Environment

Urban designer Kaja Kühl illustrates how to use plants to clean up contaminated sites, a cost-effective way to add productive, healthy land to the City’s environment.

Janette Kim and Erik Carver discuss Underdome, an ambitious attempt to classify contending energy agendas and to examine their implications for public life.

We all of course know the story of Noah’s Ark -- of massive floods sent by a disgusted God to wipe out our corrupted civilization except for Noah, who, with his family, builds an Ark to save pairs of animals to eventually repopulate the planet. The contemporary take on the story has some new twists.

FASLANYC chronicles the progression, from design experiment to multi-disciplinary operation, of a small group effort to celebrate and activate the ecology of the Gowanus Canal.

As oil spills into the Gulf, blood spills in the streets of Greece, and cash spills from terrorist wallets into the hands of willing airline agents, one wonders who can clean up this mess. We tell our children to clean up after themselves, but can we? Disciplining a child is a perilous affair, but in the end self-discipline is the challenge. Self-discipline requires introspection, but how much of it can we muster in a world careening towards 9 billion people?

What if sewers no longer overflowed when it rained? Kate Zidar talks about designing for stormwater management and why it is crucial to our health, our waterways and our city.

Vanessa Keith explores some simple yet radical ways to retrofit our urban building stock to address a chief cause of climate change: tropical deforestation.

Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe shares thoughts on recent and upcoming additions to the city's collection of parks on unlikely sites.

The West Harlem Piers Park is the last jigsaw piece in a now unbroken strip of publicly accessible waterfront running all the way up from Battery Park.

Artist and longtime creek explorer George Trakas shows us around the Nature Walk he designed at Newtown Creek.