

* * *

There are a couple of rather worrying aspects about phytoremediation which I don't really like to think about, and try not to mention to often when I'm selling the idea. So I've put this bit at the end because I don't really know what to do with it. Yeah, like the pollution itself.

Some people are genetically engineering hyperaccumulator plants. Scientists at the University of Georgia have inserted a gene into a plant from a bacteria which lives happily (naturally) on metal-contaminated soil. The resultant plant thrives on toxic mercury, converting it into a relatively inert form. Many scientists are dead into this, seeing it as the way forward for phytoremediation. Is this a good use of genetic engineering? In such a polluted world, is the only way to reclaim land rendered toxic by our own science, to use more science? I dunno.

Phy toremediation also looks like an easy answer, but there aren't any really easy answers as far as industrial pollution is concerned. The possibility that industry could use plants to clean an area around a toxic site and thus still feel happy to continue pumping out pollutants, is worrying. I do not feel that relying on nature to clean-up something filthy will produce a 'nice' human-friendly environment in the long term. It would still render the land surrounding the industrial plant useless, destroying the natural ecosystem, destroying biodiversity, and cramming it full of triffid-like toxic munching plants.

This is similar to the toxic red algae in the Mediterranean, or the thick green algae that pollutes our own waterways, feeding on fertilisers, and suffocating all other life under the surface. Maybe they also absorb nitrogen, acting as bioremediators, but this not promote total harmony.

* * *

None of this removes the problem of contamination on my allotment. Or the allotments over the way. Or contamination on any community land. It is easy to scare people off a piece of land by labelling it 'toxic'. And allotments, in particular, are vitally important to local communities. It is land we already have, by right. We can't move on, the way industry does, when the surrounding land gets too polluted. But we can really reclaim our land.

From such great beginnings, it might all come to nothing, like the flower from the seed that looks nothing the picture on the packet. But at the moment, phytoremediation is there, and its the best thing we've got.

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