Solution to Industrial Pollution: A Food Forest, Of Course

How do we make a living while also caring for the earth upon which our living depends? Chattanooga, TN has a long industrial history. Generations have made their living here and continue to make their living here in steel mills and chemical plants. The old Wheland Foundry (pictured below, c. 1950), soon to be turned into our newest baseball stadium to revitalize South Broad, is one of our oldest factories, active in Chattanooga since 1873.[1] Other steel foundries intentionally dumped their industrial waste in worker and black communities around the city, especially in Alton Park and Highland Park, leaving serious lead pollution in our backyards.[2] Much of south Chattanooga is a US Superfund Site, receiving funding from the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to scrape off the polluted soil from backyards across the city and replace it.[3] While an industrial economy provided income for many, it has left us with costs we cannot afford: the poisoning of our children and our land. We need a green economy that heals our soil, protects the young, and gives Chattanooga a future.

            The Food Forest Coalition of Chattanooga hopes to build a community of residents, businesses, community groups, and public spaces who utilize perennial edible landscaping to create a more abundant city. To work with community groups to install food forests, we must reckon with the industrial pollution of the past. Lead in the soil is a major concern. At St. Elmo United Methodist Church, we discovered lead in the peeling paint on a shed. As an excited volunteer group, we had already begun work improving the soil, installing log berms, planting a cover crop, and sheet mulching. The discovery caused us to step back and slow down until we knew more.

            Thanks to a connection from another community gardener in town, we learned about the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. They do free surface tests for heavy metals, funded through the EPA.  Our results were good, and they suggested a few simple practices to prevent any lead exposure, including painting the shed, mulching the soil heavily, avoiding root crops, and wearing gloves when gardening.

            Lead is a dangerous soil pollutant that can cause permanent learning disorders and behavioral dysfunction in children. Adults also can be negatively affected by ingesting lead, but because the main pathway is physically ingesting soil or paint dust, children are much more susceptible. Plants can uptake lead into their roots and into leaves if lead levels are high enough, but fruiting bodies and berries do not collect lead. Cucumbers are a strange exception, with one study finding lead reaching the fruit.[4] Plants will not uptake the lead if they have healthy soil with sufficient phosphorus and an even pH between 6.0 and 7.0.[5] Increased organic matter in the soil also binds lead so it is unavailable to plants and to people.[6]

            In short, though lead is a dangerous pollutant, the best long-term solution is to improve soil health through the addition of compost and mulch to cover, dilute, and bind the lead making it unavailable to plants or children. Improving the soil health is always the first step in a food forest project or the installation of edible landscaping. The highest surface lead test at the St Elmo UMC site was an outlier at 226±3 parts per million, and the rest were within naturally occurring lead levels under 80 parts per million. Compost, mulching, and cover crops is a safe way forward to remediate the soil. Increasing the use of land for edible landscaping that improves soil quality can make a safer landscape for all of us and for our children.

            As we work together to build community-based food forests that are free-pick public spaces, in the debris of industrial landscapes, how can we value the practices that build our future as a people and as a city? The industrial economy employed many and continues to do so today, but has left us costs that deny our future. We need a new environmental ethic, a green economy that does not strip the land of resources but leaves it more abundant for future generations. Come join us in building public spaces and access to livelihoods that serve us and the next seven generations here in Chattanooga!  

[1] Wheland Foundry being honored for war work. 1917. Retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America, https://collections.chattlibrary.org/s/localhistory/item/12556. (Accessed May 23, 2024.)

[2] Southside Chattanooga Lead, Chattanooga, TN Cleanup Activities. 2024. EPA, https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.cleanup&id=0410686. (Accessed May 23, 2024).

[3] Same as above.

[4] Finster, Mary E, Kimberly A. Gray, and Helen J. Binns. 2004. "Lead Levels of Edibles Grown in Contaminated Residential Soils: A Field Survey." Science of the Total Environment. 320. pg 245-257.

[5] Traunfield, Jon. 2023. "Lead in Garden Soils." University of Maryland Extension. https://extension.umd.edu/resource/lead-garden-soils/ (Accessed May 23, 2024).

[6] Same as above.