NRDC and the Big Apple
OnEarth spoke to Mark Izeman, director of NRDC’s New York urban program, which works to protect the nation’s largest metropolitan area. Why should restoring the New York City waterfront be a top environmental priority? For starters, it’s the greatest untapped area of open space in the city. The shoreline is longer than the entire coastline of Cape Cod, but historically much of it has been walled off from the public. Second, revitalizing the waterfront must also be seen as a key element in jump-starting the region’s new green economy. There are huge opportunities to create and preserve environmentally friendly industries, including the city’s historic maritime industry. Can you give us some examples of how the waterfront can help build a green economy? I can think of two good examples. The first is the city’s state-of the-art recycling facility, which is being built along the Sunset Park waterfront in Brooklyn. And the second is the ongoing effort to transform the historic Brooklyn Navy Yard on the East River into a green industrial park. Both of these projects will not only help create thousands of new jobs in green industries, but they will also help reduce city air pollution by using our barges and boats-instead of relying exclusively on trucks-to move people, goods, and recyclables. How clean are New York City’s waterways these days? Well, over the past 40 years the level of pollution has declined dramatically in the harbor. But significant problems persist, such as toxic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in the Hudson River and dioxin contamination in the Passaic River in New Jersey. And, despite sharp reductions in sewage pollution since the 1970s, our waterways are still regularly contaminated by untreated sewage discharges from our antiquated sewer system. Indeed, every time it rains, millions of gallons of raw sewage and rainwater are discharged into the surrounding rivers and bays from hundreds of outfalls dotting the coastline. This lingering problem limits New Yorkers’ recreational opportunities, such as kayaking and swimming. At the same time, the city’s sewage treatment plants also need to be upgraded to remove more nitrogen from our sewage wastes. High nitrogen levels lead to algae blooms that harm fish and other aquatic life. And what about eating fish caught off the city’s coastline? Are they safe to eat? Unfortunately, despite all the gains we have made since passage of the federal Clean Water Act in 1972, there are still significant health concerns with eating fish from the city’s waterways. The biggest problem is PCB contamination, which comes from the more than one million pounds of PCBs dumped into the Hudson River by General Electric over a 30-year period. Because of this toxic legacy, New York State officials advise that any fish caught from the Upper Hudson should not be eaten. And officials warn that most fish species from the Lower Hudson should not be eaten more than once per week .
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NRDC and the Big Apple
Water’s Edge
Photographs by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, text by Robert Sullivan To know New York, or at least to experience it, the tourists often start at Times Square, with its theaters and shows and chain restaurants that offer out-of-towners what they expect (and pay) to be surprised by — the hot dog, the bagel, the Broadway spectacle, in the intersection of glass and stone-covered skyscrapers. The native starts at the water. Because if you want to get to the physical, historical, and even, I would argue, emotional essence of the city that is packed with eight million people, you head to the water’s edge, or edges — all 578 miles of them, all as close as they are far away. These are the places where New York, even if you think you know it, changes before your eyes, where the city seems less concrete and more dynamic, where you are never sure what is flora and what is fauna, or what is natural and what is not. As is well known, the shoreline of New York City is back. Where did it go? A quick synopsis: in the mid-1800s the waters of New York become a place where swimming involves navigating trash and dead animals, primarily horses, which are tossed in whole. The shoreline is the place for docks, obviously, as well as sail makers, oystermen, printers, tanners, sailors, and the refuges of sailors. Sewage treatment begins around 1900, but the pace of sewage production (i.e., urban life) increases. Sewage treatment can’t keep up and is then overwhelmed by all the other things we begin to pump into the water, especially after World War II — namely, chemicals. At this point the water gets really bad, and the people who deal with it directly are those who have no choice: the powerless, the poor, and the marine industry, which begins to struggle, then nearly dies off. In the 1960s comes, first, the idea that the river is polluted