Billion Oyster Project

The Billion Oyster Project

Originally published in Civil Eats.

When Hurricane Sandy struck New York on October 29, 2012, it deluged every neighborhood it hit. Seven years later, many neighborhoods—including Coney Island, Canarsie in Brooklyn, and points all along the shore of Staten Island—are still recovering. Others, such as Staten Island’s Fox Beach, were destroyed in their entirety, never to have residents again.

With these events in all too recent memory, New Yorkers know how susceptible they are to climate change and are at the forefront of developing new approaches to the climate crisis, with the city’s young people getting especially involved. As the recent youth climate strikes that brought hundreds of thousands to New York’s streets attest, the younger generations—those who will be most affected by climate change—are taking concrete steps to try to turn back the tide, quite literally.

One of the programs that is engaging youth is the Billion Oyster Project. While the project’s founding goal aimed to to make the “waters surrounding New York City cleaner, more abundant, more well-known, more well-loved,” it has a more pressing role in the time of accelerating climate change: creating oyster reefs that can help blunt storm surges that accompany hurricanes by breaking up the waves before they hit land.

To date, the program has planted 28 million oysters with the help of thousands of volunteers and high school students. An offshoot of this outreach is that young people are engaging with the waterfront like never before. This has strengthened communities and led to relationships between young and old who might not have ever known each other had the climate crisis not brought them together.

Tanasia Swift, pictured at top, is the Community Reefs Regional Manager at the Billion Oyster Project. She grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, one of the most urban places in the city. However, for as long as she can remember, she wanted to be a marine biologist. Her inseparable bond to New York’s waterways formed when she’d go to Red Hook with her father to fish as a child. She now leads efforts to install community reefs in South Brooklyn, which was badly impacted by Hurricane Sandy.

Students from Baruch College take oysters from the Paerdegat Basin.

On this day, Swift leads students from Public School 115 studying oysters and learning about the basin with a meditation. For her, the program is as much about regenerating community as it is about ecology. Before the students get technical knowledge, Swift wants them to develop a connection to the environment and gain an awareness of things they might not have been conscious of before.

By closing their eyes, breathing simply and instructing them to be aware of all that their senses perceive, the children slowly take in the world around them. After they reopen their eyes, she asked them what they experienced. “I didn’t know it smelled like the ocean, we’re so close to the water, I didn’t know we were this close,” one of the students said. They would also talk about hearing birds and the water lapping against the nearby shore, things they were not aware of when their eyes were open.

Students meditate before their discoveries.

At first when children pick up crabs, they find their claws intimidating and drop them right away. Explaining that they need to respect the small creatures, instructors told the children they could freak out before and after they touched the crabs, but not while they touched them. After taking this advice to heart, the students took deep breaths and picked up the crabs, holding them in the pit of their palms. One girl, through giggles, said that once the crab was on her and scuttling across her skin, there actually wasn’t anything to be afraid of.

At first when children pick up crabs, they find their claws intimidating and drop them right away. Explaining that they need to respect the small creatures, instructors told the children they could freak out before and after they touched the crabs, but not while they touched them. After taking this advice to heart, the students took deep breaths and picked up the crabs, holding them in the pit of their palms. One girl, through giggles, said that once the crab was on her and scuttling across her skin, there actually wasn’t anything to be afraid of.

Students from PS 115 finished their day by heading down to the dock in single file where they saw oysters and creatures that live in them closer to their habitat. For the students, being outside of their school was to enter into a living laboratory. Their school is within a mile of the water, however living in urban Brooklyn it was as if the water was a world away as many had never been to it.

The Billion Oyster Project has dozens of projects throughout New York City. One of them is 8 miles away from Canarsie in Coney Island Creek.

The waters there are heavily polluted and there is a stench of fetid death all around. For years, the creek has been like this: home to the rotting hulls of ships and a dumping ground for discarded tires, rusting shopping carts and anything else people want to dump without being seen. However, The Billion Oyster Project hopes to change that and bring life back to this body of water. They currently have planted 160,000 oyster beds in Coney Island Creek with the goal of bringing the total to 200,000. October 29, 2012 was a pivotal date for Coney Island. It was then that Hurricane Sandy struck, transforming it from the place the world knew as home to funhouses and roller coasters to a frontline community most vulnerable to the climate crisis. In a blog post Tanasia said: “The motivations for installing a reef at Coney Island Creek have as much to do with awareness as with restoration. Some people go swimming in the creek at times when it is dangerous to do so, such as after combined sewage overflows (CSOs). Some shy away from the creek entirely, worrying that it’s always dangerous to touch the water. Part of this reef’s purpose is to provide a way for people to better get to know, and safely interact with, the water near their homes.”

The Billion Oyster Project has dozens of projects throughout New York City, and one is eight miles away from Canarsie in Coney Island Creek, which flows into New York Harbor. The waters there are heavily polluted, and a stench hangs all around.

Photo: Berenice Abbott from the collection of the New York Public Library. In 1937 when this photo was taken, oysters were so plentiful that they’d commonly be seen piled up along the waterways and outside of the restaurants that served them.

In 1937, when the above photo was taken, oysters were so plentiful that they’d commonly be seen piled up along the waterways and outside of the restaurants that served them. Later, when reefs were dredged up or covered in silt and the water quality was too poor for oysters to regenerate, the reefs began to precipitously decline. Like the Coney Island Creek now, New York Harbor was toxic and nearly lifeless for more than 50 years until the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, which prohibited dumping waste and raw sewage into the harbor.

The Billion Oyster Project partners with restaurants thought New York who donate their shells to the program after eating the oysters. Once the shells are collected, oyster larvae are placed in the shells and attached to the surface where they will then grow to become oysters themselves.

By 2035, the Billion Oyster Project hopes to have distributed 1 billion live oysters around 100 acres of reefs, which the project says will make “the harbor once again the most productive water body in the North Atlantic and reclaim its title as the oyster capital of the world.”