“There are some parcels that Mother Nature owns,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo said in his State of the State address a few months after Sandy. “She may only visit once every few years, but she owns the parcel and when she comes to visit, she visits.” Nature—in the form of rising seas—has already begun to visit a stretch of the East Coast from Cape Hatteras to Boston, which is experiencing sea level rise greater than the global average. And in 2013 the New York–area flood zone doubled when FEMA released its new maps. Some scientists think that even this is a grave underestimate of coastlines at risk.
A bit of surrender, then, may be unavoidable. For Meyer and Bolstad’s double-dune forest to exist, for example, some would lose their ocean views and others perhaps their houses, houses that are so close to the ocean that there is no room to create a dune system. But the reality is that many of those houses were already relinquished, swept off their foundations during the storm in a sudden unplanned event that is the opposite of managed retreat.
The crooked flagpole that leans in the sand at the end of Kissam Avenue in Staten Island’s Oakwood Beach neighborhood is a reminder that a dune can only be battered so many times before it’s breached, and with rising sea levels, the concern is real. Most of the Fox Beach area of Oakwood has signed up for a buyout—at prestorm home values—that Governor Cuomo proposed post-Sandy. The offer was impossible to pass up for many beat-up shoreline dwellers who lived in what was essentially a bathtub, vulnerable to storm flooding from the west, ocean surges from the east, and brush fires from the phragmites-filled wetlands that close in from the north and south. The whispering fronds betray a neighborhood that was once, and remains, a wetland.
“The storm would’ve killed me if I’d been home,” says resident Bill Bye, whose single-story bungalow on Kissam Avenue filled nearly to the ceiling with seawater during Sandy. When I meet him, Bill sits in a plastic lawn chair in front of his home of 30 years with a single sheet of paper in his left hand and a cigarette in his right. The paper is a New York City assessor sheet, which shows the value of his home before October 29, 2012. He hopes the assessor will agree with the value and that the government will issue a check—soon—allowing him to move on with his life. “It’s gonna happen again,” he says. “It’s too dangerous to live here.”
But Oakwood Beach and its wetlands don’t have to signal disaster in waiting. The area is also part of a growing system known as the Staten Island Bluebelt. Run by the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, the Bluebelt is the aquatic equivalent of a greenbelt. The extensive system of engineered ponds, creeks, and wetlands naturally provides flood control by absorbing storm surges across 10,000 acres and 16 watersheds that span the southern end of the borough, Oakwood Beach among them.
Yet the word engineered evokes the wrong visual. Instead, imagine Staten Island circa 1850, with babbling brooks passing under stone bridges and along banks blooming in purple-flowered pickerelweed. Bluebelt designers, who use words like beautification and countrify to describe their work, draw their inspiration from mid-19th-century photographs and native plant stock as well as the latest knowledge of hydrological dynamics: strategically placed riffles and pools along with abundant plantings help soak up storm runoff pollutants like nitrogen and phosphorous. A moratorium on new building in wetlands along with buyouts like the one in Oakwood Beach are helping to expand the Bluebelt’s reach. “This is what some people like to call ‘thinking out of the box,’” says Staten Island borough president James Molinaro. “Instead of putting down sewers, you use nature to purify and disperse storm water. There’s both beauty and effectiveness.”
The Bluebelt costs considerably less than a typical underground sewer system, and it provides the added benefit of fostering community open spaces and wildlife habitat. Neighborhoods can “adopt” a piece of the Bluebelt, and volunteer groups help with cleanups. The result is an ecosystem-wide maintenance program that brings together citizens and government in a creative way that is winning awards.
Another unlikely but increasingly sensible partnership for a livable New York is between humans and a more aquatically sophisticated member of the natural world—oysters. The city’s waterways were once dense with them. Jamaica Bay alone, a vast network of wetlands and marshes on the north side of the Rockaways, used to send 300,000 bushels of oysters to city markets each year. But by 1921 the impacts of sewage and industrial effluent, overharvesting, and dredging had taken a toll, and the oyster beds perished or, for health reasons, were no longer harvested.
New York City waters are now cleaner than they’ve been in decades, and spat—the little larvae of oysters—are floating about, seeking out some substrate to latch on to so they can grow.
“There are oyster larvae,” says landscape architect Kate Orff. “There’s just no place for them to land. So there are these babies, but then . . .” She pauses and makes a long downward whistle indicating failure. “I get depressed about this, as a mom of two.”
Orff has proposed bringing back New York City’s lost oyster reefs—which could naturally help shield the city from future storm surges—in a project called Oyster-tecture. We meet at a round table in the kitchen of her SCAPE Studio offices on Lower Broadway, with a foggy morning view across Manhattan to the Hudson River.
Her idea is to make a home for the oyster orphans, starting in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, one of the most polluted waterways of the city. Piers are already in place; cages will be lowered into the water that are filled with fuzzy rope, providing lots of surface area for spat to land. (The cages are to keep hungry New Yorkers from prematurely harvesting oysters that won’t be suitable for human consumption for years to come.) She was thrilled when she heard Governor Cuomo give a shout-out to the bivalves after the storm: “It came out of his mouth—‘We need to be thinking about oyster beds’—and I’m like, yes, that’s the goal!”