and, second, that it does not have to be. In the 1970s comes the Clean Water Act. In the 1980s, in response to the act, comes clean water. In the 1990s little creatures begin to jeopardize the wood in the old piers, a good problem as far as water quality goes, and the bigger creatures (i.e., us) begin to turn around and face the rivers and the harbor, the kills and the bay. It is a long and tortured story, but Westway, which was once to be the great modern interstate along the Hudson, on the West Side of Manhattan, became instead the Hudson River Greenway. And yet still, to this day, no one really knows exactly what is on the water. No one has really explored all of the 578 miles, not even the Shorewalkers, who walk the watery circumferences of the city, who see a lot of the shore. (Their motto: "See New York at 3 m.p.h.") Even the people who tell us about the edges in various official capacities and subsequently make bold plans for them may not be certain about what is there. In fact, the 578 miles themselves are not a certainty. Municipal legend has it that it was Mayor John Lindsay who, in groping for the precise number of shore miles at some harried moment in the 1970s, asked his staff, who took string to map to come up with — quick — 578! Into the breach of visual, statistical, and other, more visceral awareness jumped Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, photographers who went, in some cases, where few New Yorkers had gone before. Cook and Jenshel are married, and although they have separate careers, they have worked together on many projects: photographing aquariums, volcanic hot spots, and, most recently, glaciers, floating on water, ethereal portraits of what, despite their solidity, seem like about-to-vanish ghosts. Jenshel works in color and was a pioneer in what is sometimes called the New Color Revolution of the 1970s. Cook works in black and white. They met in 1979; the story involves cannoli and an Italian pastry shop in Poughkeepsie, New York. They married in 1983 and began collaborating in 1991. Cook was born in New York City but grew up in Indiana, spending summers on the beach back in New York. Jenshel was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens. In 2002, Cook and Jenshel received a grant from the Design Trust for Public Space to document the city shoreline. They came away from their initial forays feeling as if they had just seen new-found land. "When we first started the project," says Cook, looking through work prints one afternoon in the Flatiron District of New York, "we would show the pictures to friends who have lived their whole lives in New York, and they would say, ‘Where is this?’ " "They would also say, ‘Where are the people?’" Jenshel adds. "So that convinced us to do this," Cook says. This is a full-blown exploration of the city shorelines, and the result is a series of photographs that remind us of the importance of what we can’t see, of the importance of the edge, of those places that are not quite water and not quite land, that are not inhabited but are not uninhabited either — places in between. In a time of binary operations, of developed or not developed, of land that is deemed either good or bad by the powers that decide, these photos taken together are a tonic of mesmerizing ambiguity, celebrations of the borders between New York City’s land and sea. The urban waterfront often seems dilapidated, but it is also being vigorously reinvented, in some cases by view-greedy developers and by politicians hoping to fund their campaigns with the money that, until the crash, was associated with builders of luxury condos and pricey hotels. But in other cases the landscape is being redeveloped by people who want to create sustainable futures, and the water’s edge is the place to see the importance of the relationship between cities and sustainable ecologies. In a context of cities, nature is portrayed as the green shoot breaking through the concrete. The shoreline is a good place to see things reversed: humans are the living thing that always turns up on a shore, to fish, to drink, to stand and ponder. The sustainable future is in the reimagination of urban spaces, with special attention paid to the urban wilderness, or wildness, to use a Thoreauvian term. The place where the water meets the land is always wild. A few words on the methods of the photographers in filming the city’s terra incognita, on their littoral trials and tribulations. There were suspicions to deal with, of course, immediately following 9/11, when anyone out alone might be reported to the authorities, many of whom are not as interested in documentary photography as they perhaps should be. Being a photographer on the water in New York almost by definition means you are close to a bridge or marine facility; whereas standing on the water’s edge once could mean contemplation, now it is seen as suspect. Cook and Jenshel were eternal suspects. While