Forbs, Fungi, and Fading Memories: What Can Preserving a Disappearing Staten Island a Century Ago Teach Us Today?
By Melissa Zavala
Gas collecting equipment at Freshkills Park. Photo taken by the author.
Staten Island’s rich history of conservation is overshadowed by its reputation as a “dump,” most often associated with Fresh Kills, the notorious landfill which at its peak point of operations in the 1980s was considered the largest landfill in the world. A look through the Staten Island Museum’s archival collections, however — its founder’s letters, journals, publications, photographs, and a wide array of other objects including herbariums, assorted wet and dry collections of specimens, and more — reveals an island that has transformed radically. The sensible response by a group of local naturalists to the dramatic changes happening 1879-1929 presents insights for today’s world. While conducting research on the large-scale transformations underway at what is now called Freshkills Park[1] for a dissertation in anthropology exploring urban nature against histories of pollution, I was struck by the extensive knowledge of Staten Island’s biodiversity amassed by a core of dedicated naturalists. As we confront a global climate exacerbated by warming temperatures, shifting coastlines and overdevelopment, what lessons can we learn from conservationists working to preserve the borough’s indigenous species one hundred years ago? This essay explores how Staten Island’s botanical archive presents us with approaches for inspiring conservation today.
Photo featuring William T. Davis at work in the marshes, on display at the Staten Island Museum. Photo of portrait taken by the author.
The letters in the “Flora of Richmond County” Collection housed at the Staten Island Museum reflect a broad network of professional scientists and naturalists working together to identify local species of wide-ranging organisms, from mosses, to slime molds, fungi, as well as larger species including shrubs and trees. The founders of what became the Staten Island Museum were aware of the deep changes taking place around the island. Led by William T. Davis, a borough native and a self-taught conservationist and educator, a core group of scientists including Nathaniel Britton, Arthur Hollick, Charles Leng and Edward Delevan, busied themselves growing a collection of not just species of living organisms but also data documenting a vanishing community. Seeing the damages pollution and urban development were having on the island, they copied down names from gravestones eroded by growing sulphates, nitrates and other ozone pollutants increasingly found in larger amounts in declining air quality around the metro region. Sometimes uncertain about their identifications of different living organisms, they were in regular touch with local, regional, and nationwide experts who assisted by lending out their reference species for given specimens and/or confirming identifications made on the field. The network of experts they created for borrowing and sharing specimens to build regional and national archives demonstrates the potential of public science. The extensive samples collected later became the basis for collections housed in different science organizations, especially along the northeastern coast of the United States. Such collections are now accessible mainly to scientists associated with research organizations. With social media serving as a platform for readily sharing data, can today’s more connected world more effectively raise awareness of species in danger of extinction? Can interconnectedness enhance conservation?
The archived correspondence from the varied collections at the museum demonstrate a type of camaraderie now fading from the email-writing genre. They offer a lens on social relationships from one hundred years ago. One example of the warm exchanges between Staten Island’s conservationists and their colleagues is visible in letters like this one from May 10, 1929, written by Nathaniel Britton to Dr. Francis W. Pennell, an American botanist and figwort family (Scrophulariaceae) expert:
My dear Pennell:
I am greatly obliged to you for the three specimens of Eleocharis which came this morning, and inasmuch as Mr. Mackenzie is particularly interested in this genus at the present time I will hold them here, if you please, until he comes in and has a chance to study them.
The Cerastium oblongifolium problem was always embarrassing, and we are very glad that you are picking it up again. We are sending you the sheet from the Torrey Herbarium labeled by Dr. Torrey oblongifolium, on which the plant collected by Douglass is definitely identified, but there is nothing in this herbarium to certainly identify the plant collected by Dewey. Possibly the herbarium at Williams College might have it preserved. Note, however, that in the lower left-hand corner of the herbarium sheet there is a specimen without locality given, which Dr. Torrey evidently included in his idea of oblongifolium, and it is possible that this represents the plant collected by Dewey, but we have never been able to prove this.