Orff advocates dredging and filling waterways in a way that supports underwater ecosystems instead of destroying them. “I think a big part of this is thinking about it holistically,” she says. “You can use dredging and filling in a cut-and-build concept throughout the harbor to create a new set of edges and cross-sections that can become armatures for habitat.” As the oysters build upon themselves, making reefs out of their own shells, they work continually to clean the waters, acting as natural filtration systems.
To consider the return of oyster reefs to New York is to explore the bathymetry, or underwater topography, of the waters that surround the city’s islands. Orff explains the mechanics, but it’s as much a history lesson.
“There was once this historic 3-D mosaic of underwater bathymetry, which included barrier islands and oyster reefs and shallower shoal areas that make a threshold into the inner harbor,” she says, using a marker to show how the stretch of Sandy Hook on the Jersey Shore wants to reach up and connect with Coney Island in a series of channels and shoals. If the landmass was permitted to form again, it would help diminish the impact of sea surges. One hard passageway could allow a steady shipping channel. “See this signature?” She taps her marker on the area between Staten Island, Brooklyn, and New Jersey. “This whole area was once shallows, back in 1766, fortified with layers of ecological systems.”
Orff isn’t the only person in the city thinking about oysters. Marit Larson, the NYC Parks Department’s director of wetlands, is working on oyster restoration on the north side of the city. She says that increasingly oysters have been showing up on tires and concrete rubble in the Bronx River. In 2006 the Parks Department started designing artificial reefs to supplement the river’s substrate; now they’re working with partners that include NY/NJ Baykeeper and New York Harbor School, which trains low-income kids in hands-on maritime stewardship as they dump 120-ton loads of shells into an area where the East and Bronx rivers converge. One survey taken just before Sandy struck found more than 11,000 oysters along a mile-wide swath of water. Last summer students relocated another 100,000 farm-raised spat to the growing reef.
; When referencing historical patterns, Kate Orff refers repeatedly to something called the Ratzer Map. In 1766, 10 years before the rebellious colonists unshackled their new nation from the British empire, cartographer Bernard Ratzer was trolling the New York Harbor, recording its curves and depths. His sepia-toned map now hangs at the Brooklyn Historical Society, a memory of the city’s once-flourishing natural infrastructure that, if brought back to life, could help mitigate the type of damage experienced during an event like Sandy.
Orff’s pen sweeps across her drawing. “This is a diagram of an ideal world of nature’s protectors. You have layers and layers of barrier dunes, and then vast tracts of wetlands. Wetlands don’t make sense if you have a building and only a little wetland. Wetlands only make sense if they are extensive, so they can really dissipate wave energy.”
Of course, efforts like these can only do so much to counteract the effects of climate change. But if combined with a comprehensive rebuilding of New York’s natural features, they could make a real impact. “There is literally nothing that could have stopped the Sandy surge,” Orff says. “But hard and soft infrastructure solutions could be combined in a win-win-win scenario that would revitalize the harbor landscape, clean the water, and begin to address coastal protection.”
The Ratzer Map holds some clues to what a more resilient New York might look like, but it’s a static snapshot compared to the Mannahatta Project, which documents the changes to Manhattan island that have occurred since that fateful year of 1609, when the explorer Henry Hudson first sailed his vessel, the Half Moon, into New York Bay. The project, now extending to all five boroughs and renamed the Welikia Project, is the work of Eric Sanderson, senior conservation ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. Sanderson spent more than a decade piecing together the city’s original ecology, mapping where its creeks once flowed, what its shoreline once looked like, and which flora and fauna filled the ecosystem. The results are a roadmap for designers seeking to know what was, in order to guide what will be. Because there is no indication that we humans will stop tinkering with our environment, the hope is that the adaptations we make embrace the third-way approach that balances human needs and ecological limitations.
“Constructing human habitats that work with nature rather than against it will have the greatest benefit for people and nature,” Sanderson says. “Probably the most important work to be done, but also the hardest, is adapting the social, legal, and economic institutions to incorporate messages from the natural world.”
Even with those systematic challenges, Sanderson is solid in his belief that we can learn—and benefit—from listening to what the natural world is telling us.
“Hurricane Sandy was information encoded in a storm,” he says. “If people begin to see the nature of our place, then they can begin to see the landscape strategies that history suggests are protective and adaptive over the long run: specifically, a combination of beaches, dunes, and salt marshes.”
The process of reimagining New York City’s infrastructure with climate change in mind was underway before Sandy, but the storm’s devastation underscored the urgency of learning from nature and then planning and designing with her machinations in mind. There will be some managed retreat—some withdrawal from coastal areas that one hopes will be graceful—but there are also ways to stay along our shorelines safely. It demands rethinking the meaning of edge, redefining it as something more fluid than the single hard line conveyed by a cartographer’s pen. To get there will require an era of collaboration and partnership, from government-level climate change panels to grassroots citizen efforts, from design competitions to smartphone apps to gatherings of engineers, city planners, and scientists. It will take people stepping out to meet their neighbors—before the high waters come.
