Yesterday, several dolphins were spotted in the Hudson River near Inwood Hill Park. They then headed up towards the George Washington Bridge.

Why are they here now? What does this say about our waterways? With so many dolphin sightings, could this be the new normal for this urban setting? Perhaps our waters here are not as polluted as we once thought…

In Heartbeats in the Muck: The History, Sea Life, and Environment of New York Harbor, Revised Edition, author John Waldman, talks about the incredibly rich and biologically diverse ecosystem that exists in New York Harbor and its surrounding waterways.

In the broadest sense life is the user of water and habitat, and thus life is the great indicator of water quality and habitat suitability and “how the harbor is doing.” And the news concerning life in the harbor is cause for optimism—I remain bullish. Sea turtles have been spotted in the Verrazano Narrows and the East River. A pair of bottle-nosed dolphins were seen near the Tappan Zee Bridge, and a “Florida” manatee swam up the East River. Harbor seals were sighted on Belmont Island and on Robbins Reef where they were common three hundred years ago; they’ve also been seen in Newark Bay, and in the Hudson near Hoboken, Yonkers, and Tarrytown, where they’ve bitten off the heads of shad caught in gill nets. READ MORE

The Hudson River and the NYC Watershed are healthy ecosystems teeming with life. Residents and visitors care for and help protect these ecosystems, which provide safe drinking water and abundant opportunities for swimming, fishing, boating and other recreational activities. Visit www.RiverKeeper.org to find out more.

John Waldman is Professor of Biology at Queens College, City University of New York. He is recipient of the New York Society Library Award in Natural History and the Norcross Wildlife Conservation Award and is an occasional contributor to the New York Times and other periodicals. He is also the author of Still the Same Hawk: Reflections on Nature and New York (Fordham University Press).

Related Links:
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Keep the Clean Water Act Strong

Beczak Environmental Education Center

My Neighborhood: Hudson River is Bob Walters’ Backyard

“. . .Hurricane Sandy reminded New Yorkers that the waterways surrounding them can be a dire threat as well as a great asset. This is a good time to explore their history. John Waldman, a biology professor at Queens College, offers a brief and elegantly written tour in “Heartbeats in the Muck: The History, Sea Life and Environment of New York Harbor” (Fordham University Press, $18).

This updated edition was published before the storm struck, but as Mr. Waldman breezily chronicles the harbor’s ecological decline and rebirth over several centuries, he never underestimates the waters that in one way or another have always defined New York.

Also notable is a new volume edited by Mr. Waldman: “Still the Same Hawk: Reflections on Nature and New York” (Fordham University Press, $18), a collection of essays by writers including Phillip Lopate and Robert Sullivan.”

Read Sam Roberts’ entire column.

by John Waldman

PHOTO CREDIT: Laura Waldman

French filmmaker Mathias Frantz and his crew had spent weeks searching the wilder crannies of New York for the quintessence of nature in the city—material that will be used in the first of four profiles of wildlife in major international cities they are calling “Naturopolis.” The week before I’d accompanied them on a boat on the East River where we angled for striped bass in the riptides of Hell Gate and snuck up on a colony of nesting cormorants on U-Thant Island, situated below the cliff-like UN building that towered as a backdrop. One week later we met at River Park, a pocket of greenery in the West Farms section of the South Bronx that is named after Gotham’s only true freshwater river, the Bronx River.

PHOTO CREDIT: Laura Waldman

The Bronx River is an urban flowage that is becoming restored mainly through the efforts of the New York City Department of Parks and the Bronx River Alliance of non-profits. River Park sits just below the lowermost dam on the river, one that prevents typical migratory fish such as alewife from ascending farther upstream to spawn. The river is also home to the American eel, a species that was described in the subtitle of a recent book as the “most mysterious fish in the sea.” And mysterious they are, baby eels, having migrated all the way from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean are slowed down, but not always stopped from passing dams. Our crew of agency and academic biologists and volunteers planned on first electrofishing below the dam and then above it to obtain a sense of the relative abundances of eels on both sides of this barrier.

Our colleague Chris Bowser of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation wore the backpack electroshocking unit on the first pass. Probing around the rocky shallows with the device’s electrical hoop turned up plenty of eels, together with sunfish, darter fish, and crayfish that were all momentarily stunned while two eager netters tried to gather them before they revived.

