New York -- before the City | Eric Sanderson

1,698,522 views ・ 2009-10-13

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00:15
The substance of things unseen.
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Cities, past and future.
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In Oxford, perhaps we can use Lewis Carroll
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and look in the looking glass that is New York City
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to try and see our true selves,
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or perhaps pass through to another world.
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Or, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
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"As the moon rose higher,
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the inessential houses began to melt away
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until gradually I became aware of the old island
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here that once flowered for Dutch sailors' eyes,
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a fresh green breast of the new world."
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My colleagues and I have been working for 10 years
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to rediscover this lost world
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in a project we call The Mannahatta Project.
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We're trying to discover what Henry Hudson would have seen
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on the afternoon of September 12th, 1609,
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when he sailed into New York harbor.
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And I'd like to tell you the story in three acts,
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and if I have time still, an epilogue.
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So, Act I: A Map Found.
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So, I didn't grow up in New York.
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I grew up out west in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, like you see here,
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in the Red Rock Canyon.
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And from these early experiences as a child
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I learned to love landscapes.
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And so when it became time for me to do my graduate studies,
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I studied this emerging field of landscape ecology.
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Landscape ecology concerns itself
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with how the stream and the meadow and the forest and the cliffs
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make habitats for plants and animals.
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This experience and this training
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lead me to get a wonderful job with the Wildlife Conservation Society,
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which works to save wildlife and wild places all over the world.
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And over the last decade,
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I traveled to over 40 countries
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to see jaguars and bears and elephants
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and tigers and rhinos.
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But every time I would return from my trips I'd return back to New York City.
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And on my weekends I would go up, just like all the other tourists,
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to the top of the Empire State Building,
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and I'd look down on this landscape, on these ecosystems,
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and I'd wonder, "How does this landscape
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work to make habitat for plants and animals?
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How does it work to make habitat for animals like me?"
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I'd go to Times Square and I'd look at the amazing ladies on the wall,
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and wonder why nobody is looking at the historical figures just behind them.
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I'd go to Central Park and see the rolling topography of Central Park
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come up against the abrupt and sheer
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topography of midtown Manhattan.
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I started reading about the history and the geography in New York City.
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I read that New York City was the first mega-city,
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a city of 10 million people or more, in 1950.
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I started seeing paintings like this.
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For those of you who are from New York,
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this is 125th street under the West Side Highway.
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(Laughter)
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It was once a beach. And this painting
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has John James Audubon, the painter, sitting on the rock.
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And it's looking up on the wooded heights of Washington Heights
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to Jeffrey's Hook, where the George Washington Bridge goes across today.
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Or this painting, from the 1740s, from Greenwich Village.
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Those are two students at King's College -- later Columbia University --
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sitting on a hill, overlooking a valley.
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And so I'd go down to Greenwich Village and I'd look for this hill,
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and I couldn't find it. And I couldn't find that palm tree.
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What's that palm tree doing there?
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(Laughter)
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So, it was in the course of these investigations that I ran into a map.
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And it's this map you see here.
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It's held in a geographic information system
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which allows me to zoom in.
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This map isn't from Hudson's time, but from the American Revolution,
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170 years later, made by British military cartographers
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during the occupation of New York City.
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And it's a remarkable map. It's in the National Archives here in Kew.
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And it's 10 feet long and three and a half feet wide.
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And if I zoom in to lower Manhattan
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you can see the extent of New York City as it was,
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right at the end of the American Revolution.
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Here's Bowling Green. And here's Broadway.
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And this is City Hall Park.
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So the city basically extended to City Hall Park.
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And just beyond it you can see features
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that have vanished, things that have disappeared.
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This is the Collect Pond, which was the fresh water source for New York City
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for its first 200 years,
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and for the Native Americans for thousands of years before that.
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You can see the Lispenard Meadows
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draining down through here, through what is TriBeCa now,
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and the beaches that come up from the Battery,
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all the way to 42nd St.
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This map was made for military reasons.
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They're mapping the roads, the buildings, these fortifications
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that they built.
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But they're also mapping things of ecological interest,
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also military interest: the hills,
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the marshes, the streams.
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This is Richmond Hill, and Minetta Water,
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which used to run its way through Greenwich Village.
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Or the swamp at Gramercy Park, right here.
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Or Murray Hill. And this is the Murrays' house
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on Murray Hill, 200 years ago.
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Here is Times Square,
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the two streams that came together to make a wetland
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in Times Square, as it was at the end of the American Revolution.
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So I saw this remarkable map in a book.
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And I thought to myself, "You know, if I could georeference this map,
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if I could place this map in the grid of the city today,
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I could find these lost features
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of the city,
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in the block-by-block geography that people know,
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the geography of where people go to work, and where they go to live,
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and where they like to eat."
