'Uncategorized'
The Ethical Culture Fieldston School will be taking a trip down the Bronx River in October as a part of their interdisciplinary Bronx River 
Biography unit. One section will look into the health of the river, and in preparation, my son and I got out and placed leaf packs into a couple of different places along the Bronx River. The expectation is that macroinvertebrates will make their home out of the leaf packs and we will be able to remove them, count and classify them before replacing them in their old neighborhood. The group will be supported by Bob Ward, and part of the hope is that such studies will become a regular monitoring procedure upon the river.
September 19th, 2009
The Water Pod has arrived at Concrete Plant Park helping to mark the return of public access to
this incredible site. It quickly has become a normal feature of the area, harkening back the original function of the site that gives the park its name. But while the pod might spark memories for past employees, the monarch butterflies that are migrating through the Bronx River Corridor have quickly decided that the plants aboard the pod are a good choice of nourishment. several pupae have also attached themselves to plants on board.
Did I mention the parrots? Yes, several pairs are nesting at CCP in what I believe is a choke cherry bush. I first heard there call a couple of weeks ago, and then my daugther and I were greeted by them this morning as we left CCP.
Rocking the Boat and Pete Seeger…
September 5th, 2009
While one way to prove an understanding of environment and environmental education may be a multiple choice exam, the real proof lies in action. In the early days of July the young people that attend the Tremont United Methodist Church Summer Program visited the Bronx River at the Mitsubishi River Walk adjacent to the Bronx Zoo. The goal was to get in a canoe in the Bronx River and learn the basics of paddling. Forty-five youth, thier counselors and their director, Cheryl Holtz Andrews, met their goal with flying colors, paddling until their armswere ready to fall off. But this was just the beginning. Two young lady’s looked around at the river and were not quite satisfied with the experience of canoeing for the first time in their lives.
“Damian, we should do something about all of these plastic bottles floating in the river,” said one.
“Yeah, they could all be recycled,” said the other. And from their they set about making it happen.
Today, after almost two months of convincing their director that it was a necessary event, the two returned with 12 other program participants and once again paddled the river. This time, however, the focus was the removal of any floatable garbage that they could reach safely from their canoes. With dilligence and care (and no lack of joyful enthusiasm) the youth spent over an hour paddling to distinct areas of the river between the Bronx Zoo and The New York Botanical Garden and removing plastic bottles, plastic bags and one large plastic triangle once used as part of a traffic blockade. It was impressive to see the pride with which each successive 
canoe came up on to the bank to show off what they had found in the river, what they had done to improve the environment that surrounds them. If there is a test to discover just what has been internalized from a lesson, this was it.
August 24th, 2009
Wednesday’s visit to Barretto Point Park to provide some waterfront education and canoeing was a great success. We were only there for a couple of hours but more than 20 people were able to canoe in the East River and learn about what lurks beneath the waves.
After a quick seining brought up dozens of silver sides ( thousands escaped), another fish caught my eye. It was a little harder to corral than the silversides, but a concerted effort landed a juvenile flounder (summer flounder?). 
On the bottom of the shore, the camoflague helped the fish absolutely disappear, but in my hand it looks quite alien.
August 19th, 2009
On July 18, 2008, the Bronx River Alliance placed more than 350 stormdrain markers (above) in Bronx River sewersheds, HP-007, HP-004, HP-009 and HP-008. Support, in the form of funding and ten energetic volunteers, for this project was provided by Goldman Sachs. Thank you to all of the staff from both the Alliance and Goldman Sachs who braved the extreme heat in the name of stormwater education! The Alliance aims to have a total of 500 markers placed by the end of August. Please visit the Storm Water Infrastructure Matters Discussion Forum to discuss stormdrain marking in more detail.
July 28th, 2008
Home Depot might not seem like the place to go in search of an epiphany about the need to serve many communities, but epiphanies don’t like to be pigeon holed. I walked through the aisles of Home Depot, searching for items of comfort for the beginning and the ending of life. These items add safety to the surroundings of my loved ones and some feeling of comfort to me. For my 9 month old daughter, I searched for outlet covers and corner bumpers. For my parents I bought a banister for their steps and support bars to help them get in and out of the shower. 80 years separate my two clients, yet their needs are quite similar, and my desire to aid their respective communities is virtually the same for both of them.
