Watts Up With That?

by John Goetz

Here is an fun press release I ran across on prweb.com. If Ms. Haseltine is successful in her project, we might see more local produce on the Grand Central Station Oyster Bar menu. But will it actually do anything about global warming?

Professor Uses Oysters to Teach College Students to Curb Global Warming

Crassotrea virginica

Internationally acclaimed environmental artist Mara G Haseltine joined NYC’s The New School for Liberal Arts to teach, Oyster Gardens, the only class of its kind worldwide where the students will focus on the design and planning of a floating oyster colony, an innovative public art project which merges art, sustainable design and field science.

New York, NY (PRWEB) October 16, 2008 — Internationally acclaimed environmental artist Mara G Haseltine joined NYC’s The New School for Liberal Arts to teach Oyster Gardens, the only class of its kind worldwide where the students will focus on the design and planning of a floating oyster colony, an innovative public art project which merges art, sustainable design and field science.

Oyster Gardens celebrates New York’s past as the oyster capital of the world boasting of 350 square miles of bio diverse oyster reef as well as to prepare it for a sustainable future with a bountiful biodiverse estuary. Students learn about the history and the biology of the Crassostrea Virginia, the indigenous oyster of New York, as well as traditional and new innovative methods of reef restoration. In this unique course students work hand in hand with a cross disciplinary team that includes marine engineers, marine biologists, along with conservation organizations to plan and design and a ‘moveable reef’ — a floating oyster colony that could be deployed around the harbor.

The idea is to bring back Crassotrea Virginica to New York, which would create a natural filtration system that cleans the waters and simultaneously brings back biodiversity, that has been missing in New York’s waters and estuaries since the Industrial Revolution. Oysters are the backbone of the benthic habitat and can act as natural water treatment plants. The average oyster filters 5-25 gallons of “nutrient” rich water per day. The restoration of 100 square miles of reef would filter twenty seven billion tons of wastewater that flows into New York’s waterways annually. The reef would not only be a haven for oyster,s but would quickly become a diverse habitat for aquatic life of all forms, from gastropods to stripped bass.

Read the rest of this entry »