with Tim Daly" is made possible - [Announcer] "Sacred Ground with Tim Daly" is made possible by Patricia and Edwin Matthews through the New York Community Trust Progress Fund, by Glenmede Private Wealth, by the Murray and Susan Haber Charitable Foundation, and by the following funders.

(gentle music) - Can New York and other cities around the world survive a changing climate?

Whether fires, droughts, or floods, every city is challenged these days in entirely new ways.

New York confronted that question back in October of 2012.

- [Reporter] Our top story, Sandy, the potential superstorm that's headed up the East Coast.

- Here in New York tonight, there is already a state of emergency.

Authorities are scrambling to keep more than 8 million people safe here.

- The time for relocation or evacuation is over.

- [Tim] New York City's concrete coastline proved no match.

- Please listen to us down here!

We are going to die!

- [Tim] Sandy lived up to the hype.

- [Reporter] 90 mile per hour winds, driving rain, record-breaking high tides.

- The water actually just pouring over the seawall now as- (wind whooshing) - [Reporter] A record surge at Battery Park in Manhattan.

13.88 feet.

Breaching the seawall and flooding the area.

- The thing I worry most about is that climate change will break the city.

Not because the landscape can't take the climate change, but because the people of the city can't take the climate change.

(electricity crackling) - [Reporter] An explosion at a Con Edison plant.

More than 250,000 people across the city lost power.

- We have this idea that we can just do whatever the hell we want, that we are like gods.

But we are not gods.

And if we act like gods, the hubris will bring us down.

- [Reporter] Floodwaters came into contact with a home's electrical system, sparking a fire that would destroy 126 homes - [Tim] From Staten Island to Queens, dozens of people died.

Thousands more were displaced.

- It's gone completely.

Everything is gone.

It's nothing there.

(sniffles) - When the storm had settled, the flood retreated and the bodies were finally buried.

New York woke up to a different reality.

Superstorm Sandy exposed a basic flaw in how we've tried to protect our cities.

For generations, we've sought to separate ourselves from nature by building walls.

Sandy showed us emphatically that approach doesn't work.

Instead of trying to contain powerful natural forces, the new way of thinking works with nature, transforming it from a threat into an ally.

It draws on living systems, trusting their capacity to adapt, restore balance, and endure even intense stress.

To paraphrase Charles Darwin, it's not the strongest species that will survive nor the smartest but the one most adaptable to change.

In this case, climate change.

(warm music) 400 years ago, this place was a pristine estuary where rivers met the sea, where countless species of animals flourished on the land, in the water, and in the air.

Eric Sanderson is a VP of Urban Conservation at the New York Botanical Gardens.

He has devoted his life to understanding how that original paradise has changed since it became what we call New York City.

- The native inhabitants of Manhattan Island were the Lenape Tribe.

They called it Manahatta.

When the colonists arrived, they wrote home, saying the food was so abundant they'll never have to go anywhere else.

And so over the years, Manahatta turns into Manhattan.

And what we now have is a great metropolis that is built on top of a salt marsh.

Because of Sandy, there's been a lot of effort to think about how do we make that shore more resilient, how do we protect people.

And one of the ways to do that is build a big wall.

- [Reporter] Walls are going up along stretches of the New York City coastline.

- [Reporter] The issue of the environmental impact of such a massive barrier system on marine life in the area was and still is the main concern among civic leaders.

- [Commentator] It's fundamentally going to change the culture, and is that the New York City we want to live in?

- But maybe there's another approach.

One of the really tremendously great ideas of the 21st century is the Living Breakwater Project off Staten Island, which is to rebuild an artificial structure that would be like the old oyster reef offshore and to break the wave surge, the storm surge offshore and, that way, to protect the coast.

(lighthearted music) And so this amazing landscape architect, Kate Orff, and her vast and really well-informed team designed this Living Breakwater system that will help support oysters, will add climate resilience, and bring back a little bit of the historical ecology back to that part of Staten Island.

