99% Invisible - 282- Oyster-tecture

Episode Date: November 1, 2017

New York was built at the mouth of the Hudson River, and that fertile estuary environment was filled with all kinds of marine life. But one creature in particular shaped the landscape: the oyster. It is estimated that trillions of oysters once surrounded New York City, filtering bacteria and acting as a natural buffer against storm surges. Over time, pollution and other environmental changes killed off that oyster population. But a group of landscape architects are designing artificial oyster reefs to help protect the city and foster a better relationship between the natural and built environment along this coastal edge. Oyster-tecture Support Radiotopia

This is 99% invisible, 9 Roman Mars. If you're standing on the sidewalk in the New York financial district, in the shadows of glass skyscrapers, you definitely don't feel like you're at the seaside. But head a few blocks south and suddenly you're at the edge of the continent, looking out at the water. That's producer Emmett Fitzgerald. There are docks and seagulls, and fairy boats ready to take you island hopping. Writer Paul Greenberg moved into an apartment down here over a decade ago.

And up until that point, like a lot of New Yorkers, I didn't really pay that much attention to the sea. If I wanted to go to the ocean, I would go to Martha's Vineyard or Long Island. But then he started noticing all these maritime buildings, like the old Fulton Fish Market, where fishermen used to sell their catch to restaurants. I suddenly was sort of confronted with the fact that New York Manhattan is really a very ocean-y kind of place. Greenberg actually writes about the ocean for a living.

His most recent book is called American Catch. And he started to research the relationship between New York City and the sea. But then, in 2012, something happened that made that relationship impossible to ignore. Hurricane Sandy crashing on shore wins now at 90 miles per hour and this storm is so big, so vast, 60 million Americans will feel its power. Just south of the Sasserie Sea Park, take a look out here. That is the Brooklyn Bridge and look at how those winds are whipping the river around. The river around. Hurricane Sandy's storm surge inundated neighborhoods throughout New York City. Sea water poured into the streets, flooding out apartment buildings and filling the subway tunnels.

Greenberg and his family waited out the storm in their 10th floor apartment. We sat there and the storm hit and things started to rock and roll and then everything went black. Sandy knocked out power across Lower Manhattan. The day after I immediately wanted to get a sense of what it was like. So he walked down to the waterfront, passed a bunch of bars and restaurants. And when you peered in the windows, it looked as if there had been a horrible bar fight. Because the water had come in, flooded up to eight or nine feet,

and thrown all the chairs and tables up in the air. But as he surveyed the damage, Greenberg also started to notice things about his neighborhood that he never had before. Turns out that Broadway, and I live on Broadway, is a ridge line. It's the high point between East and West, and when Hurricane Sandy hit Lower Manhattan, it got safer and safer and drier and drier, the closer you were up to Broadway.

He says the storm forced New Yorkers to see the relationship between their city and the ocean in a much more intimate way. Nothing equates you with your city's topography like living in the eye of a hurricane and feeling that water flow up and rise up and literally start to swallow the city. Sandy took the lives of over 100 people in the United States and caused upwards of 50 billion dollars in damage. It was the second most expensive storm in U.S.

history. And part of the reason why the storm was so destructive has to do with climate change. Scientists have calculated that because of sea level rise driven by climate change, Sandy flooded in additional 27 square miles and affected 83,000 more people than it would have otherwise. There is a wake-up call here and there is a lesson to be learned. This is Governor Andrew Cuomo speaking in the storms after math. There was a reality that has existed for a long time that we have been blind to and that is climate change, extreme weather, call it what you will and our vulnerability to it.

It's undeniable but that the frequency of extreme weather conditions is up. So it's going to be a rethinking, redesign of how we protect this metropolitan area from this increased frequency. Architects and engineers are looking at different ways that cities like New York can redesign their infrastructure to prepare for more extreme storm surges. There's talk of floodgates and massive seawalls that would stretch across the entire harbor. But Paul Greenberg says that one of the solutions for New York's future might lie in its past.

