Once an open sewer, New York Harbor now teems with life
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is the same story across the US. In 2012 when I took up fishing, I had a fellow tell me he had not seen a smallmouth bass caught out of the river in 30 years! Now it is trivial. Hard not to catch one.
Just in the last 5 years the variety of birds showing up has changed. Many bald eagles and other raptors. 100+ strong flocks of pelicans. Pelicans! Apparently inland pelicans were normal 100 years go.
You can now catch bluefish, see harbor seals, and even spot whales within sight of skyscrapers. https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2022/08/01/humpback-w...
One of my favorite transformations: Spectacle Island, which doubled in size after being used as a city dump from the 1920s until 1959, is now a national park.
Nitpick: it's a National Recreation Area, not a (capital) National Park. I suppose in lowercase it carries a different meaning :-)
https://www.nps.gov/articles/nps-designations.htm
TIL of National Preserves and National Reserves, which are different....
The parkways are also somewhat odd. I didn't know NPS operated so many miles of urban roadway.
It's also a lovely place to walk and cycle, with sweeping views of the harbor. No, it doesn't smell.
Fun fact: byproducts from the sewage treatment process are piped across the harbor to Quincy and processed into various industrial chemicals, including pelletized plant fertilizer that is sold to the public under the brand 'Bay State Fertilizer.'
I think it’s technically a combined sewer system that has both street water and sewage so when it rains, the system gets overloaded.
Fixing the sewer system is a massive project
These laws and orgs can be overly bureaucratic, and need constant monitoring to make sure they don’t halt all progress in a given area, but it is a vast improvement to earlier times when the government cares not a whit about water quality. We have the same story here on the Delaware - a river you would not want to dip a single toe into 20 years ago is now beautiful, serves as drinking water to millions, and supports all sorts of hunting, fishing and tourism industries.
The most successful land animals today are... cows, pigs and chicken.
(Compare with horses, which were successful because they were useful... until they weren't anymore, and their population dropped. And yes, this also implies that lab-grown meat is an extinction-level threat for aforementioned farm animals.)
Species which we eat but don't farm we tend to eat to extinction, or near-extinction. Think of the Atlantic cod fish.
Most oysters we eat are farmed. And you need the old shells as a substrate to grow a new oyster bed.
Other human food species are extinct due to a combination of being a human food source and a food source for invasive species introduced by humans (eg, the Domed Rodrigues giant tortoise).
Famously the American buffalo went from 60 million in the late 1700s to 541 a century later. It was a cheap meat, provided cheap leather, and in order to deprive Plains Indians from a food source, the US government decided not to protect it earlier.
Then there's the collapse of many marine species due to overfishing, most recently the king and snow crab population collapse which canceled the season in Alaska, and the continuing question of the role humans played in the Quaternary extinction event.
Therefore, I suspect your claim isn't so clear-cut.
The US government actively supported exterminating bison, for that reason. That included having people shoot them dead from passing trains.
They are being reproduced (not a mistake here, they don't actually fuck/reproduce on their own) a lot that's true, but using the word 'successful' to describe their fate seems a bit too cynical.
Pretty much everyone eating well and having a good time.
Pretty neat, right? Turns out oyster larvae can’t just attach to anything. And one of the best materials for them to take root on is oyster shells. So you fly in oysters from around North America, charge a ticket price, have a good time; and then load the dried shells into chicken-wire crates (volunteers build them), lower them into reefs [1] and then innoculate them with larvae. After a few seasons, the water around the reef becomes clean enough to allow for doing it again. (Oysters are filter feeders. You don’t want to eat ones growing in dirty water.)
I've eaten many dozens of raw oysters at just about every coast I've ever visited (EU/MX/Gulf of MX, Pacific & Atlantic US), and have never gotten sick. I'm pretty careful with Gulf oysters though.
from https://www.billionoysterparty.org/oysterfarms
> Oyster farms travel to the Billion Oyster Party from across the country, bringing their unique oysters for you to try — and pair with your favorite beverages.
The biggest pollution is usually from run off and oysters eat nitrogen and phosphorus. Nitrogen causes algae growth, like red tide, which deals all kinds of havoc to ecosystems.
https://bittersoutherner.com/feature/2021/it-runs-downhill-t...
I grew up in this area and it’s very sad to see a place that held an incredible amount of life become a shell of what it once was.
One of my favorite places was Eau Gallie with the big concrete dragon — which now is long gone as well.
Bitter Southerner is a great site and worth supporting with a membership or one-time donation. I like a lot of their merch too and proudly wear my Yoknapatawpha t-shirt.
My take: Arguments never change in politics. I'll never understand why spending lots of money on military or company profits (aka the economy) is always prudent but improving the live of ordinary joe through quite cheap measures needs to be evaluated in great detail to not waste a single cent.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1972/10/18/archives/president-vetoes...
You can have these surreal conversations where they acknowledge that the opposite happened, but any further improvements will definitely destroy the economy. This is especially weird when it comes to fire prevention which is the actual biggest threat to property values where they live.
Not every problem can be solved this way (sometimes the 'big discussions' are really needed) but many smaller, more technical issues, can be attacked successfully if there is no immediate political gain.
The United States in general and New York City in particular wasn't doing too hot in the 1970s. I think it's hard to understate quite how bad things were[1].
But they were bad because of irrational choices, not despite them.
to
> But they were bad because of irrational choices, not despite them.
Eh, I think a lot of the choices were rational given the available information and understanding at the time.
Cost is always what politicians use to avoid having to say they just don't like something for ideological reasons.
A related technique is "Constitutional Concerns".
A surprising percentage of these arguments go like that where something is billed as uneconomical because it reduces waste, and the people pushing against it are backed the industries which benefit from that waste.