- I was obsessed with the oyster and how to sort of renature our environment to kind of put forward a different concept about how humans and nature can coexist in the climate change.

And then Sandy hit in 2012, and I went from being the crazy oyster lady to helping lead the coastal protection master plan for New York City.

I'm Kate Orff.

I'm the founder of the landscape architecture and urban design practice called SCAPE.

- [Tim] Kate is a leader, a big thinker, and one of many who sees a new path forward in city planning.

- Superstorm Sandy marked a choice.

How is New York going to adapt?

Do we need to build 18-foot seawalls and multiple billions of dollars to try to block our estuaries, cut ourselves off from the nature that has sustained us for millennia?

And I think we've kind of said no.

The answer is to double down and to repair our natural systems where we need that most in our cities to cool our air, to clean our water, to protect us from the most devastating storms.

The question becomes how to design for a water-rich future.

We need to thicken our landscape.

We need to focus on building physical resiliency in the physical form of the shallows.

And we need to also jointly focus on the social resiliency of communities on shore.

- [Tim] Kate has spent years arguing this philosophy and ultimately persuaded city, state, and federal government to commission Living Breakwaters, an elaborate plan of moving rocks around the harbor as speed bumps for incoming storms.

They authorized $111 million for the project.

- It is a chain of rocky breakwater structures that protect Staten Island and Tottenville.

We're looking at Tottenville here.

And those breakwaters are seeded with oysters by community members and school kids.

So they will really become this kind of, like, thriving postnatural/natural oyster reef that have all the protective benefits of the oyster reefs that were once here.

We tested these structures in both a physical wave tank, and we also ran many, many digital models to show its efficacy, to show how it reduces erosion and rebuilds the shoreline, to show where the wave action is reduced and where it's protecting the community onshore.

The idea is a community-built oyster reef and also kind of a stewardship concept.

Centering on the whole of the neighborhood but really focused on being inspired by the lowly oyster.

When we talk about climate adaptation, the question always comes back to, how are we adapting?

And in my mind, the landscape gives us some clues about how we do actually need to change.

(relaxing music) - [Tim] A fellow oyster lover has a different way of bringing back more mollusks to New York Harbor.

A lot more.

- Hi, I'm Pete.

- [Tim] Pete Malinowski runs the Billion Oyster Project, an ambitious dream to restore more than a billion oysters to New York Harbor with the help of millions of New Yorkers.

- Oysters are known as a keystone species, which means they have a disproportionate positive impact on the ecosystem.

So if you restore oyster reefs, you also restore all of the animals that benefit from oyster reefs.

Oyster reefs create three-dimensional habitat, filter the water, provide food for hundreds of other species, and stabilize the shore.

So this was all wetlands and there were oyster reefs around it, protecting the shore and creating habitat for other animals.

And we very quickly, in about a hundred years, ate all the oysters.

The story in New York City with the oyster reefs is a very common story.

22 of the largest 30 cities in the world are built on estuaries.

We think of these places as separate from nature.

We think of New York City as a city, as a concrete jungle, and in order to find nature, you need to leave New York City and go somewhere else.

But the reality is that this is the place that used to be the most important natural place in the region.

All around the world, in big coastal estuaries, used to be filled with oyster reefs, and they're not anymore.

Places like London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, and Lagos, Nigeria.

And here in the U.S., some of our biggest cities, like Houston, SF, New Orleans, and, of course, New York.

Humans have eaten 95% of all the oysters in the world.

They're the most impacted marine ecosystem on the planet and the one that has the most potential to add biomass to the ocean.

What if we can change that and restore the ecosystem here in New York and in other cities around the world?

You can not only have a better quality of life in New York City, but you can also do the most good for the ocean and for the planet.

- [Tim] Amazingly, oysters grow best on the backs of old oyster shells.

So Pete started collecting millions of pounds of oyster shells from restaurant plates.

They spend years being bleached outdoors before being dumped back into the harbor and becoming the foundation of future reefs.