working during the 2004 Republican convention, they were watched especially. "People followed us around talking into their wrists," Jenshel says. "We developed this super-nice persona to take the edge off the hostile situations," recalls Cook. The police weren’t the only hazards. Newtown Creek is the tidal creek that separates Brooklyn and Queens and is emblematic of much of the waterfront: once rural, then overdeveloped, now regaining a foregone wildness that is as much about neglect as it is about the relentlessness of what we refer to as nature. This tidal creek was named for the town in the first settlements of Queens that was "new" around 1652. More recently, it has become known as the site of one of the world’s largest underground oil spills, about 17 million gallons, which is 6 million more than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. (Even more recently, New York State has seen the return of a Colonial-era apple species, the Newtown pippin; Erik Baard, an author and environmental activist, identified its pedigree.) Jenshel and Cook photographed the creek after a rainstorm, or what is euphemistically called a stormwater event, which means the water slicks with chemicals, street runoff, and the stuff from household sewers. The result was a beautiful color test of a photo by Jenshel, and three weeks of subsequent sickness. Despite the health risks and wrist talkers, Cook and Jenshel’s results are celebrations of a mystical emptiness, painterly studies of the awkward but ultimately hopeful intersections between the man made and the non–man made. Taken as a whole, their work depicts a sometimes tropical waterfront, a place of interpersonal engagement as well as overgrown complexity. The waterfront of the husband-and-wife team is a place that disputes, in other words, the seemingly overwhelming rush of cement-fueled box store and parking lot sameness, the race to clean and park-ify all that is shore. Their work is a portfolio of secrets. There are quarantine stations, sites long abandoned, islands commandeered by vines. Like the photographs themselves, the vistas from Staten Island are a balm: it is an island which performs the valuable service of providing New Yorkers with perspective on the rest of the city, lest we forget that New York is a port, is an island chain, is (even before global warming raises the sea level) nearly at sea. In highlighting broken reeds (the wetlands-destroying phragmites) and seemingly discarded vessels, their photos give a sense of the intimacy of these places, the spiritual importance of entropy. Broad Channel is the only inhabited island in Jamaica Bay, a wildlife refuge within the Gateway National Recreation Area. Houses are built on stilts. The feel of the place is, like the feel of City Island in the Bronx, more like Maine, or a fishing village on some other part of the New England coast. Broad Channel and City Island are not fancy places. On City Island, the restaurant once owned by the late Tito Puente, timbales player extraordinaire, takes the place of a Starbucks. It is true that murders and innumerable other crimes have happened in our marshlands, but then so have untold moments of personal reflection, of stillness — moments of water- and sky-draped unmomentousness that purify the emotional watershed. Cook and Jenshel give us the ubiquity of sky from shore and the joy of ruins, which take on the significance of religious artifacts in a city and a country that are wondering how to proceed industrially. In fact, plans for the waterfront were part of the reason they went to particular places to photograph. At the beginning of the decade past, New York’s shoreline was full of places that had been marked for large-scale Olympic development. These were places that the Olympic hopefuls considered useless and dead and of little or no value. (The Olympics plan is currently dead itself.) "Some of what drew us to certain places was, okay, this is going to be, say, an Olympic rowing place — well, what is there now?" Cook recalls. "It was annexation," Jenshel says. In the end, this is what Cook and Jenshel’s photos do. They assert a public ownership and denote the valueless as valuable. The photographers are like explorers who, rather than claim the land for the king or queen, claim it for all, claim it for its trodden but still unspoiled beauty, claim it for reconsideration, perhaps, by you or me. Oftentimes the people who are already in the area don’t need much help in this regard. You don’t need a degree in urban planning to know that value is not necessarily added with nice hotels or ballfields made with plastic grass and black rubber dirt. "At one of the meetings," Jenshel says, "someone got up and they said, ‘You know, sometimes we just want to walk out on a patch of dust and sit out under a tree and that’s enough.’ And that really struck us." "I find those places beautiful," Cook says. "And transformational," says Jenshel.
