In March 2012, Jan Mun became the first Artist in Residence for Newtown Creek Alliance, where she will be using art and science to ignite the imagination and rethink our waterways. She will be working with Newtown Creek Alliance to connect with other local organizations to collaborate and work towards our shared goals.

The first project being created is The Fairy Rings, a mycroremediation project to filter toxins from the water through sculptural form. In European folklore, it was believed that the gathering and dancing of fairies and elves created fairy rings, circular discolorations or growth of mushrooms on a grass lawn. The belief transformed these spaces from reality into fantasy. Today, we now know fairy rings are a natural phenomenon created by fungi. In this project, oyster mushrooms are used for their ability to neutralize hydrocarbons that are present in petroleum products such as oil, pesticides, and herbicides; and because of their ability to act as a hyperacummulator to absorb heavy metals and common toxins found in urban environments. The sculptural form is an alliance between the material structure and nature. Nature participates through the ongoing process of the sprouting of mushrooms and the mycelium cleansing toxins from the water. Mycroremediation is a term and practice developed by mycologist, Paul Stamets.

Jan Mun, a media artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA in Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design and her BFA in Photography from SUNY New Paltz. She has been examining biological computing principles working with living organic matter. She is exploring the generative principles of how complex systems such as botany and fungi, economies, and social networks function and the effects of interactions between different entities, whether cultures, plants, or people.

Jan is an amateur mycologist, microbiologist, and beekeeper working in collaboration with cultural anthropologists, choreographers, composers, activists, gardeners, engineers, and scientists to develop ways to communicate with each other and the larger public. She is working on a long-term project called ProfileUS: Invasive Species, which examines the biopolitics of the migrations of non-native plants and people in the United States and considers which populations are authorized to thrive and which are repressed through institutional laws. Using a combination of artistic and scientific processes, ProfileUS: Invasive Species is a social reflection and critique of our political and social systems.

Prior to working in new media, Jan has a background in traditional media, documentary photography and web products. She has worked with photographer Bruce Davidson for many years in Central Park and has worked in communities in Mississippi, Lebanon, Spain, and Kyrgyzstan developing photographic workshops. She will return to Kyrgyzstan this summer to teach a media workshop with the Open Society Foundation. Since 2004, Jan has developed web products for the United Nations, for which she won a Webby Award. In 2011, she completed the International Year for Forests website for the United Nations Forum on Forests.

Jan has attended residencies at I-Park, Mildred’s Lane, and MacDowell Colony. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. This September she will be presenting her work at ISEA (International Symposium for Electronic Arts) in Albuquerque, NM: Machine Wilderness.

From Rosa at GFF:

The Greenpoint Film Festival was a great success last year.   Now on its second year it has expanded and is open to submissions.  Our “expanded” Environmental section is particularly interested in films, video, and footage in general which speaks directly or indirectly to the current environmental issues of our time, and/or this neighborhood.  We will reach out to all audiences that include film audiences, as well as schools and environmental groups.

GFF is accepting features and shorts in all categories:  narrative, documentary, experimental, and animation in digital and 16MM formats.

The extended environmental section will be screened at the same time as the rest of the festival, comprised of curated programs and new works. Please check our  website  www.greenpointfilmfestival.org to view last year’s program.  Your work can be submitted through our submissions section on the website above, or directly to me by sending an inquiry email.

Kind Regards,
Rosa Valado
Founder/Director
greenpointfilmfestival@gmail.com

Deadlines & Fees
Regular deadline: April 3, 2012
Shorts( Features(≥50 minutes) $30

Late deadline: May 3, 2012
Shorts $25
Features $35

The City has issued an RFP for a pilot “waste-to-energy” facility. Thermal waste-to-energy (WTE) is the cousin of incineration, part pf a broader group of “thermal conversion” technologies such as gasification, pyrolysis, and plasma incinerators that use heat to convert municipal solid waste into a synthetic gas, and then burn it to generate energy.

The City’s Phase 3 study identifies 9 potential locations for the facility, 2 of which are on Newtown Creek: Phelps Dodge and National Grid.  Here’s a link to a report detailing our serious concerns about using thermal conversion for disposing of solid waste in our community.

Our understanding of  WTE is that it happens best within a system where waste is heavily regulated – where toxics, plastics and metals are aggressively diverted.  That’s the case for some of the european WTE examples that the city is pointing to, but it is not the system we are currently operating here. Any thermal technology with toxins going in is going to have toxics coming out somehow…its not magic.

At NCA we support diversification of the waste industry that targets prevention, reuse and recycling to help stem the tide of waste associated with virgin resource extraction (where most waste is created that the consumers don’t see) and actually generate more local jobs and less environmental harm than disposal sites such as landfill, incineration and its cousin, WTE.  Instead of this investment in WTE, we would like to see the Mayor focus on his standing commitment to fully reopen the city’s network of Marine Transfer Stations, a move that would more equitably distribute the current trash burdens that are disproportionately focused on the Newtown Creek and South Bronx. We support the use of marine transit for all bulk goods, because it reduces truck impacts on the residential communities that surround Newtown Creek’s industrial core.

NCA, along with a broad base of organizations committed to garbage equity, signed on to a recent letter to Mayor Bloomberg outlining out concerns and opposition to this approach. We will be watching this issue closely.

From Sydney Brownstone at L Magazine:

“There’s lots of enterococcus in the audience tonight,” Tracy Brown, an advocate at Riverkeeper, a local water quality watchdog, joked to a crowd of roughly 60-70 people who had filed onto benches at the Brooklyn Brewery Monday night. She was referring to the gut bacteria that scientists use as a measure of water quality—if there’s enterococcus in a river, it means raw sewage has been released there, and recently. As people slowly sipped their lagers, listening to the two presentations on the subject from a representation of local environmental and urban planning organizations, the question that remained was exactly how much beer-addled enterococcus from that night might end up in sludgy sediment piles on the banks of Newtown Creek, a tributary of the Hudson and East Rivers.