- At most of our reef sites, we restore live oysters on reef structures.

The basic methodology of the Billion Oyster Project is simple.

We build structures for new oyster reefs to grow on, seed them with oyster larvae, and then place them all over the harbor.

We have these big cement half-domes called reef balls.

We put those in tanks with filtered harbor water.

We add oyster larvae that attach to the reef balls and then put the reef ball down at the bottom.

So each one of those reef balls, they're five feet across, weigh about a thousand pounds, and they'll go down with around 50,000 tiny little oysters on them.

And then over time, those oysters grow, and it becomes a little oyster reef.

And we put clusters of those reef balls down.

(warm music) When we restore a reef, we see an immediate and dramatic change in the abundance and diversity of animals at that site.

So you scuba dive down to somewhere in New York Harbor and look around on the bottom, you can't see any animals, right?

And you put an oyster reef there and come back in a matter of weeks, and it's just totally full of animals.

And that's because the oysters are creating habitat and they're also making food available to all these different animals.

- [Cameraperson] Outside on the docks, and who do we see?

We see an amazing bald eagle.

- [Pete] Most exciting part about doing this work in New York right now is that every year there are more animals in the harbor.

- Oh my God!

- There's so many.

- [Pete] You're watching the natural system bounce back after those, you know, centuries of pollution and degradation.

- [Cameraperson] Hello.

- [Tim] It's worth remembering just how filthy these waters once were.

- [Eric] The bulk of water in New York Harbor is oily, dirty, and germy.

Men on the mud suckers, the big harbor dredgers, like to say that you could bottle it and sell it for poison.

The bottom of the harbor is dirtier than the water.

In most places, it's covered with a blanket of sludge that's composed of silt, sewage, industrial waste, and clotted oil.

- Each of us all across this great land has a stake in maintaining and improving environmental quality.

Clean air and clean water.

The wise use of our land.

The protection of wildlife and natural beauty.

Parks for all to enjoy.

These are part of the birthright of every American.

To guarantee that birthright, we must act, and act decisively.

- The Clean Water Act of the 1970s was passed under President Nixon with a lot of support from politicians here in New York because our water was just so foul.

- [Tim] New York has evolved in all kinds of ways over the past 400 years.

Take the notorious Brooklyn neighborhood known as Gowanus.

(lighthearted music) Not long ago, the Gowanus Canal was a punchline for polluted New York.

It was so toxic the EPA named it a Superfund site.

- The Gowanus Canal was famous for its pollution.

And why was it famous for its pollution?

Because those salt marshes in the late 19th century were all industrial areas, and people had factories and they just dumped their pollution into the canal.

The problem with Gowanus is it's an old salt marsh, which all, of course, begs the question of why was there a canal there in the first place.

The reason it was a canal is because the guy who developed Park Slope needed a place to bring in the brownstones that are so famous in that part of Brooklyn.

So they created this canal.

But that canal was built on top of something that was there before, which were mill ponds.

So I think what's happening in Gowanus and Brooklyn right now is super interesting.

Gowanus makes a great place for urban development 'cause it's close to the subway lines, it's close to Downtown Brooklyn.

- [Tim] New York is desperate for new housing and has few places to put it, so the decision was made to add thousands of apartments on the old salt marsh.

- From an urban planning perspective, it's the perfect place to build more housing.

From a natural perspective, it's the worst place to build new housing.

Because we mostly think of the city as a human-built thing, where nature is something to be controlled or not relevant, that's where we decided to put the housing.

And there's a lot of creativity going in to try and manage the flooding.

(upbeat music) - [Gena] So here we're about to get our first view- - Oh!

Ready.

- [Gena] Of Sackett Place.

- [Kate] One, two, three.

- Yeah.

- Oh, there we go.

- [Gena] Downtown Brooklyn in the distance.

- [Kate] Yeah, such a good view.

- [Gena] This is a great spot.

Yeah.