Well, so New York, in its natural state, was set up to deal with big storms. New York was built at the mouth of Hudson River, and that fertile estuary environment was filled with all kinds of marine life. But one majestic creature, in particular, shaped the landscape. It's estimated probably in the trillions of oysters surrounded New York City. Before European colonization, what we now think of as the New York City Harbor was a

veritable oyster kingdom. Some scientists think it contained nearly half the world's oysters, and they were an important part of the ecosystem. Oistors are filter feeders, and they help keep bacteria levels in check. And in addition to their ability to filter the water, oysters did a huge amount to buffer the city against storm surges because oysters are kind of special. They are unique among mollusks in that they build in three dimensions.

So they're really architects in a sense. Oysters like to grow on top of other oysters. They actually sense the chemical basicness of oyster shell and they will see directly on top of other oysters. So you get these aggregations, these clumps that build, build, build, and build. And eventually they build up into massive complex reef structures, kind of like coral reefs. Well, oysters really are the coral reefs of temperate zones. Oyster reefs covered over 220,000 acres in the Hudson River estuary, and sometimes

they grew as high as 20 feet tall. Like coral reefs, they cut down on coastal erosion, and were home to all different kinds of fish. And just as coral reefs help protect many tropical islands from hurricanes, oysters protected New York City. They broke up large waves before they could crash onto the shore. And below the surface, their rough texture would increase friction and slow down the water. And so, an oyster reef spread out over many miles will actually sap the wave energy of waves passing over it. Most people don't associate New York City with oysters today, but back in the 1700s, they were what New York was known for.

Oysters were absolutely central to the identity of New York. If somebody were to say I'm going to New York, they would say enjoy the oysters. This is Mark Kirlansky, author of many books, including an environmental history of New York City called The Big Oyster. Kralanski says that before colonization, the indigenous Lenape people ate lots of oysters. And when the Dutch arrived in the area, they found an oyster paradise. You know, you could just walk down to the shore

anywhere, certainly in Lower Manhattan, where everybody was living, but anywhere, and break off a few oysters to eat. And that's exactly what they did. Everybody in New York ate oysters. We said that the only thing that poor people ever got to eat was oysters and bread, but it was also something that rich people ate.

Kind of unusual in food history to have and rich people food and the poor people food be the same at the same time. Oysters were sold in street carts and bars, but also fancy restaurants, and they were served in all different kinds of ways. Oh, there were lots of things. They were like oyster loaves and oysters with different kinds of sauces and they were oyster stews.

Discarded oyster shells piled up in huge mounds outside of shocking houses and restaurants. They were so plentiful that builders began using oysters as construction material. Shells were burned to create lime, ground up for mortar, or used to pave streets. For instance, Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan is called Pearl Street because it was originally paved with crushed oyster shells. The demand for oysters was so great that it eventually outstripped New York's bountiful supply. The Erie Canal and the railroad opened up new markets.

Well, a nature could not produce enough oysters for it near all the places. Once they were shipping them to a lot of places, it was more than the natural beds could provide. By the mid-1800s, New York's natural oyster population had been depleted. Humans had nearly eaten the city's protective shellfish barrier out of existence. But that wasn't the end of oysters in New York. When they started to run out of oysters in New York City, they went and got seeded from

the Chesapeake Bay. And they planted these baby oysters on long ropes, strung in rows throughout the shallows of the harbor. Farming oysters works quite well, and it is kind of the next logical step, you know, if you need more oysters than grow there with nature, you just grow some of yourself. Oyster farming continued throughout the 19th century, and by the 1880s the city was producing over 700 million oysters per year, but there was a problem lurking in the water. For years the city had been dumping industrial pollutants and sewage straight into the harbour without a second thought.

