The revolutionary solution for a noxious landfill site in Staten Island? Bury it, plant some grass and leave it for 20 years.
Landfill’s long road to lush landscape
At the turn of the millennium, Staten Island’s landfill was the largest garbage dump on the planet; three times larger than Central Park, with trash mounds 20 stories high excreting noxious methane and leaking unspeakable fluids into the waterways. Today, it’s a lush green oasis, and one of the most unlikely urban ecological restoration success stories of all time. The radical fix? Bury the trash, plant some grass and do nothing for 20 years. — via FutureCrunch
“No more garbage for the people of Staten Island,”
A little less than two decades ago, the last steaming load of garbage arrived at Fresh Kills Landfill. At the time, the New York Times reported a packed-high barge turned slowly out of the Arthur Kill — that long, dishwater-brown tidal strait that separates Staten Island from New Jersey — and then docked at the Sanitation Department’s pier, an event celebrated less as a matter of ecological stewardship at the time than a triumph of not-in-my-backyard politics.
For the New York Times, Robert Sullivan wrote:
‘I remember the last barge because I happened to be there. It was March 22, 2001, and I was embedded with the Department of Sanitation’s film crew, greeting the barge from the rain-soaked deck of what is known to the Sanitation Department navy as a trash skimmer, a little boat that snags flotsam, like a mechanized sea gull. The barge had set off that morning from a transfer station in College Point, Queens, heading south into the East River. Fireboats saluted the trash with water cannons, and as it passed Gracie Mansion, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani saluted it from his front lawn.
About an hour later, Mr. Giuliani was at Fresh Kills himself, standing amid garbage hills 200 feet tall, alongside Staten Island’s borough president, Guy Molinari, and Gov. George E. Pataki. These three Republicans had worked together to close the dump that Mr. Molinari’s father first protested when it opened in 1948, a time when Fresh Kills was a saltwater marsh where kids swam. After 1948, it became an ecological nightmare and a political hot potato. A banner behind the politicians read, “A Promise Made, a Promise Kept.”
“No more garbage for the people of Staten Island,” said Governor Pataki.’
Source: NewYorkTimes
What Freshkills means to one New York resident
Robert Sullivan, for the New York Times, wrote: ‘What Freshkills park initially represented back in 2001 was the Bloomberg administration’s plan to transfer garbage to way stations out of Staten Island and into neighborhoods where people of color lived. From there, New York’s trash was sent out of the city’s boundaries, as it still is today — by train to Ohio, to Virginia, to upstate New York and to several landfills in Pennsylvania among other places. Some of what would have gone to Fresh Kills is today incinerated in Newark, N.J., Niagara Falls and Chester, Pa., on the Philadelphia border, where 70 percent of residents are African-American.
Next year, when I look out from the top of the North Mound, I’ll be thinking about what the all-new grasslands and the restored marshes mean not just for the lucky-at-last Staten Island communities nearby but for the Mid-Atlantic coast. I’ll think of the migrating birds who see Freshkills and all of Staten Island’s parks as a life-sustaining stop on the way through the region, up through the Meadowlands and into Long Island Sound and beyond.
I’ll also think of the new Amazon fulfillment center nearby that’s standing on what could have been restored wetlands, another sad trade-off. A four-mile walk up the shore from Freshkills, the big flat building (neighbor to other multimillion-square-foot warehouses) is adjacent to Old Place Creek Tidal Wetlands Area, just beneath the new Goethals Bridge. Old Place Creek is, incidentally, about as close as you can get to seeing what Fresh Kills looked like before Freshkills Park and before Fresh Kills dump, when Thoreau might have paddled through.’
Note: All images accompanying this article are by Jade Doskow and are from an ongoing series documenting the rebirth of Freshkills.
Source: NewYorkTimes
9 GOOD REASONS TO SPEND MORE TIME OUTDOORS
With autumn around the corner after a long and locked down summer, it is highly recommended we spend some time outside. Nature offers one of the most reliable boosts to your mental and physical well-being. Here are just 9 of many potential health benefits of spending more time outdoors.