When Hurricane Sandy slammed the entire eastern seaboard with high waters and storm surges that flooded New York City’s subways in 2012, it incurred $50 billion in damages.
The devastation from Sandy, the second-costliest hurricane in U.S. history, is still evident at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, a 14-square-mile embayment of wetlands outside New York City.
On Jan. 11, Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, landscape architecture professor from the City College of New York, will visit the University of Oregon to discuss the devastating, transformational effect of climate change on shoreline communities, and why humans need to “adapt to a much more flexible and amphibious way of living at the coast.”
Seavitt Nordenson will address the various strategies she and a CCNY team designed to restore the urban ecology of Jamaica Bay and make coastal regions more resilient to environmental threats. She will also discuss how landscape architects play an important role in adaptive design that addresses climate change.
Map of Jamaica Bay, an embayment of wetlands outside NYC, where Seavitt Nordenson says there’s an incredible opportunity to alter the ecological fate of the marsh islands through “a novel system of marsh terracing at the islands’ perimeters.” Photo credit: Creative Commons
Located outside Brooklyn and Queens, Jamaica Bay’s wetlands provide New York City with critical natural defenses against hurricanes and other natural disasters. These have gradually been disappearing since the early 20th century. According to an article in Landscape Architecture, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers predicts that without human intervention the marshlands will disappear by 2025.
In storms, the marshes provide critical shields for cities that reduce the damaging power of waves. Seavitt Nordenson says the barrier island of Rockaway Peninsula can work as “a dynamic entity that enables an exchange of ocean and bay ecosystems within a watershed. … We as humans will need to adapt to a much more flexible and amphibious way of living at the coast.”
The UO Overlook Field School, part of the Fuller Center in the landscape architecture department, took a tour of Broad Channel and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife with Seavitt Nordenson and Don Riepe, director of the Northeast Chapter of the American Littoral Society.
“There’s no better way to comprehend the vast scale of Jamaica Bay than being physically present right in the middle of it all, as we did with the Overlook Field School,” said Seavitt Nordenson.
In 2010, Seavitt Nordenson contributed to the research project “On The Water: Palisade Bay” and helped curate “Rising Currents,” an exhibition at the New York’s Museum of Modern Art, both of which focused on the New York waterfront and its ability to recover from or adapt to rising sea levels.
Her research aims to identify what measures can be taken to mitigate the severe climate patterns threatening the area. These include reintroducing ocean-to-bay water circulation and flow via “overwash plains” and establishing terraces at marsh perimeters.
“Catherine’s work is creative as well as based on sound science and adds to the development of plans to make the New York City coastline more resilient,” Riepe says.
Catherine Seavitt Nordenson’s lecture will take place at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 11 at the Lee Barlow Guistina Ballroom in the Ford Alumni Center (1720 East 13th Ave). The event is hosted by the Fuller Center for Productive Landscapes. The lecture is free and open to the public, and is preceded by a 5 p.m. reception.