It didn't seem to register with people that dumping raw sewage on a food supply would be unhealthy. It seemed sort of intuitive to me, but they didn't worry about that. That is until the early 1900s, when New York was hit with deadly outbreaks of cholera and typhoid. Public health officials were able to track the diseases back to the source. Turned out that most of these epidemics

were coming from oyster beds. And so one by one, the city started shutting down the oyster beds. Which was really upsetting for New Yorkers. It was huge front page news every time they closed an oyster bed. And there would be all these articles about how we have to do something about this. We're losing our heritage, we're losing our oysters, and we have to stop this. But they somehow didn't get it stopped. New York closed its last remaining oyster bed

off the South Coast of Staten Island in 1927. Water quality continued to deteriorate until oysters could no longer survive. The water was so acidic, it would actually etch through the shelves. By the middle of the 20th century, New York's world-famous oysters were all but gone, leaving the sea-bottom baron and the city exposed. Pollution continues to be a problem in New York, but in 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, which regulated the waste being dumped into waterways, and little by little, water

quality in the harbor has improved. Now oxygen levels are high enough to support shelters, so theoretically, we could have shelters again throughout the bay. This is Paul Greenberg again. In his book, American Catch, he documents several different groups who are working really hard to try and bring back the New York Oyster. There are a lot of obstacles in their way, including FDA rules, which make it really hard to plant oysters, and the fact that there just isn't enough wild oyster larvae in the water anymore. But one of the biggest challenges is actually an architectural one, because the physical landscape of the harbor has totally changed. We've been dredging the harbor for over 150 years now. It went from an average depth of 20

feet to places where now it's more than 50 feet, and the bottom looks very different. Right now our harbor has a flat muddy bottom, but if we were to look at, say, 1850, 1880, this would have been an extremely kind of rougher, three-dimensional mosaic. This is Kate Orf. She's a landscape architect and founder of the firm Scape, based in Manhattan.

And she's the author of the new book Towards an Urban Ecology. She also just became the first landscape architect to win a MacArthur Genius Award. And Orp says that a flat muddy bottom just does not work well for oysters. There are no places or very few places for oysters to grab onto and to attach. Right now, there are some oyster larvae floating around out there, but they don't really stand a chance. Any oyster that lands on the bottom of the bay's bed will then immediately be covered with soap. So we need to lift those oysters off of the bay floor, and we need to provide substrate for these creatures to attach onto.

That challenge gave Orphan idea that spawned one of my favorite portmanteaus, oyster texture. The concept was to build giant nets made of fuzzy marine rope and elevate them off the sea floor. They would then seed the nets with oyster larvae and let the oysters grow from there. So it agglomerates in the sense of becoming a mega structure that scales up out of very small organisms. With a relatively small architectural intervention, you could have a new piece of protective infrastructure, an artificial oyster reef, which in turn would filter the water, slow the water, and create a safer relationship with that water.

Kate Orf debuted her oyster texture proposal in 2010, as part of an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called Rising Currents. And it was a speculative project that sparked a ton of conversation, but it was never actually built. But Hurricane Sandy brought new attention to sea level rise and opened new funding avenues for coastal resilience projects. In 2013, the federal government launched its Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force and staged an architectural competition called Rebuild by Design. Escape, that's Kate Orf's Architecture firm,

submitted an Oyster-centric proposal called Living Breakwaters. The project receives $60 million of funding and will be carried out by the governor's office of storm recovery. Now, Scape is in the process of designing artificial oyster reef breakwaters off the South Coast of Staten Island. Staten Island was particularly hard hit by Hurricane Sandy. This is Gina Worth, another one of the architects from Scape, explaining the choice of location. And the wave action from the surge landed right on Staten Island and

really dramatically impacted this land mass. Staten Island was also one of the epicenters of New York's historic oyster economy. So it's not the first time that people have been trying to cultivate and expand oysters within the bay. Hundreds of years ago, they were doing it for food production, and today we're trying to do it for a more robust and resilient shoreline. The design has evolved a lot from the original

oyster texture proposal with the marine rope. The plan now is to build a necklace of offshore breakwaters out of large rocks and a special material called eco concrete which shellfish like to grow on. They will then seed the breakwaters with oysters so they grow into reefs. Much like a natural oyster reef, the living breakwaters are designed to slow down the water and break up dangerous waves before they reach the shore. As the oysters grow, they really help add friction to the water column and break waves.

The living breakwaters should reduce coastal erosion, build up beaches, and make storms less dangerous. Modeling by scientists at the Stevens Institute has shown that the breakwaters could have reduced the height of waves during sandy by 3 to 6 feet, but they won't keep flood water out of Staten Island altogether, and they're not meant to. Breakwaters let the water through. We can reduce the wave action. We can reduce the intensity and the velocity of that water, but we live in a coastal edge.