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So, after some work we were able to georeference it,
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which allows us to put the modern streets on the city,
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and the buildings, and the open spaces,
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so that we can zoom in to where the Collect Pond is.
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We can digitize the Collect Pond and the streams,
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and see where they actually are in the geography of the city today.
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So this is fun for finding where things are
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relative to the old topography.
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But I had another idea about this map.
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If we take away the streets, and if we take away the buildings,
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and if we take away the open spaces,
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then we could take this map.
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If we pull off the 18th century features
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we could drive it back in time.
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We could drive it back to its ecological fundamentals:
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to the hills, to the streams,
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to the basic hydrology and shoreline, to the beaches,
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the basic aspects that make the ecological landscape.
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Then, if we added maps like the geology, the bedrock geology,
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and the surface geology, what the glaciers leave,
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if we make the soil map,
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with the 17 soil classes,
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that are defined by the National Conservation Service,
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if we make a digital elevation model
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of the topography that tells us how high the hills were,
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then we can calculate the slopes.
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We can calculate the aspect.
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We can calculate the winter wind exposure --
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so, which way the winter winds blow across the landscape.
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The white areas on this map are the places protected from the winter winds.
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We compiled all the information about where the Native Americans were, the Lenape.
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And we built a probability map of where they might have been.
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So, the red areas on this map indicate the places
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that are best for human sustainability on Manhattan,
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places that are close to water,
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places that are near the harbor to fish,
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places protected from the winter winds.
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We know that there was a Lenape settlement
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down here by the Collect Pond.
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And we knew that they planted a kind of horticulture,
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that they grew these beautiful gardens of corn, beans, and squash,
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the "Three Sisters" garden.
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So, we built a model that explains where those fields might have been.
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And the old fields, the successional fields that go.
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And we might think of these as abandoned.
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But, in fact, they're grassland habitats
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for grassland birds and plants.
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And they have become successional shrub lands,
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and these then mix in to a map of all the ecological communities.
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And it turns out that Manhattan had 55 different ecosystem types.
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You can think of these as neighborhoods,
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as distinctive as TriBeCa and the Upper East Side and Inwood --
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that these are the forest and the wetlands
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and the marine communities, the beaches.
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And 55 is a lot. On a per-area basis,
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Manhattan had more ecological communities
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per acre than Yosemite does,
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than Yellowstone, than Amboseli.
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It was really an extraordinary landscape
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that was capable of supporting an extraordinary biodiversity.
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So, Act II: A Home Reconstructed.
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So, we studied the fish and the frogs and the birds and the bees,
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the 85 different kinds of fish that were on Manhattan,
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the Heath hens, the species that aren't there anymore,
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the beavers on all the streams, the black bears,
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and the Native Americans, to study how they used
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and thought about their landscape.
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We wanted to try and map these. And to do that what we did
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was we mapped their habitat needs.
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Where do they get their food?
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Where do they get their water? Where do they get their shelter?
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Where do they get their reproductive resources?
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To an ecologist, the intersection of these is habitat,
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but to most people, the intersection of these is their home.
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So, we would read in field guides, the standard field guides
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that maybe you have on your shelves,
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you know, what beavers need is, "A slowly meandering stream
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with aspen trees and alders and willows,
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near the water." That's the best thing for a beaver.
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So we just started making a list.
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Here is the beaver. And here is the stream,
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and the aspen and the alder and the willow.
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As if these were the maps that we would need
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to predict where you would find the beaver.
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Or the bog turtle, needing wet meadows and insects and sunny places.
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Or the bobcat, needing rabbits and beavers and den sites.
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And rapidly we started to realize that beavers can be
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something that a bobcat needs.
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But a beaver also needs things. And that having it
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on either side means that we can link it together,
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that we can create the network
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of the habitat relationships for these species.
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Moreover, we realized that you can start out
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as being a beaver specialist,
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but you can look up what an aspen needs.
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An aspen needs fire and dry soils.
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And you can look at what a wet meadow needs.
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And it need beavers to create the wetlands,
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and maybe some other things.
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But you can also talk about sunny places.
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So, what does a sunny place need? Not habitat per se.
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But what are the conditions that make it possible?
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Or fire. Or dry soils.
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And that you can put these on a grid that's 1,000 columns long
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across the top and 1,000 rows down the other way.
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And then we can visualize this data like a network,
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like a social network.
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And this is the network of all the habitat relationships
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of all the plants and animals on Manhattan,
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and everything they needed,
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going back to the geology,
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going back to time and space at the very core of the web.
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We call this the Muir Web. And if you zoom in on it it looks like this.