We shouldn’t be cavalier about inflation but we really have to keep in mind that pollution is often related to highly-profitable externalities which might be the most cheapest option because under true cost is being subsidized by everyone else (for example, reducing emissions has usually correlated with huge reductions in healthcare costs).
Also, dismissing cars as ‘vanity’ items is likely not to resonate broadly. While self-branding is a thing, some people just genuinely like the cars they can and aspire to buy. I love the inefficient cars I own, and the vast majority of people who know me have no idea or interest that I own them. If anything, vanity dictates humility in my circles. I also get negative responses on HN for owning ~500hp ICE cars (although my cumulative emissions are lower than ever due to reduced driving.)
This not a claim I made. Fuel costs are obviously going to affect most of the economy but note that I said “especially badly” — that’s because many Americans live in areas which were designed only for car travel, and if you live in one of those areas you don’t have a choice about buying a car when your current one dies because you can’t function without one. When cars are selling way above the previous market rates, that means your costs are either unaffected (driving a car with plenty of life left) or massively inflated (when the dealer is telling you it’ll be 18 months unless you’re paying 20% over).
This shows up in other areas but with different outcomes: for example, beef production is dependent on fuel costs. When that goes up, many people will switch to a different protein because there’s almost no cost to doing so. Same underlying problem, completely different level of impact.
> Also, dismissing cars as ‘vanity’ items is likely not to resonate broadly. While self-branding is a thing, some people just genuinely like the cars they can and aspire to buy.
I grew up in Southern California suburbs, you don’t need to explain car culture to me. If you note, however, my comment referred to “inefficient vanity vehicles”. If you really like having a sports car, that’s fine as long as you treat it like a hobby and can afford it (a friend of mine joked that he had a BMW M3 habit and should’ve saved money by switching to illegal drugs).
I was referring to the much larger group of people who make financial stretches to have a late model SUV or luxury sedan because that’s the image they’re aiming for, even if they’re leasing it to make the numbers work at all. If you remember over the summer when the local TV News couldn’t run enough stories about gas prices, notice how it was always some dude putting 20 gallons of premium into a huge truck or SUV. People who are actually poor don’t buy those because everything about them costs more than they can spend, which is why I mentioned that distinction.
If you are starting from scratch a personal car is literally the 3rd thing you seek out (shelter and employment are tied for #1) because of the massive freedom it affords you to be more selective in your choices of shelter and employment letting you "level up" from there.
These people who are just on/over the cusp of the transition between those two living standards got kneecapped by inflation (mostly food/fuel initially and then kicked while down by the rent a little later) way harder than the middle class who's got more room to trim fat.
"Nixon won by just 1 percent of the popular vote. “Once in office he escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia, with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives, before finally settling for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968,” says the BBC."
I would say "beyond evil".
The South didn't need any help walking away from a peace deal in '68. Hell, they walked away from the peace deal in '72 and only signed because Nixon told them the US was leaving regardless.
And there was no peace deal in '68 with the North. The North wasn't even interested in negotiating until a couple years after Nixon got into office.
And funny how Nixon gets blamed for "prolonging" a war he never started. How about blame JFK and LBJ for starting and escalating it into a massive conflict?
Perhaps it's easier to believe this about Nixon given his other documented crimes. Or you can just browse the transcripts here to get an idea of what he was willing to do and what his motivations were for making decisions. https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/watergate-trial-tapes
Yes, Nixon did tell the South that he could get them a better deal if they waited until after the election.
But the idea that the US and North Vietnam were on the verge of a peace deal in ‘68 is just laughable.
And sure Nixon did lots of things wrong, but that doesn’t mean I automatically believe some article that makes a preposterous conclusion.
So whether a more immediate peace deal was likely or not, he made an effort to postpone it. And he had specific personal reasons for wanting it postponed.
Given the other actions he took for personal gain, why should we believe this was any different?
But at this point, we're way outside HN boundaries. So I'll leave it alone.
North and South Vietnam weren't on the verge of peace, but the US could easily have had peace at any time by withdrawing.
And the letting go of the gold standard (whether this is evil is debatable).
On the other hand, Nixon created the environmental protection agency.
A la Patriot Act and Inflation Reduction Act
What’s the big deal about 10 feet of poop in the East River? How many chemical workers should lose their livelihood for some oysters? Coastal elites eat oysters, real men eat steak.
Nowadays, there is promenade along the river and it is easy to see many birds around. People goes there to do jogging or cycle. The river is creating as much economic value as natural one.
But it is nor inviting nor healthy to swim in the river, there is much more work to be done.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...
We’ve come a long way but still more todo.
Rainstorm overflows are being reduced using rainwater gardens also known as "green" infrastructure, basically absorbable surfaces in sidewalk areas.
Probably the biggest solution could have been to better regulate Rainstorm runoff from private properties. But the city did not pass such legislation except for larger properties.
This is a huge gripe of mine. I live in south Queens where the majority of homes are single family detached and so many have had their yards paved to 100% coverage. It infuriates me when I see water pouring down their driveways running into the streets. I don't know why but people seem to prefer hideous barren concrete to life supporting dirt. It pains me when I see a home sold and the property is cleansed vegetation and paved. Looking around my neighborhood on 1940s.nyc is depressing.
It’s in your dental floss, too. Switch to silk or another natural fiber for flossing.
It’s on Amazon.
[1] https://madebyradius.com/products/natural-biodegradable-silk...
Where was this available?
Had the TFA included a couple of actual photos instead of clipart illustrations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/science/dolphins-new-york...
The government banned commercial net fishing in 2015, so the bay is now only for recreational fishing.
I understand it had revived the ecosystem.
https://amp.theage.com.au/national/victoria/bay-of-plenty-po...
There is anaerobic life but much less of it there aerobic life. So it seems fair to argue that it wasn’t teeming at all.