While much of the environmental focus in recent years has fallen on reducing carbon emissions, the fact remains that pollution in forms other than heat-trapping gases still pose a significant threat to the sustainability. Everything from industrial toxins to shoreline degradation has impacts that often need to be met by expensive and carbon-heavy restoration efforts. But as research continues into carbon reduction, more and more natural solutions are being found to these environmental problems.

While the factories of the Industrial Revolution have scaled down and cleaned up remarkably since the environmental movement of the 1960s, they've left a significant legacy of pollution in US soils. Metal pollutants especially, like copper, arsenic, lead and zinc, can renderi attractive parcels of land useless for parks, food production or redevelopment. But researchers in England recently discovered that earthworms can process soil-borne metal pollutants into forms that are less hazardous and more easily extracted from the earth.

Toxins in aquatic or swampy environments can prove even more nefarious, as they can seep into groundwater supplies, and render an entire community's water supply unsafe for consumption. But restored wetland plans—often the same plants that were initially displaced by the development that create the pollution—have been proven an effective filter of all manner of toxic chemical. Simple-to-construct artificial wetlands have since been used to effectively filter polluted swamps and waterways, clearing the way for their sustainable reuse.

Mangroves, too, have proven their worth as a fantastic means of protecting coastal populations and preserving shorelines against erosion, and efforts to replant them, in addition to saving lives, will lower the economic and carbon impacts of other forms of shoreline defense. It will also help establish public sentiment in countries with major deforestation carbon emissions that leaving local vegetation intact can provide them with significant economic advantages.

When I was younger, it seemed that efforts to combat negative environmental change with natural solutions was a novel endeavor. Ladybug pesticides were an oddity rather than the norm. But as the world has become progressively more concerned with the climate consequences of industrial solutions, problem solving that relies on natural solutions, or adapts existing natural processes to new situations has become ever more attractive.

While its doubtful that a single magic-bullet process can "cure" the problem of carbon emissions, I don' think it's too hopeful to say that the heat-trapping gasses saved through wide-spread adoption of solutions based on natural processes can provide a significant step towards a cleaner, more sustainable planet.

Photo by Flickr user kudumomo