The Environmental Impact of Cleaning the Harbor
It will take a concerted combination of engineering, ecology, environmental science, chemistry, materials sciences, economics, and sociology to effectively clean up the NY/NJ Harbor.
Published March 1, 2000
By Fred Moreno, Anne de León, and Jennifer Tang
Academy Contributors
“The New York harbor is like a bathtub,” says Reid J. Lifset, a member of the Science Task Group of The New York Academy of Sciences’ (the Academy’s) Harbor Consortium. Formed in January 2000, the Consortium includes 30 representatives from industry, academe, local and state government, nonprofit and community action organizations. They are all stakeholders in the Academy’s Harbor Project, a five-year effort to define and recommend pollution prevention strategies in the New York-New Jersey Harbor’s modernization for shipping in the 21st century.
Lifset elaborates on his disarmingly simple bathtub metaphor. He explains that just as the amount of water entering a bathtub ultimately adds up to the amount draining out plus the quantity pooled in the tub, so do the contaminants flowing from a variety of sources into the Harbor accumulate, after which they either settle as sediments or are removed.
Of course, the modest task of removing even the most stubborn bathtub scum pales when compared to the extraordinary challenge of removing the vast amounts of muddy, contaminated sediments in the waters of the NY/NJ Harbor. “Daunting quantities of sewage and toxic chemicals are part of the scenery,” observes Lifset, as well as “fragile ecosystems where egrets and cormorants nest.” The consequences for the environment are considerable, as are possible adverse affects on the health and well-being of the more than 20 million people who reside in or visit the Harbor area every year.
Formidable Expertise Meets Abiding Passion
Lifset brings to the Harbor enterprise both formidable expertise and an abiding passion for his work. He is associate director of the Industrial Environment Management Program and associate research scholar at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Industrial Ecology.
Utterance of the words “industrial ecology,” a framework for environmental analysis and management, adopted by the Academy’s Harbor Consortium, triggers another metaphorical response from Lifset. “If industrial ecology were an art form,” he says, “it would be landscape painting.” The aim of industrial ecology is “to consider the big picture and avoid narrow, partial views,” he observes, while “conventional environmental analysis, by contrast, is more like portraiture,” which focuses on the details of a single subject.
Industrial ecology, which first emerged as a field in 1989, is a “systems” approach to the prevention of pollution and the assessment of environmental threats. Multidisciplinary, it borrows from engineering, ecology and environmental science, chemistry, materials science, economics and sociology. The goal of industrial ecology is “to examine the environmental impacts of modern industrial society,” says Lifset, and “to discover new methods of production and consumption that will lead to fewer harmful side effects.”
As a member of the Harbor Consortium’s Science Task Group, Lifset is an active participant in assessing existing data and data needs relating to the five toxicants slated for research and in framing the general approach to the study of each. In 2000, the Academy’s Consortium completed preliminary research on mercury, extended its research efforts to methyl mercury and cadmium, and began to explore the economics of the port in the region’s transportation system.
Also read: Reducing Mercury Pollution in NY Harbor