The problem Brown and Kate Zidar, executive director of the Newtown Creek Alliance, explored, had to do with something called “combined sewage overflows.” (CSOs). When it rains, a combined sewer system (meaning a sewer system that runs street runoff and residential raw sewage in the same pipes) can become overburdened, so it’ll spew the sewage into surrounding waters. New York Harbor sees about 27 billion gallons of this stuff discharged into it annually, from 460 CSO pipe outlets. With a new injection of federal funding for Newtown Creek’s Superfund status, the Alliance and Riverkeeper are trying to accomplish two main things: closely monitor the water for CSOs and test for the presence of enterococcus at hundreds of different sites up and down Newtown Creek and the Hudson, as well as figure out the best way to solve New York’s shit problem in terms of tax dollars spent.

Read the whole article.

When Mayor Bloomberg stated through 2007 PlaNYC that his administration intended to “open 90% of our waterways to recreation by preserving natural areas and reducing pollution”, people took notice. We take notice because recreational use of a waterbody requires meeting more rigorous water quality standards. So an alternative reading of this statement might be, “we can afford to leave 10% of waterways unsafe for contact.” Although we are an industrial waterway, we nonetheless advocate for the Clean Water Act goals for safe contact here on Newtown Creek.  Unfortunately, the city’s recent planning efforts are pointing to what waterbodies they think are beyond saving, and Newtown Creek seems to be in 10%.

Combined sewer overflow (CSO) contribute an estimated 1.5 billion gallons of untreated sewage and stormwater to Newtown Creek annually, conveyed from a vast upland watershed through 23 permitted CSO outfalls throughout the creek. The vast majority of CSO – over 90% – is discharged from just 5 of these outfalls, located within the tributaries of the creek, where tidal flushing is extremely poor and water quality is most severely impaired. The NYC DEP is working along two planning tracks to address this problem.  The “plan of record” is the CSO Long Term Control Plan, currently in draft form and under review with the NYS DEC, and focuses on traditional centralized “grey” infrastructure recommendations, while the more recent NYC Green Infrastructure Plan of 2010 incorporates decentralized Green Infrastructure (GI) investments such as vegetated swales and green roofs.

Recently, the NYC DEP and the NYS DEC agreed to formally incorporate GI into the Long Term Control Plan, which required a renegotiation of a Consent Order that governs this mandated planning process. This is an acronym–riddled, highly technical course that only the most intrepid water quality advocates care to navigate, but will nonetheless have a lasting effect on how the broader public can safely access the “6^th borough” of our public waterways.

In the process of renegotiating the terms of the Long Term Control Plan to include Green Infrastructure, there seems to be winners and losers.  Some waterbodies are projected to achieve more CSO reductions with less public dollars, while others, such as Newtown Creek, have seen major backsliding from earlier commitments made to reduce CSO pollution.  This draft of the plan would allow for the discharge of 567 million more gallons of sewage than was allowed in the 2009 version of the Consent Order. This draft would not reduce pollution to sufficiently protect sustenance fishermen and recreational boaters that are present in increasing numbers on the Creek. This draft does promise a Green Infrastructure pilot project that alludes to future investment in GI in the watershed, but makes no hard guarantees.

The main strategy for improving water quality in the creek is to aerate the majority of the waterbody, like you do at home with your fish tank. While this strategy “teaches to the test” in the sense that dissolved oxygen levels in the creek will be directly improved, nothing is actually repaired ecologically. In fact, some are concerned this approach does more harm than good. The aeration produces a fine aerosol at the water’s surface that might mobilize contamination into a handy breathable mist, an effect of particular concern for those who work or recreate right on the waterway.

Past elements of the “grey” plan, such as a detention tank for CSO volumes that would contain overflow and then pump it through the sewage treatment plant when capacity freed up, were scrapped entirely.

Newtown Creek is a complex planning environment with local, state and federal layers. We face monumental environmental challenges, with historic and ongoing sources of contamination. Granted, the city has made deep investments at the Newtown Creek sewage treatment plant, finally bringing the facility up to Clean Water Act standards, and promises more investment to come in in the realm of Green Infrastructure. It is nonetheless bewildering that at the moment when all hands are on deck to clean up the creek, the city takes a step back from its commitments on CSO.

For the first time in the history of this waterway, we have the scale and scope of commitment in place to turn it around, but we will only succeed if everyone does their share. Resuscitating Newtown Creek is going to require leadership and collaboration like we’ve never seen.

Kate Zidar
Executive Director
Newtown Creek Alliance

The NYS DEC is collecting comments on this draft plan until March 9. Send your thoughts to Gary Kline at gekline@gw.dec.state.ny.us.

Kate Zidar of NCA and Phillip Musegaas of Riverkeeper joined Maxine Margo Rubin on The Many Shades of Green, a BBOX Radio show that delves into topics that affect the environment in Brooklyn and beyond, to discuss Newtown Creek issues.

Listen to the show here!

As mentioned at the December NCA meeting, we are convening workgroups around our growing program areas. The workgroups will be digging into Education, Bioremediation, Green Infrastructure and Workforce Development. NCA members who have indicated interest in these areas have met and will report back to the group at this public meeting.

Newtown Creek Alliance Public Meeting
Monday, Feb 27 at 6pm
LaGuardia Community College
31-10 Thomson Avenue
Long Island City, N.Y. 11101
E500 (E Building)
Directions and map

Join NCA as we review the final presentation of the Brownfield Opportunity Area report! There will be a morning and an evening session for the community where BOA consultants will present their findings.