They look a little like back-yard aboveground swimming pools, complete with blue plastic interiors, and are connected to the harbor through PVC hoses and powerful water pumps. The Billion Oyster Project has retrofitted four beige nine-thousand-gallon shipping containers into oyster tanks. But, in the past century and a half, extensive river excavation, industrial pollution, and overharvesting have destroyed nearly every oyster colony in the New York Harbor region. The Red Hook terminal is situated where the East River feeds into the Upper Bay, which was once a prime habitat for oysters they could grow to weigh more than a pound apiece and fill an entire dinner plate. Correctly deployed, oysters can form dense reefs that slow the movement of water and mitigate the impact of storm surges. That afternoon at the Red Hook Terminal, Orff, in a long black jacket and sneakers with fluorescent yellow laces, was inspecting a mollusk setting tank belonging to the Billion Oyster Project, a nonprofit that aims to reintroduce the bivalve, in vast quantities, to the waterways of New York City-oysters being a critical part of her coastal-infrastructure plans. This carefully designed “second nature,” the thinking goes, could be our second chance. Green infrastructure, by contrast, involves strategically deploying wetlands, dunes, mangrove forests, and reefs to reduce threats of catastrophic flooding and coastal erosion, while also revitalizing the land. Its guiding principle is that “gray infrastructure”-the dikes, dams, and seawalls that modern societies use to contain and control water-is often insufficient, and sometimes destructive. She’s also at the forefront of an emerging approach to climate resilience that argues we should be building with nature, not just in nature. She’s the founder of the design firm SCAPE, the director of the Urban Design Program at Columbia University, and the first landscape architect to win a MacArthur “genius” grant. Now we have a different climate, and we need a different approach.”Ī great deal of Orff’s work addresses the inescapable fact that the Atlantic Ocean is rising, and coming for the land. We’ve spent the past one hundred years dredging out everything for shipping and hardening the edges. They acted like breakwaters, absorbing wave energy and slowing the water before it hit the shore. “There were oysters, tide pools, grasses, lots of colorful marine life, and they were a big part of New York’s coastal-protection system. “Before Buttermilk Channel was dredged, people used to walk from here to Governors Island at low tide,” she said. Behind us were the Red Hook Houses, the largest public-housing complex in Brooklyn, with some twenty-five hundred units set on a peninsula, a former tidal marsh that will take on more and more water as the planet continues to warm. Farther west, along the Hudson River, we could make out the ports and cities in New Jersey where the risk of tidal flooding has more than doubled over the past generation, as sea levels have risen. “I’m interested in reworking the edges,” Orff told me, squinting into the breeze.

Living breakwaters staten island