Standing a mile-and-a-half long on Manhattan’s west side is the elevated railroad known as the High Line. Built for freight deliveries in 1934, the last train ran on the High Line in 1980. From then on, nature took over – quietly, like a secret.

Wind and wildlife dispersed seeds over the abandoned railroad and a lush garden grew amid the ballast and steel tracks. Closed to the public, the trestle’s primary visitors were wild – birds, insects, and the occasional adventurous human. For these explorers, finding one’s self alone in a city of 8 million, 30 feet above street level, with a view of the Hudson River whose winds made the Irises and Evening Primrose sway – was magical. Meanwhile, on the ground, property owners in the surrounding area lobbied to demolish the High Line. But in 2002, a group called Friends of the High Line won the city’s support to preserve the railroad and turn it into a public space. The first section of the park opened in June 2009.

Botany is a force of nature whose quiet yet critical role in our ecosystem is often neglected. Fortunately, this is not the case with the new High Line park. In this video I interview Patrick Cullina, Vice President of Horticulture at the High Line, to learn more about this unique garden in the sky. When shooting this video, I also had my mother in mind – her carefully tended yard, and frequent childhood visits to the Bronx Botanical Garden where she’d take innumerable photos of my siblings and I next to the flowers. As an adult, I appreciate such beauty even more.

– Irene Tejaratchi Hess
Producer, NATURE

The Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island was New York City’s primary landfill from 1948 to 2001. Thousands of tons of daily garbage created the largest man-made structure on Earth.  The former landfill is now the site of Freshkills Park, a 30-year project to cover, reclaim, and slowly open this land to the public.

As part of THIRTEEN’s online series The City Concealed, producers Bijan Rezvani and Daniel Ross go behind the scenes to document the changes at the world’s most notorious garbage dump. Although these changes might be good for Staten Island and the environment around Fresh Kills, where does all that trash go? Watch the film now. Plus, producer Bijan Rezvani gives his take on what it was like to film atop of tons of garbage for the Inside Thirteen blog.

note: this might be pretty basic for those familiar with nanotechnology concepts–but the subject is so new, so unregulated, and under-scrutinized, we wanted to give an overview as well. If you want to skip to the specific environmental content, start with question 6.

1. What is nanotechnology?
The chemist and Nobel prize winner Richard Smalley described nanotechnology as “the art and science of making stuff that does stuff at the nanometer scale.”

nanotech: Colloidal gold

Nanotechnology involves working with materials at an incredibly fine scale—around the size of the atoms and molecules that they are made of. But the aim is to achieve something new and useful. By working at the nanometer scale—where one nanometer is a mere one billionth of a meter long—it becomes possible to tap into some unique properties of matter. Many of these properties only become apparent when small clumps of atoms and molecules are carefully constructed and used as the building blocks of larger structures. For instance, some materials can be used in new ways when they are engineered at the nanoscale. Other materials behave in strange new ways that enable innovative new uses.

Gold, for example, becomes a highly reactive, red-colored metal when formed into nanometer-size particles. And working at the nanoscale allows highly sophisticated new materials to be engineered that would be impossible to produce using conventional technologies—everything from super-strong materials to the next generation of computer chips to targeted drugs. More …

1. How have you seen the media shift in the last 40 years or so in how it covers environmental stories?

When I started covering the environment in the mid-seventies, very few media outlets had full-time reporters on the environmental story. Television paid little attention, except for catastrophes. Even The New York Times didn’t let me cover it full-time until Reagan, Watt and Gorsuch turned it into a political issue. By the 80s, most media had at least one environmental reporter–including TV. Environmental reporting became much more knowledgeable and sophisticated. But media managers, to whom the environment was an unfamiliar issue, tended to treat the stories with skepticism, influenced probably by complaints from polluting advertisers.

2. Has the economy affected good environmental reporting? More …

Filmmaker Doug Shultz has worked with NATURE for a few years, first with the award-winning Silence of the Bees, and recently with The Loneliest Animals, which addressed concerns of critically endangered species and population recovery options.

1. What was the hardest endangered species story you’ve had to cover–hardest emotionally?

Tough question. I became really attached to the Sumatran rhinos, and between seeing the massive deforestation in Indonesia and knowing that those big, beautiful creatures are being wiped off the planet just for their horns…it really is infuriating. Similarly, lemurs are a favorite of mine, and when you see whole forests disappearing so quickly from Madagascar to make room for mines or to be turned into charcoal, you know countless irreplaceable animals are disappearing with them. It’s extremely frustrating. More …

Holly Hughes is the editor of the book “500 Places to See Before they Disappear“. She talks to us about ecotourism, preservation and conservation, and disappearing places in the NYC area.

1. When you wrote “500 places”, what was the time-frame you envisioned for the “disappearing” aspect?

Some destinations in the book are in more imminent danger than others, certainly. The time frame I had in mind was more like within the next seven years–provided nothing was done to save them. That’s an important clause.

2. Are there any destinations in the book which have already disappeared?

There are a few sights that have already been irreparably damaged, just to establish the point that sights do disappear. For example, there’s the Buddhas of Bamiyan, in Afghanistan, ancient sacred figures which the Taliban deliberately blew up in 2001. There’s a plan to replace them, but even if they’re rebuilt with fragments of the originals, they will still be only replicas.
Also of note: Pompey’s Pillar, in Billings, Montana, a rock formation that bears the only physical evidence of the Lewis & Clark expedition. The formation’s still there, but the sweeping Yellowstone Valley panorama that Lewis & Clark admired is now marred by a hulking set of high-speed grain elevators, which local activists tried and failed to prevent. It’s a sobering truth that sometimes the environmentalists fail.

More …

Our Vanishing Wilderness was a landmark program for National Educational Television and public broadcasting (pre-PBS). Broadcast in 1970 but filmed in 1969, the material in it pre-dates the first Earth Day, but definitely reflects the nation’s growing interest at the time in pollution and environmental issues, as they had more and more of an effect on the health of our country.

The series, 8 half-hours, is very first TV series dealing with environmental issues. Each episode analyzes an ecosystem that was (and sometimes still is) being threatened as the result of man’s decisions; frequently, big business decisions. More …

Chris Reddy is director of the Coastal Ocean Institute at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The Coastal Ocean Institute studies how human activity like industrial pollution, fishing practices and agricultural runoff affects coastal waters. Dr. Reddy spoke
with us about the greatest threats to coastal waters here in the New York
area, and what we can do about it.

1. What is the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and what kind of work do you do there?

WHOI is a nonprofit institution dedicated to understanding marine science and engineering, and dedicated to gaining the best understanding about how the ocean works. At WHOI, we think of the ocean as a big manufacturing plant and we figure out what goes on in the plant. We’ve been around since 1930, and we have 150 scientists that work on different projects. We’re trying to figure out what happens to the ocean.

2. What is the greatest threat to the ocean around New York and the eastern seaboard now?

It’s question of scale and time. If you’re in Long Island, the biggest threat in the short term might be algal bloom, or it may be these places where there’s no oxygen in the ocean and fish can’t breathe.

A brown tide (algal bloom) near Long Island; the blue water is Block Island Sound.
( photo by L. Cosper, 1986)

More …