On the second pass, my Ph.D. student George Jackman operated the shocker. George has an unusual background for a doctoral student—he is a retired New York City police lieutenant. As such, he sees things that mere civilians miss. As George stepped deeper into the flow to begin “fishing” he eyed a plastic device and reached down and then held up a metal sleeve—the magazine from a handgun. Our crew and the observers who gathered were amazed, making comments about this truly being urban nature. But a minute later the incident became considerably enhanced: George yelled “wow” as he spotted the actual handgun—and then retrieved and held up a10 mm Glock. The assemblage couldn’t quite believe this, and neither could the French filmmakers who asked whether we’d planted it there for Naturopolis.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ferdie Yau

We hadn’t, of course, but I wondered whether the eventual viewers of Naturopolis would believe that such an iconic urban symbol would have been discovered by accident. The gun’s being found there makes sense, it was located just below the 180th Street Bridge—a perfect place to stop a car and toss a gun into the water. I questioned if its owner threw the gun into the river when it was raging with high water, not knowing that the Bronx River is a “spate” flow that floods quickly when it rains and then drops to low levels, shallow enough to reveal a handgun.

George later gave the weapon to a patrolman, who guessed it was used in a murder and promised to do ballistics tests. The tests showed that the gun was used in a shooting not far from there about a week earlier, and at a time when the river was so high we needed to cancel our fieldwork. This gun had been fired 10 times into the back of its victim. Remarkably, the man survived, this gun is so powerful that it essentially perforated his torso while apparently missing vital organs.

The remainder of the day was less eventful, with many eels surveyed below the dam and only about one-fourth as many above, showing that eels can indeed somehow work their way past the dam. The eel “ladder” we plan to install next year should ease their access to the river’s headwaters as they follow their natural instincts and swim, obliviously, maybe even mysteriously, past whatever unnatural jetsam society leaves along its bottom.

John Waldman is author of Heartbeats in the Muck: The History, Sea Life, and Environment of New York Harbor, Revised Edition and Still the Same Hawk: Reflections on Nature and New York (Both forthcoming from Fordham University Press this October).

Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies of the Earth, edited by Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller, examines the increasing shift toward awareness, even as the intensity of environmental destruction continues. The essays in this volume posit that nothing short of an epic epiphany in global thinking can begin to reverse the damaging effects we’ve wreaked on the planet thus far. This change in thinking would involve the very overhaul of the way we practice religion and philosophy–what Ecospirit proposes is a shift so profound, it would challenge the very foundations of the way humans have talked about, written about, and studied the Earth for thousands of years. It’s a radical challenge, but a call to action we all need.

Also from Catherine Keller, and Chris Boesel, comes Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, a study of Apophatics, or the study of negative theology, in which God is described in what CANNOT be said about the divine. This volume pursues the unlikely conjunction of apophasis and the body, not for the cachet of the “cutting edge” but rather out of an ethical passion for the integrity of all creaturely bodies as they are caught up in various ideological mechanisms—religious, theological, political, economic—that threaten their dignity and material well-being.

New this Spring, Apophatic Bodies contributor Virginia Burrus has collaborated with Mark D. Jordan and Karmen MacKendrick on Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions. Seducing Augustine analyzes the iconic Confessions, exploring religion and theology in a sexual context–a perspective not often tackled by critics. Often ambivalent but always passionately engaged, their readings of the Confessions center on four sets of intertwined themes—secrecy and confession, asceticism and eroticism, constraint and freedom, and time and eternity.

Discussion of the Earth and the environment has its roots in theology, philosophy, and human nature itself. Join the discourse with Fordham!

During the interview, His All Holiness explained his role in the church as leader of 300 million Christians worldwide, as well as discussed the reason for his visit to the United States, his sixth. He participated in the eighth international interfaith and interdisciplinary environmental symposium in New Orleans.  Environmentalism is a cause that is important to Patriarch Bartholomew, as he explains:  “Usually we speak about the education of our children and the good food of our children, but what about the air that they breathe and the water they drink?  Now and tomorrow and after tomorrow we have to think of the coming generations, the posterity.  That is a duty of the church and that is why the Ecumenical
Patriarchate initiated this symposium and environmental activity.”

You can read the entire interview here.

The piece outlines the Orthodox Christian’s place in the ecological struggle to save our planet. Patriarch Bartholomew asserts that the spiritual has a place in this secular issue, writing “The natural environment unites us in ways that transcend doctrinal differences.” His call to action is to believers and non-believers alike, stirring both national governments and individuals to act on behalf of the environment.

In Fordham’s forthcoming book, In the World, Yet Not of the World: Social and Global Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the public addresses and writings of Patriarch Bartholomew are assembled, highlighting his devotion to the preservation of peace and equality among all cultures and creeds.