“Why are you going to the West Side?” a man asked the bus full of passengers as he stumbled passed the driver. It was only 9:30 in the morning on a Sunday, and yet he was clearly already drunk. “There’s nothing worth going to on the West Side. It’s just a big hole over there” he announced. He then undermined his argument against Westbound travel by slumping down in the seat next to me. I didn’t answer the man’s question, but I was headed to the West Side of Manhattan in the hopes of learning about the environment of New York.
After studying environmental issues in both college and grad school, and now working in the sustainability sector for several years, I had been struck to realize how little I actually knew about the environment where I now live. I decided to begin remedying this with a visit to the Felix M. Warburg Hall of New York State Environment at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)[1]. Due to my blindness, I had reached out several weeks in advance to schedule a visually described tour[2].
But first I had to figure out how to navigate my immediate environment. This was the first time that my new Seeing Eye Dog, Rocco, and I had traveled on our own to an unfamiliar setting, so I was excited but alert. After all, I had been warned to expect a big hole. After exiting the bus west of Central Park, we acted out my familiar blind man routine of repeatedly getting lost and then unlost. I started down the nearest street in one direction, eventually decided the traffic sounded off, and so turned around. I then carefully counted the cross streets as Rocco and I walked south, keeping track of the alternating direction of traffic on odd and even streets. We made our way to 79th St, but I was disoriented by scaffolding until I learned from a passerby that I was actually searching for the museum on the wrong block. When I heard a boisterous group of children honking toy horns, I figured I was finally within earshot of the entrance, but I then had to work my way around an unexpected garden bed. Once inside the lobby, the echoing shouts of children overwhelmed me, so I was grateful when a guard escorted me through the crowd.
My guide for the day was Andrew, a kindly gentleman. As we made our way around the bustling halls of dinosaurs and dioramas, Andrew told me that in his twenty years at the museum, I was the first person to request a tour of the environment exhibit. When we arrived, I learned one reason for the lack of popular demand; the exhibit had been created in 1950, 73 years before my visit. A few of the smaller labels had fallen off, and Andrew commented how several pieces were dusty or showing their age, but the space had its charms. Had the exhibit been only twenty years old, I might have found it dated, but it served as a time capsule, a view into how the “environment” was being thought of years before my parents were born.
The displays centered on the environment of Stissing Mountain, located in Pine Plains, some 30 miles north of NYC. The hall opened with a large diorama of Stissing Mountain itself, as viewed from a distance and framed by trees and undergrowth. Despite the necessarily artificial nature of the display, Andrew gave a compelling description, saying there was something “Sublime” about the scene. Once a museum colleague had sat on the bench in front of the diorama and actually composed a poem.
As we weaved our way along the displays, Andrew patiently read the captions out loud and provided colorful descriptions of the visuals. Already over the excitement of a new place, Rocco kept flopping down at my side whenever we paused. My formal education had engaged the environment largely through datapoints, lab experiments, and computer models, but Andrew’s narration spoke to another way of seeing the environment. One set of display cases detailed how soil quality varies across the region, and a series of artificial flowers illustrated how the distribution of vegetation depends on the properties of underlying rock formations. Another entry showed how local rocks were shaped by ancient glaciers, which etched distinctive, parallel scratches in the rockface as they moved across the land. While I knew I couldn’t do so myself, I was intrigued by how an educated eye could perceive the underlying character and history of the landscape from these visual clues.
Although the materials were almost three-quarters of a century old, many of the exhibit’s messages remained relevant. I had not fully realized how well our environmental challenges were publicly understood decades ago, so taking in earlier insights was sobering. One section, for example, eloquently described concerns around soil erosion, promoting contour tilling and other agricultural best practices. Despite recent improvements in awareness, the future of our soil has only become more precarious. Fully half of US farmers now use no-till practices, and estimates suggest annual rates of soil erosion are now down to 5 tons per acre, just a quarter of the devastating rates of loss experienced during the Dust Bowl[3]. Yet it has been calculated that the American Midwest is still experiencing soil erosion up to a thousand times greater than before modern agriculture, and UN experts have warned 90% of Earth’s topsoil could be at risk of erosion by 2050[4].