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Water’s Edge
Fishing for Pollution on the Bronx River
Citizen Science : Part of an ongoing series about everyday people adding to our knowledge of the world around us. Tori Swedin cuts the motor on her dinghy. Aside from a few mallards perched near the water’s edge, New York City’s Bronx River is empty this afternoon. It’s quiet as Swedin leans over the side of the boat and dips her French-tipped nails into the murk. She fills a series of tubes and glass vials, then hands them to her mentor, Addy Guance. Their water thermometer reads 52 degrees Fahrenheit, but neither Swedin nor Guance look cold. They’re bundled into thick tops and wearing work boots, with life jackets adding an extra layer of insulation. Swedin works quickly, though, collecting water samples that will be used to measure oxygen levels and sediment suspended near the river’s surface. At 19, Swedin (in photo, right) is a program assistant and one of Guance’s former students at Rocking the Boat , a nonprofit environmental group. It’s located in Hunts Point, an industrial section of the South Bronx. Unemployment in the neighborhood is rampant, the crime rate is among the highest in New York, and more than half the population lives below the poverty line. In Hunts Point, you won’t find many kids going fishing or skipping stones after school — most of the waterfront property here belongs to expressways, commuter rails, and waste transfer stations. Many of the students at Rocking the Boat barely knew the river existed until they signed up for the program, which conducts workshops for local teens, teaching them to row, build boats, and study the river’s ecology. Guance has been the group’s on-the-water instructor for 10 years. But this backyard ecology program does more than just provide an after-school educational experience. It’s a way to keep track of the health of the river itself — and through that, the health of the community and the entire city. The readings that Swedin and her mentor take this afternoon will go to the Bronx River Alliance , which has kept records on the condition of the river since 2001. The students at Rocking the Boat collect samples twice a week, and if they find anything fishy — a strange smell or sheen or a toxin in the water — the alliance will report it to the city’s parks department or various environmental agencies. As collectors of pollution, rivers are among the best barometers of the environmental health of a city — or the countryside, for that matter. The charts kept by the Bronx teens at Rocking the Boat show evidence of waste from the cement factories and sewage treatment plants that line the riverbanks. But as the students are discovering, refuse also flows into the river from street grates far across town. As in nearly 800 other municipalities across the country, New York City’s rainwater runoff, household sewage, and industrial wastewater all run through the same pipes. And in a city as dense as New York, it only takes a tenth of an inch of rainfall for these pipes to back up and spew their grimy load directly into local waterways. The result is more than 27 billion gallons of raw sewage and polluted storm water pouring into New York Harbor each year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Under the Clean Water Act (the federal law that governs pollution in our streams, lakes and estuaries), cities and towns with combined sewer systems are required to report overflows. But the law doesn’t require them to seek out and find these discharges, says Nancy Stoner, a former co-director of NRDC’s water program who is now the deputy assistant administrator for water at the Environmental Protection Agency. As a result, officials tend to ignore the problem, Stoner says, rather than investing in monitoring systems that would detect water pollution. New York City officials have estimated that it would take a minimum of $58 billion to prevent routine sewage overflows — money they don’t have. But as programs such as Rocking the Boat proliferate across the country, giving average citizens a glimpse at what’s going on in their waterways, cities are starting to feel more pressure to do something. A recent New York Times series on widespread drinking water pollution, which has been documented by government agencies but allowed to continue without penalty, is leading to questions on Capitol Hill and elsewhere about the need for tougher enforcement of clean water laws. It’s not that hard to find problems if you look for them. On this particular day on the Bronx River, Guance and Swedin are seeking signs of an oil spill that took place about 12 miles upstream. In the early morning on November 4, a Con Edison power station in the Dunwoodie section of Yonkers went up in flames. The fire consumed a tank containing 30,000 gallons of transformer fluid, a mineral oil used for electrical insulation and cooling. About half of the oil either burned up in the fire or bled into the Bronx River via storm sewers, says Thomas Panzone, a spokesman for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. A cleanup crew from Con Edison then spent three weeks working on the river, sopping up residual oil and raking up contaminated leaves floating on the surface. Panzone estimated that the oil had traveled about seven miles downstream. But Guance worries that the spill made it farther than that, into her territory. Shortly after she heard about it, a herring washed ashore in Hunts Point. Guance wondered if the spill was to blame. "It could have just been me speculating, but it’s a little too coincidental," she says. Out on the boat, while Swedin collects the water samples, Guance picks up her clipboard and starts recording the day’s data. "Weather, dense cloud