Full Transcript

INTRO 

This is The Climate Story Project— where we share real stories about how climate change is shaping our lives. Stories that connect us. Stories that move us to act. This is a project of the New York Climate Exchange, a non-profit organization that’s accelerating climate solutions through a unique partnership model and climate campus on Governors Island. In each episode, you’ll hear voices from different places and walks of life in our growing archive of personal climate stories, so that we can remember, reflect, and respond together.

The story you’re about to hear is from Helen Chirigos. Helen is a Seasonal Fabrication Technician from the Billion Oyster Project, a partner of the New York Climate Exchange. 

HELEN

I grew up clamming and fishing and, growing oysters, spending most of my time when I wasn't in school on a small barrier island, off of Long Island called Oak Island. It's a small one mile strip of marshland connected by boardwalks that each resident is responsible for maintaining. There's no transportation to the island. There's no municipal electricity or water or sewage system or trash system.

The people who lived there, a lot of them have spent their entire life on the island. Most spend as much time as they can there or split them with family. A lot of them are passed down generationally, and in literally the same shape they were when they were built like 150 years ago as like fishing communities or just seasonal.

But it's just very interesting because environmental changes are immediately obvious. Like, you know when it's high tide, you know when the tide is much higher than usual, you know when the water smells a little bit different. If rain falls really low, the people who rely on rainwater to collect for household water supply really feel that impact. You notice like when they're algae blooms, they wash up on your shore. You know when fish die off and mass like everyone on the island notices and we'll talk about it. It’s just a very immediate relationship with your surroundings.

But where I'm also from is New York City, where I live in the East Village. I've lived in the same apartment my whole life and my parents have been here before I was born. This is a community in a city that I didn't really think of as coastal. And a lot of people don't, even though we're a series of islands. Every person in the five boroughs lives within six miles of shoreline. And I can go for a long walk and get to the East River from my house

When I was 10, Superstorm Sandy hit the city and Oak Island, which is only about 50 miles away. And the impact I think was relatively similar in a really interesting way. On Oak Island, a lot of people chose to stay in their houses there through the storm to kind of protect them. We buttoned everything down. We just did as much as we could. 

And in the end, two of my neighbor's houses were lifted up off of the wooden posts that they sit on and swept away and completely demolished in the marsh. Our house was not destroyed, but everyone had pretty extensive damage. The boardwalk, which is kind of our version of a sidewalk, was destroyed so you couldn't get around on the island. A lot of the freshwater plants on the island died. And they're still gone. There's kind of a before and after the storm.

During the time of the storm though, I was in New York City in my apartment at home. And we were watching a movie, not too concerned about the storm, like we weren't really following the news. And there was a big bang. The Con Edison Power plant down the street from me, a transformer blew out and we lost power for I think over four days. 

And I remember taking a walk after the storm had passed and seeing this like water line, this obvious like line of debris that signified how far the water had come up being like above car windows. And we walked through Alphabet City and people were pumping out their basements and just thinking like, this doesn't make any sense because we, this isn't waterfront, you know? 

I think a lot of New Yorkers had that same reaction, like we weren't overly worried about the storm. I think on Oak Island it was also kind of mind boggling and shocking, but we knew that there was a certain amount of vulnerability. And I spent kind of a while feeling shocked for a long time and then just very concerned, about my home, about whether it would exist in the future. For my neighbors who couldn't rebuild their homes. It really shifted, I remember even as a 10-year-old, like starting to think about like, well by 2100 extreme estimates say that we'll have 5.4 feet of sea level rise. Most of the island is not higher than that. Most of the island goes underwater during high tide. 

But more so than the physical impact, there's like the psychological component that I experienced and New Yorkers experienced, and definitely people on Oak Island experienced about the lack of stability that our environment currently has. I think it impacted community health and individual, like an interpersonal sense of like safety and reassurance. And I know that I felt it, and I know that the city felt it too, because immediately after we started all of these projects to kind of mitigate climate change. 

Billion Oyster Project had started offering oyster research stations to public school classrooms. So I convinced my science teacher to sign up and get an oyster research station, which is a little wire cage with a tile on top tied to a rope, with about 10 oysters in it. And BOP sent us that and water quality testing kits. And we would walk from my school to the waterfront on Friday afternoon. So it was like, all the nerds, you know, that's what we did in high school, and we would do water quality and it was like what is in the water? What animals live here? Why do things grow or not grow? Or what causes the fecal levels or the turbidity to change. And so we'd pull out this cage and my classmates and I, we'd be like touching crabs and measuring barnacles and tourniquets and, really having this like tactile connection and relationship and learning about our city's health through investigating the waterways.

It really kind of begged this question in me like, why do we just accept that we don't have access to this part of our city? And, why are we so disconnected? That kind of led me to where I am now, which is, back at Billy Oyster Project after graduating from college where I studied the environment and politics. And the department I'm in leads the events where we help to  clean a lot of oyster shells that are recycled from about 80 restaurants in New York that give us their used shells. and recycle to put back into the harbor.

The oysters do three things. They filter the water, they filter about 50 gallons of water a day. Also when they start to grow naturally, which is, we're putting them in the water as a keystone species to hopefully get them to a point where they're just reproducing and doing their thing and have been restored, they create these crazy like geometrical shapes and they grow off one another and create a living sea wall that will grow as high as the tide grows, that help protect the city from storm surges and extreme weather events. 

And the third reason is that before we decimated the oyster populations in New York, over half of the world's oysters lived in this harbor. There are some historical journals that recount being able to walk across the buttermilk channel between Brooklyn and Governor's Island on the oyster reefs. As New York became kind of a connection point for Europe and a global trading port, people started to actually remove the reefs so that larger boats could get through. And around that same time, people started selling them, eating a lot of them. The same way you can now go and get a hot dog from a hot dog cart, there used to be oyster carts everywhere and they were enjoyed in really high end spaces, they were always a luxury food, but also served in what at the time were called poor houses. So everyone was just eating oysters. Before it was the big apple, it was actually the big oyster. 

So there's kind of this extensive habitat with a lot of historical cultural significance long before colonization where the oysters are a really important part of our city and the health of our city. The Billion Oyster Project aims to put a billion oysters in the water. We're at 157 million oysters. It's something that we're working towards with the help of New Yorkers. And, yeah, I see my role at BOP as kind of providing a space for people who are also feeling concern and looking for agency and, and a way to actively engage and to make a difference.

I just, I also, I just love oysters. I learned how to count by sorting our oysters into groups of 10. I grew up wading around the marshes and trying to identify species. And I know a lot of people don't have this opportunity, that kind of really privileged like ability to interact with nature, which is a human right. But, in New York, it's harder to access. As we try to figure out like spaces where people can interact and kind of find joy and pleasure and health and connection with the waterway, to me is like maybe the most important part of creating like a healthier relationship with our coast.

OUTRO 

This story is part of The Climate Story Project. To find more stories and learn more about The New York Climate Exchange, visit nyclimateexchange.org and follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. This episode was produced by Kylie Miller. Thanks for listening.