For me, the most striking display was a diorama of a wetland, running twenty feet across. From Andrew’s description, I was able to picture a vibrant scene of plants, bugs, birds, and rodents thriving around a body of water (represented with a sheet of textured glass, I was interested to note). Accompanying signage underscored the ecological importance of wetlands and remarked that although the clearing of wetlands for agriculture had been common, practices were changing. In retrospect, practices did not change quickly enough. New York still has some 2.3 million acres of freshwater wetlands, yet it is thought over half of the state’s historic wetlands have been lost[5]. In the three decades after the exhibit opened, the US lost over 0.5 million acres of wetlands every year. Although this pace has since slowed, the nation lost a total of 16.8 million acres of wetlands between the mid 50’s and 2004[6], equal to around half the area of all New York State. I felt troubled as I reflected on how environmental risks had been clearly seen in advance, and yet insight had not been enough to change collective action.
Andrew mentioned how natural history museums have been criticized as “dead spaces”, but he thoughtfully pointed out how museums can be places for engagement and initial exploration. I had to agree. Although the displays presented a curious facsimile of the environment, it was a way for an urbanite like me to view the world beyond the city. Andrew remarked how the animals populating the dioramas were uncannily lifelike. Rather than crudely stuffing their specimens, the museum’s taxidermists had carefully observed the animals while they were alive. Sculptures had then been crafted around real skeletons and staged in authentic poses, and castings were finally made to support the original pelts. I found this rather grim, but the technique apparently endowed the specimens with personality. Under the circumstances, it seemed almost respectful. In a time of urban disconnection from the environment, encountering a long-dead bird could be an invitation for reconnection.
In early spring, a few weeks after my museum visit, I had the chance to view the environment in an entirely different way. Under a gray midday sky still threatening to rain, a group of colleagues and I met at the entrance to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. We were there to join a foraging tour led by the self-styled “Wildman” Steve Brill[7]. Brill began foraging in the NYC area in 1982 because, as he puts it, he wanted to feed himself. After setting aside ambitions to become a chess master, he had been working as a professional cook and teaching culinary classes. Then one day when out on a bike ride, Brill came across orthodox Greek women collecting fox grape leaves in the park, and this sparked his curiosity about the wild edible offerings growing freely around him. Yet Brill was frustrated to find that the available botany books were written without an eye to gastronomic potential, so he began teaching himself and experimenting in the kitchen. Soon, he was offering tours through city parks. The Wildman’s big breakthrough came in 1986 when he was arrested for eating a dandelion in Central Park. He claims he could have faced a year in jail, but following a wave of national press coverage, the city reversed course and hired Brill to guide public foraging tours.
After four decades of foraging, my sighted colleagues assured me that Brill looked exactly like I would expect a Wildman to appear, complete with a bushy beard. As our group began trekking into the park, Brill emphasized the importance of only picking common renewable resources, mostly invasive weeds, and taking care to minimize our impact. Rocco, trained to walk me along paved paths, was clearly perplexed when the tour took forays into fields or up wooded hills, but he still guided with aplomb. Our group paused every few minutes when Brill spotted interesting specimens for foraging. He would share a short talk about a plant’s characteristics and uses, sprinkled with a reliable supply of dad jokes. I couldn’t visually spot the plants or look at Brill’s botanical hand drawings, but I was game to taste test various leafy greens.
Brill explained that early spring is a promising season for finding shoots and greens (such as dandelions, chickweed, daylily, and chicory), as well as roots (such as wild carrots, primrose, and parsnip)[8]. I particularly enjoyed sampling several types of wild mustards, which I could have mistaken for trendy microgreens at the nearby farmer’s market. Among other stops, we examined a stand of black birch trees, distinguished by their smooth gray bark and toothy leaves. The branches of the black birch contain oil of wintergreen, and indigenous communities had long valued the tree for providing pain relief. Brill had even given his daughter black birch twigs to chew on when she was teething, and he recommended using black birch in tea or jello. We also looked at burdock, a biennial with large and woolly leaves like elephant ears. You would need a shovel to dig up the burdock’s deep roots, but Brill says it is tasty when sliced thinly and sautéed with ginger and carrots.
