Part 4: Nature, by any other name

Industry receded from the shoreline of Hunters Point in the late 20th century. With lack of use, the docks slowly crumbled into the water, the gantries rusted, the railroad ties that stepped out to the water’s edge rotted. By the time the Queens West project was being proposed in the mid-1990s, the perimeter of the peninsula that had been transformed from marsh to bulkhead was a wide band of dirt.

And yet, in the intervening decades before the new park broke ground in 2015, a patchwork of meadows, woodlands, and dense undergrowth had appeared along this edge. Flowers in the meadow drew bees and insects, and birds made nests in trees which shaded the blanket of vines that grew chaotically alongside chain-link fences. Dan Campo, chronicler of New York’s formerly industrial waterfronts, described this spontaneous woodland as a place to have a “beyond-the-rules” experience, and a “visceral connection to the landscape.”[1]

The Hunters Point woodland in 2015. Photo: Nathan Kensinger.

This is often the story of industrial areas that industry abandons. Again, we see our old story retold: a resplendent nature, restored, triumphing over the human-made environments that had for so long dominated it. But the nature that thrived here in the more recent past, the thickets of trees, the wildflowers and shrubs, was, in a way, “unnatural.” This was not the pre-human, pre-industrial wilderness that we fallaciously believe it outside of ourselves; this wilderness existed because of human intervention, because developers and factory men trucked in soil and gravel to fill the marsh out to the bulkhead line. There’s a tension between our “elemental experience” of these places, and their character as a “multi-layered, palimpsestic, accidental landscape.”[2] It suggests that what Cronon writes is true: nature, and our ability to experience it, is both “out there” and “in here,” both far away but also close at hand, and both of these natures are shaped, formed, and informed by us, by humans.[3]

An informal gravel path through a meadow. Photo: Nathan Kensinger.

This is not nature returned, it’s nature transformed, a new nature that flourishes in contaminated soil caused by human activity. Yet this nature, this novel ecosystem, did not appear in the park designs.[4] Though the landscape architect, Thomas Balsey, expressed a fondness for what he called “a little piece of rugged nature,” the team designed a landscape with “a more contemporary form,” filled with native species.[5] A contemporary landscape based on its pre-human, unaltered, pre-industrial past! Time is a fickle ingredient in landscape projects, spooling out into loops that are hard to disentangle. In any case, the spontaneous woodland was torn up by its roots to make way for the restored marsh. The meadow was razed. The steep cliff of the bulkhead, to which saplings clung, was graded and returned to its “original state.” The new ground was planted with native marsh grasses and plants.

Horticulturist and botanist Peter Del Tredici has written persuasively that this kind of restoration “rests on the mistaken assumption that we can somehow bring back past ecosystems by removing invasive species and replanting native species.”[6] On the contrary, Del Tredici argues, “people have altered the basic trajectory of modern ecology to such an extent that going back to some earlier native condition is no longer possible and is certainly not a realistic solution to the increasingly complex environmental problems that we face.”[7] The trucked-in soil, the rocky cliff of the bulkhead—these changes fundamentally altered the land such that the ecology present when Ratzer was making his map is out of reach, back there, in the past.   

Moreover, falsely-maligned invasive species can sometimes actually help address contamination. Del Tredici highlights the mighty Phragmites which, “by absorbing excess nitrogen and phosphorous” in the soil, help to clean up toxic landscapes.[8] Invasives like the Phragmites are not the cause of environmental degradation, but a symptom of it. Replacing them with native species won’t address the underlying issue: runoff from nearby highways, air pollution, groundwater laced with noxious chemicals after years of heavy industrial activity. Campo, walking down the informal pathways through the woodland at Hunters Point suggested that we should “have more respect for those species that survive these harsh conditions.”[9] What might this place have looked like if the emergent ecosystem were retained? Is it even useful to consider such a hypothetical?

De Tredici suggests a method of thoughtful management in these spontaneous landscapes. Rather than ripping up all the plants and replacing them, he argues, we should simply remove the unwanted ones. “Unwanted” is a broad enough category that it could include vines that are strangling mature trees and unsightly undergrowth—that is, it can address both functional and aesthetic needs of a project. Such was the strategy at Berlin’s Naturpark Schöneberger Südgelände: a rail yard that had been abandoned following the construction of the Berlin Wall. By the time the Wall fell, it had become a striking patchwork forest and meadowland, filled with native and non-native plants. The park design worked with this spontaneous nature, clearing undergrowth, building paths on top of the railroad tracks. The resulting park embraces both natural processes and human ones, provides space for human and non-human use, and creates a landscape where many pasts are acknowledged without being literally restored.

Mature trees growing between railroad ties at Berlin’s Naturpark Schöneberger Südgelände, and a meadow beyond. Photo: Gertrude K.