As often happens, a decision made to correct an earlier mistake or to provide access for one group that had been previously ignored can benefit many people. A very clear example is for the benefit offered to parents with strollers, bicyclists, and pullers or pushers of carts every time they mount or dismount a sidewalk. Those little sidewalk cut-ins that make the transition smooth were designed to aid the disabled in ADA of 19–. That decision made many lives better.
Two new parks have been opened in Hunts Point in the last year. Ostensibly, the parks were opened to offer the local population access to the waters that surround them for recreation and relaxation. But it may and should grow into something much more.
All along the Bronx River, we are working towards making the river itself and its adjoining environs more accessible to the thousands of school children that live nearby or have heard about its history. The combined efforts of the Education Program and the Recreation Program offer ideas and opportunities to teachers from the area, ranging from a canoe trip with a dissolved oxygen lab to a simple, “Yes, you can walk around in that area.” The teachers are thankful for the support, and the students express their gratitude with their keen interest. About thirty of those students came together on Thursday, June 5th at Hunts Point Riverside Park for the Bronx River Student Symposium. They showed how they are learning about water quality, the wildlife and restoration of the river. Incredible has it sounds, students came on a day off from school to share what they feel is important about the river; Their Bronx River. The access to the river has turned on something in these students far beyond the science or environmental and social issues that they discussed. The students were the ones teaching those that were present about the river. They showed they own the issue and the place, and they are poised to take over. Nothing could make a teacher happier than to have a student move beyond them, hopefully make them superfluous.
The desire, no; the feeling of responsibility to bring about one change for one person or group that need can often have a greater effect on groups beyond those targeted. The Bronx River Alliance and the groups that we partner with have tried to increase access to the river for teachers and students, and the students will take it on to the world. In the case of the banister that I put up for my octogenarian parents, the first one to use it was nine month old daughter. The first person to grab on to that banister was not the intended user, but that smile of satisfaction that came from the safe feeling of the sturdy oak rail told me that I had done the right thing.
DG
June 8th, 2008
Why do we bother teaching science to students? Do we really believe that we are teaching the next Charles Drew? Do we see in the faces of the youth around us some audacity of imagination that just might happen to advance an end to diabetes? The truth is that it is actually true. When you work with somebody who is learning something new in the world of science, some odd duende appears and you believe that this person may just make an advance in the world that will benefit us all. But that is not why science is important; It is important beyond the science itself because of the dialog that you see between the mind and the world that surrounds us. Last Friday I was lucky enough to speak with some of the interlocutors that have been involved in that dialogue at the Banana Kelly Science Fair.
Nic and Carly at Banana Kelly High School have built their ninth grade science curriculum around the Bronx River and water quality monitoring. They have also given students a window onto their world and some of the students have taken that view very seriously. As I walked between the two rooms where the Science Fair was set up, I was amazed at the amount of information that the students had sorted through and had to make sense of in the form of a presentation. There were discussions about salinity, turbidity, global warming and comparisons of the levels of pollution in the Bronx River, the Hudson River, and the Newtown Creek. Just like with adults, the depth of the discussion varied greatly across the classes, but you could feel that the dominant opinion was that the subject merited discussion.
In the interest of full disclosure, Nic and Carly put me in the difficult position of grading the projects that I viewed, a job that they face everyday. I was given a rubric and had to see where on that scale the students stood. This is necessary because the students, all of us actually, need to know that people are looking critically at everything that we say and do. The unfortunate thing is that I wrote all notes on those rubrics instead of in my notebook, besides the fact that I was a little harsh in my grading.
At any rate, many students showed that they had looked deeply into the data and asked, “Why does the salinity level change?” or “What is the relationship between the amount of precipitation and turbidity?” Then they tried to make sense of these numbers, a task they call mental mastication. The data, mostly just numbers and dates, was obviously much more to these young people; they had collected the data, seen the parts of the world they were talking about, and knew that they were talking about their world. The dialogue that they engaged in was intimate which made the information relevant.
Beyond the actual information, the off-the-cuff remarks of many of the students made me really think about what education is really about and how hard it is to judge the understanding of a student. “Maybe,” Said one, “The Bronx River is cleaner because people have been trying to clean it up. Maybe that’s what the Newtown Creek needs.” To be able to see beyond the first view, beyond the numbers and actually bring in a historical perspective is profound and extremely heartening. It is beyond science and into life itself.
