Mannahatta

Listening to so many biomedical lectures, sometimes I feel the strong need to listen to something completely unrelated, no immunology, no cancer. Last week I went to this cool talk at the Secret Science Club. The topic was ecology - I know absolutely nothing about that. I remember about a year ago there was an exhibit at one of the city museums that had a poster featuring the picturhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife above. I thought it was a cool picture, at the least. I never made it to the exhibit, and as it turns out, it was all based on the work of Eric Sanderson, an ecologist, who also wrote a book titled Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. Basically, this guy wanted to know what was here before New York City. What kind of plants, animals, geologic formations, what people lived on out little island. He showed a very cool map from the early British settlement: only the very South tip on Manhattan was built, everything else was full of creeks, woods, wild animals, and Native Americans. We all know the rest of the story, and today, we have an increasingly crowded island of over 2 million crazy people, who are willing to do anything to live on this island.

If you like maps, you will like this. You can play with the layers to see today's street map or what Manhattan looked like in 1609. You can highlight each city block and click on it and the program will tell you what species of plants and animals likely lived on that block 400 years ago. My block in Harlem, for example was in the middle of a creek. And not only that, but it looks like one would have been able to take a boat from the East river to get to my apartment. There also used to be a fresh water pond in South Manhattan, which was basically the lifeline of the island surrounded by only salt water. Now, City Hall stands in its place. On the block where I work, there likely used to be black bears! How cool!

All this was interesting, but what's the point, right? I was asking myself too. It turns out that this guy has a pretty cool vision about what the city should be striving for to be greener. He showed some current and imagined future pictures/models of parks, squares, roads with more bike lanes, streetcars, less buses and cars, more trees, plants, basically anything green. He wasn't saying that we should move out of cities to "get back to nature". Quite the opposite, actually. He thinks that we should bring more nature to cities as large as NYC to make them more livable, healthier and prettier. I see that there is a trend in this city at least towards some similar concept, it might take decades or even more to arrive at some livable solution, but even in the meanwhile we can all do a lot to help that future become the present.