And Worth wants to design a way to make that coastal edge safer and healthier, both for humans and for marine life. In addition to reducing waves and filtering the water, the living breakwaters will provide some of the habitat that oyster reefs once did. Staten islands' historic oyster reefs were filled with all these nooks and crannies where juvenile fish like the hide. With the help of marine biologists, the architects designed pockets within the breakwater structure. They call them reef streets.

So within the reef streets, juvenile fish are able to come in to these kind of underwater canyons and feed in the street and shelter and hide from predators in the structure. Where says that as a landscape architect, your clients are usually people. But we're also trying to think about who are our underwater clients,

who are the fish species that might use this system. Like if you were a fish swimming in the water, what would look like a safe place? It's like a totally different mentality to have when designing than what a person looks for. Construction hasn't begun yet on the physical structure of the breakwater, but some of the oysters are already growing. What? Next, oysters growing over here. This is Asia-Salgato, a recent graduate of the New York Harbor School on Governor's Island.

I'll use guys right here. The Harbor School runs a program called the Billion Oyster Project, which aims to restore oysters throughout the harbor, and in the process teach young New Yorkers all about the Marine ecosystem. Asia is standing next to a tank filled with white shells, soaking in harbor water. They're actually left leftover shells from restaurants. So we'll go around and we'll collect shell

from different restaurants around the city. And on the surface of every shell, there are little oysters growing. You see all these big brown dots over here? Yeah. Those are all oysters. They look like little blobs of brown jelly, but if you get really close,

you can see the beginnings of a oyster. You can kind of tell them this one, this one has like stripes on it. That's how you know that's like its own shell slowly growing. Once it gets bigger, obviously it'll look like one of these shells, but it's getting there slowly. The billion oyster project is an official partner on the living break waters, meaning that millions of little brown balls of goo grown by young New Yorkers like Asia will soon be

protecting Staten Island. The governor's office of storm recovery is scheduled to begin construction of the living break waters in 2018. The billion oyster project will work with local high schools on Staten Island to monitor oyster growth over time. A healthy reef can grow very quickly, so we're very optimistic that by say 2025, we would have a pretty robust reef system going. robust reef system going. Kate Orf says that even if they're successful, they aren't going to return the coastal environment to the way it was before. No architect can do that. They're creating something totally new. Part ecosystem, part infrastructure.

And Orf hopes that they inspire other living infrastructure projects, but she doesn't think that oysters are going to save New York from climate change. There isn't any one solution to a problem so immense and complex. Researchers at the organization Climate Central recently ranked New York as the most vulnerable city in the United States to see level rise, with over 426,000 people living in zones that could face serious flooding by 2050. When you start projecting out further than 2050, the scale of the problem becomes hard, the phantom. It's really hard, frankly, to be optimistic.

We're on track for pretty rapids, you know, level rise. Can we kind of come together and proactively see this as an urban design opportunity and not a force that just displaces thousands of people with less economic means and who are less fortunate? I don't know. I think it's going to be a real challenge. Orf sees the Living Breakwater's project as a step toward a healthier relationship between the city and the sea.

But to protect New York and other coastal cities in the long term, there are going to be a lot of other interventions that will need to be considered, ending new development on coasts, lifting existing buildings up, and eventually in some places. Retreating literally from floodprone areas and can we have those hard conversations? I certainly hope so. I hope so too because New York is a city by the ocean, and the water is only getting higher. Oysters aren't the only non-human architects, and that gives us a tour through the extraordinary builders of the animal kingdom. After this.

Okay, so I'm in the studio with Emmett Fitzgerald who just did that piece, and in the piece, you talk with Paul Greenberg, and he talks about oysters behaving like architects, because they build these massive structures in the shoreline. And it goes thinking about other types of architecture that is not made by humans. I mean, I think I feel like architecture and the building of structures and buildings is sometimes sort of thought about as something that separates humans from the beasts, but a lot of my favorite architects are animals. Okay, well, later on, I was told we put some.