With this sheet we are putting in a few specimens. It would seem that the plant of the Serpentine hills of Staten Island might be somewhat different from yours of the Pennsylvania Serpentine areas. This possibility has occurred to me several times, and I shall be glad to have your judgment in the matter.[2]
The letters and specimens shipped to and from Staten Island illustrate how knowledge gets pieced together over time. Even using low-tech ways, scientists and enthusiasts have effectively worked together to better understand change. With instantaneous electronic connections and better data sharing alternatives, how much more information can the public share today and how?
In 2011, while I conducted fieldwork on Staten Island, a patch of Pycnanthemum torrei that botanists from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden had located years before was once again under threat. This species of mountain-mint had been thought extinct in the metropolitan region until it was found in 2004 on a roadside along the south shore of Richmond County. This seemingly ordinary-looking forb named after John Torrey, the famous New York botanist and author of the first flora of New York published in 1843, was mostly known only from historical records like the ones referenced here. With less than twenty known populations in the world (and all located in the eastern United States with some in the NYC region), this plant is far more threatened than many of the charismatic species, particularly of animals, on the federal endangered list.
While the patch originally identified in the Kreischer Hill area of Staten Island was barely saved by a lawsuit against the developers, a strip mall was nevertheless built on the site, pushing the species further to the brink. The fate of Torrey’s mountain-mint continues to hang by a thread. One of the things the plant scientists I got to know through fieldwork found so upsetting was that the species’ location on Staten Island further made it a low-ranking preservation objective. “No one cares about Staten Island,” was a common refrain expressed by historians, naturalists, scientists, and residents alike. Though the island is “the borough of parks,” it is overlooked in various ways, sometimes because of its distinct political culture which differs from the rest of the city, at other times because of its geographic distance from the power center in Manhattan across the New York Harbor, and at other times because of cultural associations with the island’s past as a dumping ground. Almost 150 years after Hollick and Britton published the first “Flora” in 1879 (a mere two years before the founding of the Natural Science Association of Staten Island), the fate of the flora of Richmond is still precarious.
The original species list was updated again from 1914 to 1929. The second “Flora” compiled involved the participation and work of a range of individuals playing different roles in the ecological history of the city and the region. A noteworthy participant was Nicolas Pike. He is known for importing house sparrows from England in a case predating the (in)famous importation of 100 starlings for release in Central Park. Both sparrows and starlings multiplied so prolifically, they soon spread across North America (though the starlings had more disastrous consequences). The participation of botanists Michael Levine, W.A. Murrell, F. J. Seaver, Robert Hagelstein, Philip Dowell, Elizabeth Britton, and Norman Taylor were invaluable. Letters between the museum founders and individuals like New York botanist, Doctor Homer D. House, and Francis W. Pennell from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia at times reflect a genuine warmth that breathes further life into the hard work of discovery and preservation, as is evident in the letter cited above.
Between the times when these species lists were compiled, the loss of life forms indexed was estimated at forty varieties having entirely disappeared. Others still were on the verge of extinction. The authors of “Flora” identified localities drastically changed, describing them in their notes and noting how these changes further endangered the island’s biodiversity. One example of their notes about how such dangerous infrastructural transformations impacted the landscape reads:
[T]he Silver Lake basin and part of its adjacent territory, converted into a reservoir for the main water supply of the island; and the chain of lakes in the Clove Valley, drained by the partial destruction of the four dams during the cloudburst of September, 1925, and unless the dams are reconstructed, the former aquatic and more or less of the semi-aquatic flora of the region will be exterminated.[3]
Clove Lake today, preserved as parkland. Photo taken by the author.
The ways in which urban development completely restructures topographical features have deep environmental consequences that are not always fully appreciated until after entire ecosystems have been destroyed. This was the case for wetlands around the northeast coast. Perceived as “swamps” devoid of development potential for their soft coastlines, the productivity of marshes was misunderstood and their elimination through dumping became the norm.[4] Robert Moses thought of these areas around the city as mosquito-ridden nuisances and envisioned mixed-uses for otherwise “unproductive” wetlands. Using landfilling techniques, he used garbage and dredge to reshape the area’s coastline. The environmental damage done to the Fresh Kills site is illustrative of the kinds of devastating effects urban planning can have on undomesticated landscapes whose vitality is so critical to cities.
Great Kills Park is built on land created using landfilling techniques. Photo taken by the author.