- [Tim] Kate Orff and her design partner, Gena Wirth, helped craft the landscape around the new Gowanus buildings in an attempt to redesign nature to create places for people to live, gather, and play on the manmade shores of a former wetlands and toxic waste site.

- [Kate] The question is, how can we bring nature back as a kind of a dominating structural force?

You'll see intertidal shelves, you'll see waterfront access, and you'll see green roofs.

- Our landscape here really steps down to enable people getting close to the water and tries to kind of break down some of these, like, hard edges and bulkheads that you see all around the canal.

We wanted this strong sense of, like, intimacy and connection with the water, and this brings you there.

- Yeah, it's such a contrast to all the other sites, which are kind of separated or walled off.

I mean, I love that, like, people are coming down to the water.

But then, of course, the water itself is kind of connected, so during high tide, the water can actually flow up and over where we're standing now all the way up the street creek.

So that sort of storm water and tidal water can meet and mingle, which is, like, the essence of, you know, creating a biodiverse and natural kind of system.

You didn't want to be close to the Gowanus 10 years ago, but it's getting cleaner.

And that's part of the challenge of, like, these water bodies are and were contaminated.

It's not just the legacy of industrial contamination, there's also human sewage.

(bright music) - [Tim] New York City effectively treats more than a billion gallons of wastewater a day, and that sewage no longer runs into the harbor except after a heavy rain.

Then they close the beaches because the water is contaminated.

- It's a densely populated place.

In fact, Manhattan Island is the densest county in all of America.

New York County has 65,000 people per square mile.

Human beings are organisms, just like every other organism in nature.

We eat and we poop and we need water.

And so you need to have a sort of urban metabolism that's going to be able to support that population.

- There's two large combined sewage storage tanks planned along the canal, and they're both under construction today.

And so once they're built, they will hold that sewage and storm water that today is flowing into the canal.

- Yeah, straight in.

Yeah.

- Making it a polluted water body.

And they'll hold it during these large rain events and then, when it's not raining, send it back to the wastewater treatment plant so it can be treated.

And so that will radically change the quality of the water and the canal.

- And the smell.

- And the smell.

- It will improve the smell.

(Gena chuckles) Yeah, for sure.

- And it'll also make it a really lovely place to be 'cause there's going to be a park built on top of each of those tanks.

- Yeah.

This is a project that has taken more than a decade, and these things are kind of coming online very gradually.

But if you fast forward to 10 years from now, you can really see the interconnected public spaces and the kind of contiguous ribbon of green and filtration gardens and imagine a kind of revitalized and cleaner water body.

- The development that's happening in Gowanus is informed in some sense by ecological principles, but it's a compromise.

And nobody knows that that compromise is going to be, you know, sufficient in the long run.

It's very, very difficult, this whole resiliency planning, because we're seeing climates that are, that haven't been seen for millions and millions of years.

You don't know how big that storm's going to be nor do you know when it's going to happen.

- I really feel like it takes a village, but it really takes a kind of a consortium of many groups and many people who share a common purpose but that bring different facets of expertise and passion, you know, to the table.

That kind of collaboration and that kind of, you know, conversation at many levels has really helped New York move forward and really begin to adapt and change its mindset moving into the future.

- [Tim] This kind of change will take decades, so it's important to lean into the people who will be most vested to reap its benefits: young people.

Pete Malinowski was a teacher at the Harbor School on New York's Governors Island when he was inspired to create the Billion Oyster Project.

His first goal was to get kids involved with nature.

- So these are oyster research stations, they're used by our school partners.

- [Team Member] Angelina, you start on this side.

Mia, you start on this side.

- And we've developed a sixth- through eighth-grade STEM curriculum for middle schools that prepare students for monitoring and maintaining these in the field.

- [Team Member] Make sure you measure all of the oysters in each cluster, and when you're done, you can put it back gently.

Remember, they're living.

- So you can see that every square inch of it is covered with living things.

Animals all over the place.

Little shrimp, crabs, sponges, tunicates.