Brill helped to upend my conceptions of an urban-nature divide. He has found shady upstate forests can be the worst places to forage, because they are overpopulated with deer, while certain overgrown areas in the city and suburbs offer the best foraging opportunities. Even in the largest city in the country, we can still be surrounded by a diversity of nature, but we need to learn how to look for it. Brill told how he had spent months hopelessly searching for wild garlic, until a friend finally told him the whereabouts of a patch in some city park. Once Brill was able to recognize the wild garlic, he realized that it was not only growing throughout his neighborhood, but it was even growing in front of his own building. Before he knew how to look, he had mistaken it for boring grass.
Later at home while sipping a cup of black birch tea, I reflected on my recent outings. I considered that if we are to have a hope of dealing with our environmental situation, we will need to bring together the broad but removed perspective of a museum with the local and interactive perspective of a forager. As informative as the AMNH exhibit may have been, it reminded me that knowledge is not enough. Facts can be shared, dioramas built, but environmental destruction will go on. In addition to general knowledge, we need to build relationships, like those Brill has made with his surroundings through food.
Perhaps there are useful parallels with blind city travel. I had planned my museum trip from home using Google Maps and the Goodmaps GPS app for the blind[9], but I was only able to realize my unseen obstacles once I was on the ground. Navigating those obstacles required drawing on relationships, with Rocco as my guide, with passing strangers for directions, and with Andrew as my museum narrator. If we are to navigate unfolding environmental crises, we will need to draw on all our available knowledge and widen our relationships to find our way.
[1] More information about the Felix M. Warburg Hall of New York State Environment is available here: https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/nys-environment
[2] I’m thankful to everyone at the AMNH who made my visit possible. To learn more about disability access programs at the AMNH, please check out their site: https://www.amnh.org/plan-your-visit/accessibility-language-assistance
[3] Ohio Ag Net. (January 5, 2023 ). “U.S.A. soil erosion”. https://ocj.com/2023/01/usa-soil-erosion/#:~:text=Soil%20scientist%20estimates%20that%2057.6,Midwest%20due%20to%20wind%20erosion.
[4] CARLY CASSELLA. (December 13, 2022). “US Soil Could Be Eroding Up to 1,000 Times Faster Than It Should”. Science Alert. https://www.sciencealert.com/%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8Bus-soil-could-be-eroding-up-to-1000-times-faster-than-it-should
[5] Huffman & Associates Inc. (June 2000). “Wetlands Status and Trend Analysis of New York State: Mid 1980’s to Mid-1990’s”. New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. https://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/wildlife_pdf/wetstattrend2.pdf
[6] I found current statistics about wetland trends were hard to come by, but the following gave a helpful overview: Ducks Unlimited. (n.d.). Crisis for Americas Wetlands. https://www.ducks.org/conservation/waterfowl-habitat/crisis-for-americas-wetlands
[7] You can learn more about Wildman Steve Brill and find his Wild Edibles Forage App at his website: https://www.wildmanstevebrill.com/
[8] I refreshed my memory of our foraging tour by listening to Steve Brill’s 2013 audiobook “Hen of the Woods & Other Wild Foods and Medicines: A Guided Tour Including Folklore”, which was helpfully available through the New York Public Library, but it’s also available through Audible.
[9] Personally, I’ve found the Goodmaps Outdoors app to be the best GPS app for the blind. It’s available for both iPhone and Android, and it’s now free. Learn more here: https://www.goodmaps.com/
Teaser photo credit: By Chhe (talk) – Own work (Original text: I created this work entirely by myself.), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18211469