William T. Davis died before seeing the damage done to the marsh adjacent to the wildlife refuge later named after him. And while uses like landfilling were resisted vehemently by New Yorkers, struggles against polluting projects and unwanted development have ranged in rates of success. Fights against such projects tend to be extremely local and the extinguishing of species they represent continues apace. Urban ecologist and founder of NYC Wildflower Week, Marielle Anzelone, whom I met during fieldwork, regularly urges New Yorkers to get to know the plants around them and in this way become more deeply invested in the fate of wild plants that are too often otherwise treated as weeds and/or nuisances — much as entire landscapes have been conceived as noted above in the case of wetlands and marshes. At her annual events and in her writings, Anzelone challenges her audiences to familiarize themselves with ten species and then become advocates for their survival. In some ways, her approach parallels that of the founders of the Natural Science Association of Staten Island, or what became the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences. The borough’s naturalists identified disappearing species and became involved in fights to preserve undeveloped areas around the island. They succeeded at least in part, resulting in the island’s vast parkland. Their efforts also fell short, however, as the island became bordered by two substantial landfills on its northern and southern shores.
Platform built to accommodate growing populations of ospreys breeding at Freshkills Park. Photo taken by the author.
While conservation efforts can have mixed results, what kinds of ecological struggles are we equipped to tackle today? Is a current ecological inventory readily available so that we can have a clear sense of what lifeforms inhabit the city alongside us? Legislation protecting the ozone layer and for cleaning up our waterways have meant significant improvements to our environment, so much so that varieties of birds have returned, and plant species deemed undesirable are now more popular — even if in some cases this is true in relation to the interest paid to the animal species associated with them. Such is the case of Asclepias tuberosa or the Butterflyweed which has shifted from an undesirable “weed” to a desirable plant for preserving the Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus). Ospreys (Pandion haliaetus) have also returned, including to places like Freshkills Park. Finally, red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) are regular sights throughout the city, no longer as isolated celebrities like Pale Male — the hawk that raised an uproar in the Upper East Side when his nest was tampered with back in the 1990s. But beyond charismatic animals, how can we prevent the irreversible and tragic losses of plants? What lessons does the man still respectfully and affectionately referred to by Staten Island scholars as “Mr. Davis” and the conservationists trained by him have to teach us today? My dissertation findings represent a range of New Yorkers thinking about “greening” at the micro-level as a means of enhancing biodiversity in general. Much like scientists working on large-scale conservation projects like the Fresh Kills transformation, everyday gardeners, urban composters, and recycling activists thought that every urban crevice represents an opening for conservation. Beautifying and greening every street tree pit, parking lot border, or home garden represents an opportunity for diversifying landscapes that cumulatively represent valuable improvements for guarding against some of the effects of climate change. Guerilla gardeners’ habit to cast wildflower seed “bombs” across urban fields of all sorts, has been one approach. BioBlitz surveys involving citizen scientists have been another. Devising additional ways of knowing, documenting and closely caring for our urban ecologies awaits new and more intimate ways of doing the required care-work that so many endangered species will need to survive.
Melissa Zavala earned a Doctorate in Anthropology from The Graduate Center-CUNY. Her dissertation, Wild NYC: Building Biodiversity at Fresh Kills and City Parks, studies the application of waste management and ecological restoration techniques for building and enhancing open habitats employing the innovations of scientists, city officials and New York City residents.
[1] The name of the site now consists of a single word, intended to distinguish the new park from its previous use as a landfill.
[2] Cited from “Flora of Richmond County,” 1879, and “Flora of Staten Island,” 1929. Hagelstein, Pennell, House, Taylor, et al. Founder’s Cabinet, Room 13. Box 1, Folder No.2.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Teal and Teal 1969.
References
FLORA OF RICHMOND COUNTY Box Inventories:
Box 1/2 Folders 1-3 Flora of Richmond County I 1879-1890 4-23 Flora of Richmond County II- 1900-1929 class manuscripts & correspondence
Box 2/2 Folders 24-26 Flora of Richmond County II 1929-1934 final manuscripts 2119 field note slips n.d.
Teal, John and Mildred Teal. (1969). Life and Death of the Salt Marsh. New York: Ballantine Books.