What It Looks Like
What does it mean to integrate human society with the rest of the environment? A follow-up to "You Are Here".
From the Seas…
Prior to the 1800s, New York City was home to an abundance of oysters, providing a regular food source for rich and poor alike. At their peak, oysters covered 220,000 acres of ocean floor surrounding the city, growing to be the size of dinner plates on reefs up to twenty feet tall. They were served as delicacies and from street carts, the shells then being used to pave roads and form into mortar. All this while the live members of the species created reef habitats for other aquatic animals, regulated the tides and waves, and purified coastal waters.
Oyster. Photo: Tara Schmidt, CC-BY-2.0.
Come the 1800s, however, the growth of the city began to destroy these famous reefs. The Hudson River estuary became clogged with human waste and other pollutants, destroying oyster habitat; overharvesting lead to dramatic reductions in population; construction along the Manhattan shoreline turned secluded, still oyster bays into landfill and open ocean. By the mid-1900s, the oysters had all but disappeared from the New York waterfront.
These days, New York City is facing a different sort of challenge. As climate change continues to cause sea levels to rise and storm seasons to worsen, the coastal city is beginning to see increased flooding and damage from storm seasons. In particular, 2012’s Hurricane Sandy flooded out 69,000 homes, causing $19 billion dollars of property damage and killing 44 residents. This sort of event is only going to become more common — and more devastating — as the climate changes more in years to come.
Cue the oyster’s triumphant return. The Billion Oyster Project, launched in 2014, is doing pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: restoring oysters and their tidal-regulating, flood-preventing reefs to the New York City waterfront. To do so, they’ve partnered with NYC public schools to both educate students in the importance of integrating other species into our built environment and allow these kids a sense of ownership over the place they live, giving them an opportunity to help improve their world by protecting the spot they call home in a real way.
New York City will still flood in the next major hurricane. But who knows how much damage will be prevented by this program and these kids?
…to the Shores…
Ground pollution is a growing concern throughout the world, as our increased intensity of resource extraction leaves behind ever more slag and waste in its wake. Bangladesh’s arsenic-contaminated groundwater is one of the great public health crises of our generation. Children in India are increasingly born with deformities due to uranium poisoning while in utero. In the United States, our heavy metal pollution has become severe enough to endanger communities along almost the entire length of the Mississippi River. One of the challenges with ground pollution is that it is not sufficient to simply stop polluting: once a pollutant enters the soil, it stays there for much longer than pollutants which can be dispersed by water currents or wind gusts.
Enter phytoremediation. The basic concept is that specific species of plants are able to absorb pollutants from the soil, either converting them into less harmful organic compounds, releasing them as gasses — thus spreading them out over a larger area on the winds; as the phrase goes, the solution to pollution is dilution — or storing them in the body of the plant, at which point we’re able to safely remove the pollutants from the site to either process them further or move them to a place where they can do less damage. It’s even possible to use this process for phytomining, reclaiming stored metals absorbed by the plant and increasing the economic incentives for remediation.
Phytoremediation at Cunha Baixa mine, Viseu, Portugal. Hydroponic plants help remove uranium from groundwater at this abandoned mine site. Photo: Daniela CC-BY-SA-2.0.
This strategy has been tested again and again to address a whole suite of environmental pollutants, not just limited to heavy metals. The EPA recommends it for a variety of superfund sites. And, broadly speaking, it seems to work. We can’t entirely remove these pollutants from our world, but phytoremediation does sure help limit the damage they’ll do.
…and Everywhere In-Between
A constant challenge when farming cherries is fending off birds attempting to steal your crop. Left to their own devices, flocks of birds will take single pecks from almost all the cherries on a tree, leaving the fruit too damaged to sell and likely to rot on the tree. When the birds arrive before the cherries are ready for market, farmers are left with plenty of trees but no crops to pay the bills, devastating for any business but particularly harmful to one with such barriers to entry as “grow several hundred or thousand trees”.
As such, farmers have long resorted to any means necessary to protect their crop —ranging from sound devices, fake owls, mylar balloons, and distress tapes to try and scare the birds off in the first place all the way to shotguns and poison traps to kill off the ones who aren’t dissuaded. All of this takes time and costs money, year over year, and eventually becomes less effective as the birds wise up to the farmer’s tricks.
A Common Kestrel Taking Off. Photo: Hari K Patibanda CC-BY-2.0.
Alternatively, the farmer can put up a bird box. By encouraging birds of prey — specifically kestrels — to nest in the fields, farmers are able to gain a free employee dedicated to chasing off these pest birds, protecting the crop almost for free. The boxes require maintenance, sure, and you need to intelligently place your boxes to attract the birds, but it’s still cheaper than most other methods and doesn’t go stale the same way other prevention methods do. It takes some finessing to work perfectly, but still, it works.
Coda
These are all still engineering solutions. Centuries of damage stemming from highly engineered human systems can’t be solved by simply shutting those systems down and hoping things go back to the way they once were; modern problems require modern solutions. But they do involve integrating other species into our workflows, utilizing the products of millions of years of evolution to assist in remediating our two hundred years of industrial progress. This is what it looks like to move past a man-made and natural binary, to recognize our role in shaping the surrounding environment and put in the work to create mutually beneficial systems for both humans and the world around us. Again: it’s not a cure-all. But it’s certainly a better path forward than the one we’re currently on.