In 1919, all along the Western Front, French authorities were taking stock of the devastation of World War I. From the border with Belgium at Lille to the border with Switzerland near Strasbourg, this most brutal of wars had torn a rupture through the land: It was ripped, cratered, pitted, charred by a billion artillery shells fired over four years. “Where there are no dead,” wrote Henri Barbusse, “the earth itself is corpselike.” A Frankenstein landscape, stitched and stapled together, which harbored in its flesh millions of tons of unexploded munitions and chemical weapons enough to kill an army, all over again.
After a period of uncertainty, it was decided to plant a shroud of trees over the war zone—a living sarcophagus that might stabilize the soil and contain the terrors within for a generation or more. A forest of forgetfulness. Where the land was worst affected—soil stripped almost to the bedrock—they planted black pines, one of the only hardy species that could thrive there. So it remains today. They call it the Zone Rouge.
For a hundred years a forest grew up across the land, tall and dark and impenetrable, whose undergrowth curled and snarled into a thicket of bramble and blackthorn. In the Zone Rouge, however, there is a place where the trees never grew back: a clearing in the woods, where the oaks and hornbeams part to reveal a small round pool of what appears to be gray gravel, or tar, or ash. A swatch of ground where nothing will grow.
The secret to this sterile wound lies also in the decisions made after the war. At armistice, millions of unused shells lay piled up, ready to be fired. It wasn’t clear what should be done with these surplus weapons of mass destruction. At Verdun, the decision was made to recover what ammunition they could at the military camps, but to gather chemical weapons—200,000 of them—at a farm near Gremilly. Here was mustered an array of the most unpleasant hexes one man can cast upon another: mustard gas, tear gas, phosgene—whose pleasant odor of freshly mown hay belies its deadly consequences—the sneezing gas diphenyl-chloroarsine, the garlic‑scented vomiting agent diphenylcyano-arsine. Then, finally, in 1928, they dug trenches as if for a mass grave, piled in the canisters, and set them ablaze. Hence the name: la Place à Gaz, the Place of Gas.
Many of the so-called heavy metals—in this case used as kind of a catch-all term for cobalt, copper, iron, nickel, zinc, and others—are essential to the fundamental processes of life, but in quantity they become toxic. When plants come into contact with metal‑tainted soil, strange things can happen.
Those plants that grow as a wan halo around the poison ashes of la Place à Gaz: It was those I was here to see. On first sight, they seemed disarmingly familiar: the haze of what is called tufted grass and the Americans call “velvet” grass for its peach-fuzz leaves—common to marshland, verges, neglected waste ground—and, hidden beneath, like an underfur, the powdered goblet lichen Cladonia fimbriata. Neither are exotic species. But plants like these are specially adapted to survive in what would be otherwise be a dangerous environment. They limit their intake of the metals, preventing a build‑up to toxic levels in their bodies.
Their neighbor, though, a soft and feathery moss known as Pohlia nutans (“nodding thread moss,” after their tiny, many-headed fronds), uses a more complex strategy: Rather than close itself off to the metals in the soil, it throws open the doors, transporting metal salts upward into its limbs and stashing them away. Magpie plants of this kind are known as “hyperaccumulators,” and it’s not totally understood why they do this.
Though metallophyte species like these have evolved naturally, finding toeholds in outcrops of metal ores and at sites like the Tantramar “copper swamp” of Canada’s New Brunswick, they are now much more likely to be found in human-impacted ones. Mine tailings, spoil heaps, slag tips, postindustrial sites of many kinds—and postconflict ones too, like la Place à Gaz. There has been an exponential growth in land despoiled by heavy metals over recent decades. Globally, more than five million such contaminated sites have been reported; more than 300,000 square miles of contaminated soil in China alone.
Because of their strange and beguiling qualities, metal hyperaccumulators—of which there are known to be around 500—are of enormous scientific interest. Thanks to their thirst for otherwise toxic materials, they have great potential as tools in the recovery of highly polluted sites. By sucking heavy metals from the earth and hoarding or redistributing them, they might prepare the ground for other, more sensitive organisms. In this way, nature begins to heal over her scars.
A field of study, phytoremediation, has grown up around hyperaccumulating plants. It seeks to harness their surreal kind of superpowers for the greater good. Other species include the brake fern, which removes arsenic from the soil and stores it in its fronds (and is being tested as a natural filter for contaminated water in Bangladesh, following a decades-long arsenic-poisoning crisis), and sunflowers, which accumulate a wide range of heavy metals and are grown on sites of former mines and smelters in Australia. It’s a slow process; the plants must grow and then be harvested—and their bodies, now containing high concentrations of the heavy metals, disposed of carefully—but it can be faster and certainly less environmentally damaging than current clean-up methods: excavation and reburial under a concrete cap.
Source: Plants, Heavy Metals, and the Lingering Scars of World War I
theartofmadeline
dededos
baratheonpilled
areudirty
titsay
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
