2025 Environmental Forum -Speaker Synopses

New York arose from the sea practically, financially, metaphorically, romantically, “immigrationally”.  It is the financial capital of the World because it was a seaport first. It was the first truly global city, founded by the Dutch as an economic colony, a business – unlike most substantial East Coast ports which were founded as religious colonies.  From the beginning, there was a deliberate intent to build New York as a seaport first and foremost.

South Street Seaport Museum (SSSM) uses its extensive collections of artifacts, objects and pieces of ephemera in the collection to illustrate material culture of a growing city.  It owns the last cohesive assembled set of commercial buildings connected to the work origin, history of the city, which allows us to interpret the water’s edge. There is no story you can tell of NYC that cannot be connected back to the seaport. The Museum seeks to show NYC’s maritime history as a city that arose from the sea.  It plans a large exhibition of New York Maritime history in the Spring of 2025.

The waterfront has also become an emerging threat, as illustrated by Superstorm Sandy. If the waterfront is the live edge that was the city’s greatest asset into the 20^th century, we must acknowledge it is emerging as a threat and at the same time need to consider how the same waterfront can become an opportunity.

While it saddens her to admit the health of the oceans is in peril and some of our shoreline decisions continue to contribute to this demise, Marcha optimistically believes we can do better. 

Marcha referenced Orrin H. Pilkey’s book “Living by the Rules of the Sea,” best known as a primer for people living along the nation’s coastline. It provides guidance on how to live along the coast in the face of rising sea levels. As with Pilkey, Marcha urged us to stop thinking of the shoreline as dry land. Waterfront conditions are dynamic and we must incorporate nature conservation when dealing with urbanized coastal areas. Coastal cities need to identify methods for cohabitating with other species who share the waterfront, feed in the salt marshes, bury their eggs on sandy beaches, and fly south over cities along the Atlantic Flyway. The new coastal science empowers us to adopt inventive, practical, and straightforward actions to help us weather a changing climate. We need to be responsible shoreline stewards.

Marcha also referenced the importance of “best practices” that combine human needs with ocean conservation and, by extension, includes rivers, marshes, and estuaries. She stressed the importance of learning from the results of past decisions and embracing action that will halt this negative progression.

She offered a list of practical suggestions including: 

1. If we must build near the water, think ‘temporary structures’ which are more adaptable to coastal changes.
2. Choose options that include restoring ecology to our rivers and oceans.
3. Acknowledge advances in 21 Century technology such as stackable precast “green walls”. 
4. Choose language that celebrates coastal conditions rather than describing them as threats. 

Bottomline, we must learn from others and from our mistakes. We must learn from the new coastal science and adopt methods that preserve the cohabitation of natural species. We must acknowledge the natural change in coastlines and we must look for ways to live along the shore without disrupting its natural state. 

We should strive to combine human needs with ocean conservation.

He showed a picture of an enormous oyster. The historic bond between oysters and New Yorkers is well known. New Yorkers referred to eating them as “eating babies” because they were so fat and juicy.  The idea of bringing back oysters has always had romantic appeal, and everyone was urged to visit The Harbor School on Governors Island where students are engaged in growing and distributing a billion (not a million) oysters.  

The creatures which Dr. Waldman discussed ranged from destructive ones like the bi-valved marine borer to harmless ones like the humpback whale. The marine borer ate pier pilings from the outside, while another bi- valve ate them from the inside, resulting in many pilings with large pieces of wood appearing above the water line held up by toothpick-like structures below the water line!  Eventually, as the water became less polluted the marine borer problem eased. This was due in part to the Clean Water Act of l972, an important piece of federal legislation for rivers and harbors all over the country,

Dr. Waldman showed a picture of a humpback whale in the lower reaches of the Hudson where they are occasionally seen. The whales are there in search of shad or alewife, not because of less polluted water (whales breathe air, not water!) He had another spectacular picture of a whale’s flukes against the backdrop of Manhattan as he put it “One mile from times Square.”

Dr. Waldman called the alewife “the petitioner” because it was forever trying to get into tributaries to lay eggs. Many of the tributaries are dammed and we should “keep working on removing the dams so the whole system will work better.”  In discussing sturgeons, he said that the average sturgeon, the source of caviar, was 14 ft. long and weighed about 800 pounds,

Throughout his talk, Dr. Waldman made his audience aware of the abundance

 of creatures originally found here, and how much they had diminished. He called the American eagle and the heron “comeback kids” as both had suffered drastic declines.”

Dr. Waldman finished his talk with a story about American eels, who are born in the Sargasso Sea 2,500 miles from New York, and then migrate east and live under the city.   Housewives in Brooklyn at one point could not get water out of their kitchen sinks. They found that small eels, trying to migrate back to the Sargasso Sea, had gotten stuck and clogged their kitchen pipes so no water came out! 

Dr. Waldman’s talk was very educational, telling local history through some of the birds and fish living in our area.          

In addition to its educational and advocacy activities, WA has developed the Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines program (WEDG) providing design standards similar to LEED standards for energy-efficient buildings.  WEDG has become a national standard. WEDG was inspired by the enormous changes on the NYC waterfront in recent years, the most complex and fast moving of any in the World.

There has been so much change on the NYC waterfront from the farms, trade and small industry that occurred after Europeans arrived.  The building of the Brooklyn Bridge accelerated this change and marked the beginning of the end of dependance on waterborne transportation in New York. Today’s waterfront bears little resemblance to that of the 1880s the past when piers circled Manhattan and NYC was considered an industrial capital.  As industry departed, it left a legacy of contamination which changed little until the 1970’s when industrial waste was allowed to be dumped directly into the river and garbage disposed of  the ocean.  The Clean Water Act was one of the greatest pieces of economic development legislation in the US because it opened up so many opportunities