cover. Algal blooms — do you see any algal blooms?" Swedin shakes her head no. An algal bloom could be a sign of contamination, sometimes a result of run-off that raises the river’s nitrate levels, which in turn feeds an overgrowth of algae. "Sometimes you can see it with your eyes, some sticky stuff coming out of the water," Guance says. It happened just last summer, she adds, when a brown tide washed over the river and the oxygen levels collapsed a short distance from a fertilizer plant in Hunts Point. Although Guance, 31, can recall plenty of algal blooms and pH spikes in her decade with Rocking the Boat, she says the Bronx River has come a long way. Since 2001, groups like hers have pulled auto parts and appliances out of the river by the tens of thousands. They’ve turned an old concrete plant into a park, successfully introduced a school of herring into the river, and created colonies of filter-feeding oysters along the banks to help clean out the toxins. "I remember having to dodge cars," Guance says, referring to the junked autos that used to block her way as she paddled downstream. "And washing machines and stoves." Today in Hunts Point, Guance’s figures are checking out OK. The pH meter reads 7.6 — just slightly basic. The river’s plants and fish are still breathing. The oil spill hasn’t done the kind of damage that she feared. "It’s a little hard to swallow sometimes," Guance says. "For something like that to happen, you’re taking three steps forward and two steps back." But Linda Cox, executive director of the Bronx River Alliance, says just the fact that more people are aware of the river and looking out for pollution represents major progress. "The more eyes on the river, the better," she says. "It helps us build up a sense of what’s happening over time. Things flow to rivers. They’ll show you the evidence of where mistakes have happened." Though Guance is modest about her role, Cox says it is people like her, with her test tubes and her bi-weekly boat rides, who are keeping watch on the polluters upstream and helping to reclaim the river as part of their community. Out on the water, a call comes over the radio. Guance holds it to her ear and listens to the voice over the speaker. "There’s a tug coming towards us," she says, and points a finger south. "We need to get back." Swedin starts the dinghy’s motor and turns upstream. Read more stories in the Citizen Science series .
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Fishing for Pollution on the Bronx River
Big Apple Needs Bees, Supporters Say
Andrew Coté tried to sweeten the deal while extolling the virtues of beekeeping to a somber-faced Department of Health panel on Wednesday. He presented a small jar of golden honey from his hives in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Technically, he was offering them contraband material. Beekeeping is illegal in New York City — the result of a change to the city health code enacted in the 1990s, when honey bees were added to a list of prohibited animals such as lions, pit vipers and crocodiles. Coté and about a dozen other beekeepers asked the health board on Wednesday to overturn that rule and allow beekeeping in the city again, without the risk of fines. "I think some sweetness in our life is appropriate," said Coté, a founding member of the New York City Beekeepers Association. Under the proposed change, which was introduced in December , hives would be legal but need to be registered. The Board of Health is expected to review today’s public comments and make a decision in March. No one spoke against legalizing bees. Supporters pointed out that bees help pollinate plants and flowers, contributing to healthy harvests. They also touted beekeeping as a rewarding and educational hobby that teaches everything from patience to environmental responsibility. "The bees bring so many good things," said Everett Scott, an Upper West Side resident who keeps bees out of state and would like to do it in the city. "Urban beekeeping offers a wonderful way to engage in a dynamic relationship with nature." Under the current rules, bees are labeled by the health department as "naturally inclined to do harm." People keeping bees can be fined $200 to $2,000 per violation. The health department has received 164 bee and wasp complaints since the beginning of 2009. But beekeepers say honey bees aren’t aggressors like wasps and hornets. "Unless you go up to a beehive and really shake it and disturb it, honey bees are really not out to sting you," said Nadia Johnson, a program coordinator at the nonprofit organization Just Food. Today’s hearing follows a growing interest in New York City beekeeping, which peaked last year with a flurry of media coverage when a bill to eliminate the bee ban was introduced in the city council. When the bill went nowhere, activists turned to the city health department to change the code. Despite current laws, beekeeping has been taking place in hives hidden on rooftops across the city. Several groups teach classes on urban beekeeping, and some members sell honey produced with illegal bees at neighborhood farmers markets. Still, the law discourages some people who would like to take up the hobby. Anna Bridge has wanted to start a beehive since 2004 but has held off because it’s illegal. "I’ve had to live vicariously through the bees of others," she said. Beekeeper Grai Rice called today a big step forward. She has been working to help legalize beekeeping for years. "I feel like we’re at that point where it’s going to be made legal," said Rice, adding that she sees beekeeping as a vital step in New York City’s environmental goals. "It’s this incredible, exciting moment that we really can be a green city."
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