HEMP & CONTAMINATED SOIL
Hemp can clean contaminated soil and there has been countless articles to extol the various attributes of the hemp plant. This is going to be another one with more detail. Not only can hemp fiber can be used to create anything from clothing and paper to concrete bricks, but hemp plants also possess the remarkable ability to pull foreign contaminants and heavy metals out of polluted soil, through a process called phytoremediation.
HYPERACCUMULATORS
Certain plants, known as hyperaccumulators, have the capacity to absorb metals and other toxins from soil by metabolizing it through their roots, where it is then transferred and stored in their stems and leaves; these plants are also able to degrade or render certain contaminants harmless.
Hyperaccumulators can have multiple applications because crops that have been used to phytoextract metals can afterwards be harvested for the metal that has been accrued, with a method that is known as “phytomining”. It is thought that certain plants develop this ability as a natural defense against herbivores. Some well known hyperaccumulators are sunflowers and mustard plants; however, hemp is known to be one of the best plants for phytoremediation, as it is particularly suited for tolerating heavy metals.
HEMP PLANTED NEXT TO A NUCLEAR PLANT
After the infamous reactor explosion at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in 1986 caused numerous toxic compounds to be projected into the surrounding area, farmers close to the blast zone were understandably worried about what impact the radioactive particles would have on the soil. In an attempt to clean out the toxic materials and reduce further dispersion of radionuclide, different hyperaccumulators were planted, most notably hemp.
While this solution was innovative at the time, it did present a new set of problems in terms of how to dispose of the radioactive crops, including how to harvest and transport them without risking the threat of further contamination.
CLEANING CONTAMINATED SOIL
In 2008, an Italian farmer discovered that his land had been contaminated with dioxin, a toxic chemical that had been leaking from a large steel plant that was nearby. The government had detected dioxin in his livestock, and so he was forced to slaughter his entire herd of 600 sheep. In order to save his land, he came up with the idea to use hemp crops for phytoremediation, in order that they might leach the toxic chemicals out of the soil. Although the process is time consuming, an added benefit is that the phytoextracted crops can be later be burned as biofuel; providing an easy, renewable fuel resource.
HEMP PHYTOREMEDIATION IS CRUCIAL
The most important thing to understand about hemp is that because it is such a proficient hyperaccumulator, it is extremely important to research CBD products and determine where the hemp has been sourced. The quality of the soil ultimately determines the quality of the hemp, more so than most other crops — hemp will suck up all of the bad stuff, and this will also be in whatever product its extract is used for. This is particularly crucial with regard to hemp cultivation in the United States; as restrictions on growing hemp have only recently been lifted and farmers are still learning how to grow it, nor can they guarantee the condition of the soil.
Conversely, hemp that has been growing in the same fields for generations will likely have clean soil, because all of the harmful metals and contaminants will have been removed over time.
The more that is understood about the legalities of hemp and the plant itself, the more evident it becomes that it truly is one of the most versatile plants in human history.
From Globalization To A Planetary Mindset
It’s time for new cooperative platforms that address irreducible interdependence.
Globalization as we have known it is over. Kaput. As John Gray summarily puts it in his contribution to Noema, “forget it.” For the British philosopher, we are returning to the pluralism that existed before the post-Cold War neoliberal expansion and even the recent centuries of Western hegemony. This is the fragmentation that Chinese thinker Yuk Hui also talks about in Noema. For him, that means any new order will arise at multiple starting points, or bifurcations, that depart from the course we were on.
There will be many possible permutations, from Cold War and economic decoupling between the two great powers, protectionist trade policies and immigration curbs. We will see a patchwork of industrial policies aimed at strengthening national resilience instead of global integration. So-called “robust” supply chains that are partly global and partly domestic to build in redundancy as a hedge against political or natural disruptions are already appearing. While the populist revolt dealt the death blow to globalization, alternative political dispositions waiting in the wings have also so far shown little interest in resuscitating it.
What remains, and is irreducible, is the planetary. Obviously, the global ecosystem, including climate and pandemics that cross borders, qualify as planetary. The challenges here are recognized as common and convergent for all.
Thus, reconciling the centrifugal pull of ingathering with the centripetal imperative of planetary cooperation is the so-called “primary contradiction” going forward.
This contradiction will play out across a global communications web that has spun a synchronized planetary consciousness in which all are aware of what everyone else is doing, or not doing, in more or less real time. Inexorably, a kind of global mind, or “noosphere” as Teilhard de Chardin envisioned it, is emerging. But it is today as much a terrain of contestation rooted in divergent political and cultural tempers, including an ever more differentiating splinternet, as a space of common ground.
The “noopolitik” of the coming era could not be more different than the realpolitik of the last century. Rather than solid nation-states in which elites calculate balances of power, noopolitik is a transparent endeavor open to all manner of connected players in a now gaseous global realm in which nations are attempting to reclaim sovereignty even as the solidity they once assumed diminishes with every passing day.
The ultimate project of a planetary approach, therefore, is to forge a shared narrative for the noosphere. This doesn’t imply some one-size-fits-all Leviathan-like order that sets solutions to whatever ails the world, but a prevalent normative awareness that a cooperative approach is the only way to make irreducible interdependence work for each of us instead of against all of us.
That shared consciousness, or “noorative,” will only take hold in the first instance if its foundation rests not on wooly abstractions but on the existential imperative of cooperation in such clear and present realities as climate and pandemics. In effect, this noorative would combine the Chinese strategist Zheng Bijian’s idea of “building on a convergence of interests to establish a community of interests” with the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of “planetary co-immunism,” as he explains in an interview with Noema.
This new order of cooperation, and the evolved consciousness that arises out of its concrete actions, can only be built one brick at a time through new planetary platforms. A “partnership of rivals” among nation-states and the “civilization-states” that are in conflict in some realms, but nonetheless have cross interests in others, is one such way. It can also be built through “networks of the willing” among both civil society and states so disposed. In other words, alternative, parallel practices and institutions will have to be built on another foundation than a U.N.-style “trade union for nations-states” in order to ultimately go beyond the lessening but still weighty pull of their inertia.
One example of this approach was embodied in the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council presentation to former Mexican President Felipe Calderón when he hosted the G20 in 2012 — the first time that supranational body tackled climate change. We proposed that while G20 summitry could set broad goals, it lacked the legitimacy to implement them across different jurisdictions. To that end we recommended that “a web of national and subnational networks should be fostered to provide global public goods, such as low-carbon growth, from below through ‘coalitions of the willing’ working together to build up a threshold of global change.”
Only once the trust- and legitimacy-building experience of new platforms that address climate and pandemics gain traction can that cooperative spirit meaningfully address other imminent planetary challenges — bioengineering, AI and the creation of inorganic life.
The time has arrived to stop regretting the lost illusions of globalization and start thinking of how to construct a new order grounded in the undeniable realities of interdependence.