And then inside, of course, are the live oysters from our facility on Governors Island.

If we want more young people to be joining the ranks of environmentalists and helping to save the planet, it's essential that we create opportunities for that authentic engagement with the natural world through public schools.

New York City is the largest and most diverse public school district in the world.

There are over 100,000 teachers teaching 980,000 students every day.

So there's this incredible opportunity to incorporate these themes and ideas and actual access to the natural world into what's happening normally in public schools all around the city.

- A way we can tell that oysters have new growth is by this transparent part right here.

So all of this is very thin and a little see-through.

It's a lot like our nails, right?

When our nails grow long, we can see through our nails.

So all of this is new growth on the oyster, which we love to see, right?

- What does it take to get millions of people working together to restore an important natural resource?

Something like Billion Oyster Project, which is a exciting, ambitious, large-scale environmental restoration program right in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world is that thing.

If we were just trying to restore oysters, it would not be as engaging to everybody, to the restaurants we work with, the public schools, the volunteers.

It's the fact that we have a clear goal.

And it's going to be a real challenge to get there, but if we all work together, we'll be able to do it.

That's the whole idea of the Billion Oyster Project.

There's so many ways to take care of the environment by limiting your negative impact, and that's what we hear about a lot.

It's important.

And it's not very exciting.

So recycling, composting, all super cool, important things.

But rather than simply limiting our negative impact, what we want to do is to create the opportunity for having a positive impact, for repairing or restoring the natural environment, leaving it better than we found it instead of just a little less worse than we found.

- We cannot change the past.

We have our built fabric and we've made these choices.

It's about kind of designing nature now to understand where it can have maximum protective benefit and how it can engage people and bring people back so that we have reconnected everybody with the threats that we face now and in the future.

At the trajectory that we're on now with increasing temperatures, sea level rise, increasing water temperatures, if we were to just continue that false paradigm of nature exists over here and cities and people exist over here, it is game over for the environment.

- If we can't rise to the challenge as a civilization, then we will not persist into the future.

(pensive music) - Every problem facing Planet Earth is a human problem, and humans need to make different decisions in order to solve those global environmental problems.

- Just as climate change has happened over the last hundred years since we kind of started burning fossil fuels and it took time to create that condition, it's going to take time to repair that.

But we have start now, and we have to do it anyway, and we have to really try to, you know, bring together inspiration, motivation, but also that get-'er-done mentality.

- [Team Member] 56.

- But what brings me hope is that I see every day young people who sort of transition from seeing New York Harbor as something that's separate from them and having a little trepidation around the harbor, being on boats.

I watch Harbor School students and middle school students all over the city transition to seeing the harbor as something that is theirs, that they have a right to access, that it's beautiful and important and worth preserving and protecting.

And you can see the difference in someone's face when they look at the harbor.

I've had the privilege of witnessing that transition happen for thousands of young people.

That's a really powerful thing to witness.

And the more people we have working together to restore New York Harbor, take better care of the planet, the better off we are.

- It's the combination of political will, economic might, and the technological developments.

So the city actually choosing to do it and then doing it well.

- Maybe set a precedent for other waterfront cities.

If it's possible to do it here, then it's possible to do it anywhere.

- The more deeply we search for solutions, the clearer it becomes that nature itself offers the most promising path forward.

It doesn't merely protect our cities, it strengthens them over time, becoming a powerful partner against some of the most damaging effects of climate change.

By rewilding our concrete canyons, we can transform cities, home to nearly 80% of Americans, into resilient, life-affirming foundations for the future.

For "Sacred Ground," I'm Tim Daly.

Thank you for joining us.

(warm music) (warm music continues) - [Announcer] "Sacred Ground with Tim Daly" is made possible by Patricia and Edwin Matthews through the New York Community Trust Progress Fund, by Glenmede Private Wealth, by the Murray and Susan Haber Charitable Foundation, and by the following funders.

(gentle music) (warm music) (bright music)