I love stories that concern Nature’s infrastructure. Yes, yes, imputing human engineering and motives to a life form fairly alien to us is an intellectual error, but there it is: not a dying salmon, flopping around on a cold Alaskan beach, but one of those silly koi, wandering about its tank, serene or bored – I can’t tell.
Anyways, Katherine Martinko of Treehugger has gathered up just such a story:
These busy filter-feeders clean the water, attract biodiversity, and offer protection from storms.
When English explorer Henry Hudson sailed into New York City harbor in 1609, there were oysters everywhere. Accounts say he had to navigate carefully to avoid running into some 220,000 acres of oyster reefs. Fast forward 400 years and most of these oysters are gone, their population decimated by polluted water.
One group of citizens, however, is on a mission to restore the harbor’s oysters to at least a shade of their former glory. The Billion Oyster Project grows baby oysters and replants them on the bottom of the Hudson River in order to kickstart a rejuvenation of the ecosystem. So far the group has planted 28 million pounds of oysters across nine reefs and the water quality is measurably improved.
It’s the fascination with evolution that it generates, not a system on a knife-edge, but one that has built-in correction mechanisms. The idea that we recognize this mechanism and can use it to clean a polluted area, with very little damage, if any, to other areas, delights my sense of how to solve problems.
I remember having the same sense of wonder and delight when I heard of mycoremediation, the use of mushrooms to remove poisons from the soil. A well designed program which can be enhanced with ease can induce something like the same feeling, but Nature is better at it.