All right, so there's a lot of different examples of animal architecture, but let's try to do a couple from different animal kingdoms. So to start with the mammals, we've got to go with beavers, which are sort of, yeah, maybe the most, maybe the most obvious example, but they really are pretty special architects. First of all, they build these incredible houses, these lodges out of sticks and mud, and they've got these cool underwater entrances.

But more amazingly, they completely re-engineer the landscape by cutting down trees with their teeth and building these big dams that essentially will turn, you know, what's a river system into a peaceful pond for them to live in. And I was sort of looking into this and I found this one scientist think that they've discovered the largest beaver dam in the world in Northern Alberta, in Canada. And it's 2,790 feet long. Whoa. Which is, yeah, I mean, it's really big. That's like larger than, you know, human dams.

That's large in the Hoover Dam. Right. And yeah, they think that this was built, many, over like multiple generations of beavers, different families contributing to this massive dam to create sort of a little beaver paradise up there in Alberta. Well, I would think it would take generations to do that. That's remarkable.

All right, so what's next? All right, so moving on to insects. There are tons of great examples of insect architects, you know, bees, ants, but I'm gonna go with termites for this one. Termites build, you know, these giant mounds out of mud. You can find them all over the world, really,

and a lot of dry climates in Africa, and Australia, and South America. And these can get huge. They can be upwards of like 30 feet tall. And really wide too, they're like these really, really, really large structures. And if you think about that relative to the size of a termite's body, it's like even more impressive. I mean, a 30 foot tall structure for a termite, if you sort of scaled that up to our size, it would be something like close to a mile high.

So they really are building incredible skyscrapers. Sky's great, but my favorite thing about termite mounds, really though, is that they exist really to provide ventilation to the termite colony. So the colony exists even underground and spreads out beneath over a greater distance than just the termite colony. So the colony exists even underground and spreads out beneath, you know, over a greater distance than just the termite mound, but it can get really, really hot underground, especially in these dry climates. And so they'll build this structure upwards, and it's super porous. And so cool breezes will catch the termite mound, and it's built in such a way that it

ventilates the entire colony and keeps them, it helps them regulate their temperature. Which is just a pretty amazing level of innovation for a tiny insect. So you shouldn't think about these things as just being a mound of dirt that they then dig in and just live in. It really is a purpose-built solution to solve a certain problem. Right, exactly. That's remarkable. Yeah, and the same could be said about lots of different animals. And obviously, it's a little different because it's not a single person who has an idea,

it's like solution to a problem. It's like an evolutionary solution, like an adaptation that they developed over a long period of time. But that doesn't make it any less remarkable to me. Totally, I don't know me either. That's amazing. Okay, so what's our last one? All right, so this is, our last one is my personal favorite, really just for like the artistry of it,

but there's this bird in that lives in the forest of New Guinea called the Vagol Cop Powerbird. It was a few different power birds, but the Vagol Cop is my personal favorite, and it's this totally unassuming looking bird. It's like a little brown looks kind of like a sparrow. So it's this unassuming bird, but the male Bauerbird in order to get females attention, they will spend several years building these elaborate structures called Bauer's and they're really, they're so beautiful. They're

like these beautiful, fat tents that they construct using little twigs and sticks, but they're so carefully done if you came across one in the forest, you wouldn't even consider that a bird made that. It looks like it was designed by little fairy architects or something. And yeah, and then often they'll be carpeted with a mossy carpet. The front is propped up with two sticks at the entrance. And then they're decorated in these crazy ways. They'll go and get flowers and build little piles of flowers. They'll get berries, all kinds of especially things that are colorful to add color to the

bowler. And then it's all of this, all of this years of building work is all just for this one moment when they're attempting to catch the eye of female bowerbirds who are looking to mate. And so the female will come in and there might be like more than one of these bours in a given part of the forest and shall like decide who her favorite architect is and mate with that bours version. All right well thanks for giving us a guide to animal architects. Yeah my pleasure. 99% of visible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald, mix and tech production by Sri Fusif, music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is the senior producer, Kurt Colstead is the digital director, the rest of

the team includes Delaney Hall, Avery Truffan, Taren Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, an independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. We are supported by the night foundation and listener donors who pitch in whatever they can to keep us making

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