I was glad to have been invited by Banana Kelly to this event, but I must admit that I felt a bit like W.H. Auden: “When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.” That goes for the students and their teachers as well. And for these dukes, our natural world is their court.
DG
April 21st, 2008
If you ever wished that you were young again, assuming you are not young, then stop. In the past week I have met a ton of young people from whom I have drawn two important conclusions: 1) There are plenty of young people out there. 2) They are doing such incredible work that they don’t need us to be mucking up the works.
On Tuesday, April 1st, I attended the Teens For Planet Earth Symposium at The Bronx Zoo. There, groups from as close by as Van Cortland Park, and as far away as Washington state came together to share some of the projects that they have been working on in their communities. The projects were as varied as the students backgrounds. The projects included invasive removal in Van Cortland Park, raising bees in Bergen County New Jersey, and raising awareness of the importance of snags, nurse logs and amphibians in Washington State. All of the groups had command of their information, and the Washington State group had even run a teacher training for their local teachers. It was very impressive, to say the least.
Then on Friday, April 4th, VOICE held a mobile workshop for the Planet youth conference. Young people from Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, Rocking the Boat, and The Point gave a tour to several other groups of young people from all over the country, including New Orleans and Richmond California. The YMPJ Youth Organizers presented their CSO campaign, gave a tour of the backyard rain barrel and rain garden system, and green roof on the church roof next door. Rocking the Boat youth met the group at CPP with rowboats and led a boat tour of Bronx River shuttled them down to Hunts Point Riverside Park and their program site. Finally, youth from The Point’s ACTION program took the group along the future Bronx River Greenway to their community center where their afterschool programs were in action and they heard about ACTION’s work. I didn’t get to stay for the later events, but I was very impressed with the energy of the participants as they discussed Environmental Justice in their world.
On Monday, April 7th, it was the YOUTH CAN Conference at the American Museum of Natural History. This time it was students from all over the world running the show, running workshops and panel discussions about worldwide environmental issues. There were elementary kids talking about watershed function and high school kids comparing water quality of rivers in New York and Bangladesh. It was amazing how much energy and excitement was out there.
So, George Bernard Shaw did not quite have it right; Youth is not wasted on the young. There are some incredible young people out there doing incredible things.
April 8th, 2008
30 high school seniors and juniors from around the country are spending a semester here in NY with Cityterm to learn about New York City. You know these students and their teachers are not only super intelligent but also know what’s hep because part of their focus is the Bronx River. To that end, these intrepid interlocutors met with Drew and myself for a short walking discussion, starting at River Park, 180th Street, strolling through the newly named West Farms Rapids, and ending in Drew Gardens, just South of Tremont Ave.
Our Environmental Issue Walk
The issues discussed varied from early Bronx History to Fish Ladders to Santeria. The guiding concept of the walk was to consider the fact that no issue exists in and of itself. There are a variety of connections that need to be made in order to understand a perceived problem before any attempt can be made to ameliorate it. Lets try to get an idea of this by using the examples given above.
We started out our talk be looking back into Bronx River History and human involvement. Previous generations made the decision that a dam was what was called for at River Park and other areas, at first for mill use, and then for the attractive look and the soothing sounds of the cascade. Now we look at it in consideration of the alewife, an indigenous anadromous fish, and see it as a barrier to normal estuarine ecology. Removal of the dam might actually disrupt life on both sides due to scour and turbidity, so a fish ladder is brought up for consideration. The construction of a ramp on one side of the dam may become what is called an “attractive nuisance,” meaning more people may want to get out there and see what it is, possibly making for a dangerous situation.
Of course, what you want is for people to get out and enjoy the river, but how is it best for them to do that? As we walked down stream, we came upon a pumpkin and a jar of honey set carefully down by the side of the river. To some it was trash, but as it was most likely an offering to Oshun, trash may very well be in the eye of the beholder, or the believer in this case.
The group finished its walk in Drew Gardens where they were treated to a great composting demonstration and given a history of community gardens, and Drew Gardens specifically, by Jennifer P. Jennifer was extremely generous with her time and answered question on topics ranging from why they don’t use horse manure in the garden to why the CSO across the river spills human manure into the river when it rains.
We hope to see this group again sometime in the near future.
DG
April 4th, 2008