One of the more delicious historical ironies of the restored marsh, in my opinion, is that marshes, for a long time, were not in vogue. That is: in the very past that is conjured by the restoration project, the marsh was not a desirable landscape. Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, as Vittoria Di Palma masterfully shows in her book Wasteland: A History, wetlands were seen as foul, disgusting, dangerous in their immutability, and ugly in their muddiness.[10] Over the long 19th century, this negative opinion was only sharpened, and put into the language of property value and industrialization: wetlands were understood not only as ugly but also unproductive, as in unbuildable. The solution here was to fill them, create buildable, dry land from the unstable muck. And now? This once unstable muck is the spongy key to coastal resilience. Not only that, but marshes are clearly beautiful again, centerpieces in the “contemporary form” of Hunters Point South Park. Tidal marshes, the simulacra of a pre-human, pre-industrial past nature, are functional and aesthetically pleasant.  

But so, too, are the novel ecosystems that erupt in abandoned postindustrial places. Landscape theorist Joern Langhorst argues that these landscapes represent the “simultaneous ruins of nature and culture.”[11] He foregrounds the aesthetic qualities of emergent ecosystems, particularly in places like Landschaftspark Duisberg-Nord (another German park—the Germans like this kind of thing). At Duisberg-Nord, a hulking, decommissioned blast furnace and is surrounded by spontaneous, but managed, growth of vines, bushes, and trees; a network of walking and biking paths snake through the site. It’s a stage on which humans can have a range of experiences, specifically because of the expression of non-human agency. Hunters Point South Park is more akin to the High Line, a landscape where the representation of a landscape (that is, the constructed nature of a restored marsh) supplants the landscape itself (the spontaneous nature of the filled marsh, the rectilinear bulkhead).

The Bahnpark (Rail Park) at Duisberg-Nord, a quilt of managed and unmanaged growth, human and non-human uses. Photo: Latz + Partner.

But the thing is, the differences between novel ecosystems and restored marshes are academic. It’s hubristic to ignore the fact that, at the end of the day, people are enchanted by all of these places, be they spontaneous or highly choreographed. They love these parks. Let’s return to a map. Google Maps reviews for all these parks are rapturous. The views of Manhattan’s skyline foregrounded by the Hunters Point marsh, the shaded paths of the Naturpark, the experience of walking the High Line, native grasses brushing at your ankles—through all of these runs a sense of wonder. At Hunters Point, it’s wonder that such a place exists in New York; wonder that the Parks Department could pull something like this off; wonder that nature and urbanism can exist side by side, that in the middle of the biggest city in the country, you can meander through a marsh.

Perhaps, too, it’s wonder at the ability of landscape to transport us to a future where we don’t rely on bulkheads and we don’t fill marshes, where we embrace the squishy morass as a key ally in addressing climate change. Maybe it’s wonder that these landscapes transport us, in a way, to the past, in allowing time to speak. The shoreline of New York won’t ever be fully restored—it can’t be and probably shouldn’t—but by gesturing toward the past, and making visitors aware of a dynamic and non-linear time, these places hold considerable power. Landscape architects and environmental historians have an incredible opportunity to work together in creating places like these, where pasts and futures are in conversation.

Or—maybe this is it—it’s just wondrous that these places transport us to a present, from which we are more and more alienated, and in which, if we’ve got any hope to make the changes we so urgently need, we have to co-conspire with, live with, and find joy in the non-human world.  

A glossy ibis. Watercolor by Michelle Mueller.

[1] Nathan Kensinger, “A Dispatch From the Last Wild Days of Hunter's Point South,” Curbed, December 17, 2015, https://ny.curbed.com/2015/12/17/10620282/a-dispatch-from-the-last-wild-days-of-hunters-point-south.  

[2] Ibid.

[3] Cronon, 25.

[4] “Second nature” is a concept popularized, though not originally articulated, by Cronon, in Nature’s Metropolis. He describes a human-constructed nature distinct from, but deeply intertwined and co-constituent with, “first nature,” the raw, unaltered natural stuff of the world. Abstraction is a key differentiator between these two natures, echoing, some might argue, Marx’s distinction between the use- and exchange-value of commodities.

[5] Balsey quoted in Kensinger, “A Dispatch.”

[6] Peter Del Tredici, “The Flora of the Future,” Places, April 2014, https://placesjournal.org/article/the-flora-of-the-future/.

[7] Del Tredici, “The Flora of the Future.”

[8] Ibid.

[9] Campo quoted in Kensinger, “A Dispatch.”

[10] Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

[11] Joern Langhorst, “Re-Presenting Transgressive Ecologies: Post-Industrial Sites as Contested Terrains,” Local Environment 19, no. 10 (November 26, 2014): 1110–33.