Ultimately such a collaborative approach could be our generation’s grand act of conciliation with the changing forces of the natural world—one that could represent a cautious step into a future that will allow us to keep some of our coveted seaside haunts while also conceding that some places we’ve set up camp are simply not ours to inhabit.
KIM TODD
Curious
FROM River Teeth
FLAT HEAD, LIDLESS eyes, body dirt brown, the Surinam toad slithers through the pond like animated mud, an amphibian golem. Long fingers filter the swamp floor, sweeping fish and worms into a tongueless mouth. Some romantic gave it the alternate title “star-fingered toad,” because after each foot divides into toes, the toes divide again, creating a “star” at the tip. But celestial the toads are not.
The most disturbing part, though, is the way they breed. Mating, they somersault through the water, the female dropping eggs on the male’s belly when the pair is upside down. Turning, he brushes them onto her back and fertilizes. The eggs sink into her body, leaving pale warty bumps until, months later, fully formed miniature toads (not tadpoles) burst out and swim away. When they’ve gone, her back is all holes like a drained honeycomb.
In the 17th century, every collector in Amsterdam coveted a Surinam toad, in a box, in a painting, in a jar. The Dutch had colonized Surinam, a small country on the northeast shoulder of South America. Between planting sugar and pineapple, they marveled at the creations of the tropical rainforest. Frederik Ruysch, botanist and midwifery expert, kept one in his cabinet of curiosity, a gathering of oddities, the precursor to museums, where his friends could come gawk. Nicholaes Witsen, burgomaster and avid collector, reported seeing the disconcerting toad and described it: “All the back is open as a wound.”
Some viewers interpreted the ugly appearance as a judgment for ugly habits: “The pipa is, in form, more hideous than even the common toad; nature seeming to have marked all these strange mannered animals with peculiar deformity,” wrote Oliver Goldsmith in A History of Earth and Animated Nature in 1774.
Those who seek her out today still have a visceral response. Comments on a YouTube video of toadlets tearing the skin and kicking free include “damn nature you scary!” and “as a lover of animals im ashamed to say i said KILL it with fire and dont stop . . . kill it burn it kill it burn it! then bury it and shoot the grave!” (A more sober-minded commenter suggested that compared to watching a human birth, it wasn’t bad at all.)
Given the strength of the recoil, why can’t we look away? The YouTube video has been watched almost half a million times. Perhaps now you are tempted. Knowledge of South American toad habits has little practical application. What is the nature of the itch we call “curiosity”?
Like the toad, curiosity is a strange beast. The investigating mind moves like a sleek little mammal, a mink maybe, rubbing up against things in the dark, trying to determine their shape, occasionally ripping with sharp teeth and pawing through the opening. Or perhaps a spider, creeping precisely, attaching silk here, and here, and here to impose a pattern where before was just air.
Curiosity can be as obsessive as hunger or lechery, swamping the senses. But it is notoriously fickle too, slinking away as soon as it is satisfied. Its subjects seem so frivolous: a baby giraffe, a dodo skeleton, the Surinam toad. George Loewenstein, author of The Psychology of Curiosity, summed it up: “The theoretical puzzle posed by curiosity is why people are so strongly attracted to information that, by the definition of curiosity, confers no extrinsic benefit.” Saint Augustine defined it as “ocular lust,” the desire to stare at an object, animal, or scene and let the mind roam. Charles Darwin, who you might think would value the trait, saw it as the enemy of substantive inquiry. He wrote in a letter to a friend: “Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.”
This kinship to physical passion—the strength of desire, the burst of delight—makes curiosity waver between vice and virtue. Intellectual curiosity sparks science, art, all kinds of innovation. Here, in most of 21st-century North America, it is held in the highest esteem. For much of history, though, coveting the secrets of the world and mulling over
mushrooms and vipers threatened to drag one from thoughts of God. Religious and worldly contemplation were at odds. Thomas Brooks, an English nonconformist preacher of the early 1600s, warned, “Curiosity is the spiritual adultery of the soul. Curiosity is spiritual drunkenness.”
Don’t unlock the door. Don’t open the box. Don’t eat the apple. Fairy tales, Greek myths, and biblical stories caution against giving curiosity free rein. The warnings are dire. But so often, like Pandora, Eve, and Bluebeard’s wife, we still extend our hand.
In the late 1920s, Henry Nissen, a slight, bespectacled psychology graduate student at Columbia, took a more scientific approach to the question of the nature of curiosity. He noticed that white rats explored their cages, even if they had to delay eating or mating. How far would they go to satisfy their curiosity? he wondered. Nissen put male albinos in a cage linked to a passageway that would give the rats an electric shock when they crossed it. On the other side of the passageway, he created an irresistibly interesting environment for a rat (he hoped): a mini-maze of sheet-metal walls in a pine base, seeded with corks and piles of wood shavings and a rubber mat. The rats investigated, even at the price of pain.
Of course, this curiosity is not merely idle. It could be a life-or-death matter for a rat to know what lurks around an unfamiliar corner. But for humans it’s more complex. Why, for example, might anyone want to read about rats shocking themselves in pursuit of wood shavings?
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015 Page 34