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Each point is a different species
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or a different stream or a different soil type.
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And those little gray lines are the connections that connect them together.
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They are the connections that actually make nature resilient.
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And the structure of this is what makes nature work,
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seen with all its parts.
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We call these Muir Webs after the Scottish-American naturalist
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John Muir, who said, "When we try to pick out anything by itself,
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we find that it's bound fast by a thousand invisible cords
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that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe."
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So then we took the Muir webs and we took them back to the maps.
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So if we wanted to go between 85th and 86th,
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and Lex and Third,
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maybe there was a stream in that block.
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And these would be the kind of trees that might have been there,
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and the flowers and the lichens and the mosses,
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the butterflies, the fish in the stream,
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the birds in the trees.
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Maybe a timber rattlesnake lived there.
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And perhaps a black bear walked by. And maybe Native Americans were there.
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And then we took this data.
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You can see this for yourself on our website.
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You can zoom into any block on Manhattan,
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and see what might have been there 400 years ago.
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And we used it to try and reveal a landscape
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here in Act III.
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We used the tools they use in Hollywood
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to make these fantastic landscapes that we all see in the movies.
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And we tried to use it to visualize Third Avenue.
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So we would take the landscape and we would build up the topography.
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We'd lay on top of that the soils and the waters, and illuminate the landscape.
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We would lay on top of that the map of the ecological communities.
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And feed into that the map of the species.
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So that we would actually take a photograph,
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flying above Times Square, looking toward the Hudson River,
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waiting for Hudson to come.
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Using this technology, we can make these
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fantastic georeferenced views.
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We can basically take a picture out of any window
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on Manhattan and see what that landscape looked like 400 years ago.
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This is the view from the East River, looking up Murray Hill
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at where the United Nations is today.
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This is the view looking down the Hudson River,
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with Manhattan on the left, and New Jersey out on the right,
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looking out toward the Atlantic Ocean.
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This is the view over Times Square,
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with the beaver pond there, looking out toward the east.
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So we can see the Collect Pond, and Lispenard Marshes back behind.
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We can see the fields that the Native Americans made.
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And we can see this in the geography of the city today.
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So when you're watching "Law and Order," and the lawyers walk up the steps
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they could have walked back down those steps
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of the New York Court House, right into the Collect Pond,
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400 years ago.
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So these images are the work of my friend and colleague,
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Mark Boyer, who is here in the audience today.
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And I'd just like, if you would give him a hand,
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to call out for his fine work.
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(Applause)
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There is such power in bringing science and visualization together,
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that we can create images like this,
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perhaps looking on either side of a looking glass.
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And even though I've only had a brief time to speak,
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I hope you appreciate that Mannahatta was a very special place.
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The place that you see here on the left side
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was interconnected. It was based on this diversity.
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It had this resilience that is what we need in our modern world.
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But I wouldn't have you think that I don't like the place
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on the right, which I quite do. I've come to love the city
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and its kind of diversity, and its resilience,
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and its dependence on density and how we're connected together.
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In fact, that I see them as reflections of each other,
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much as Lewis Carroll did in "Through the Looking Glass."
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We can compare these two and hold them in our minds at the same time,
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that they really are the same place,
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that there is no way that cities can escape from nature.
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And I think this is what we're learning about building cities in the future.
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So if you'll allow me a brief epilogue, not about the past,
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but about 400 years from now,
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what we're realizing is that
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cities are habitats for people,
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and need to supply what people need:
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a sense of home, food, water, shelter,
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reproductive resources, and a sense of meaning.
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This is the particular additional habitat requirement of humanity.
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And so many of the talks here at TED are about meaning,
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about bringing meaning to our lives
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in all kinds of different ways, through technology,
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through art, through science,
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so much so that I think we focus so much on
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that side of our lives, that we haven't given enough
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attention to the food and the water and the shelter,
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and what we need to raise the kids.
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So, how can we envision the city of the future?
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Well, what if we go to Madison Square Park,
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and we imagine it without all the cars,
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and bicycles instead
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and large forests, and streams instead of sewers and storm drains?
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What if we imagined the Upper East Side
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with green roofs, and streams winding through the city,
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and windmills supplying the power we need?
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Or if we imagine the New York City metropolitan area,
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currently home to 12 million people,
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but 12 million people in the future, perhaps living at the density of Manhattan,
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in only 36 percent of the area,
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with the areas in between covered by farmland,
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covered by wetlands,
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covered by the marshes we need.
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This is the kind of future I think we need,
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is a future that has the same diversity
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and abundance and dynamism of Manhattan,
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but that learns from the sustainability of the past,
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of the ecology, the original ecology, of nature with all its parts.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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