John Waldman is standing on a dirt path, surrounded on all sides by 4-foot-tall sea grass, staring out across Jamaica Bay.
Seagulls are flying overhead. Ducks are gliding across the water.
A conservation biologist, Waldman is in his element. He’s spent the better part of three decades in the waterways surrounding New York.
Waldman is talking about Jamaica Bay’s potential in helping to understand concepts as complex as climate change when he spots a group of elementary school students walking down the path.
He cracks a wide smile.
“The water changes everything for kids,” says Waldman, 59, a Queens College biology professor.
“That connection with nature can change your life. This bay is so close to the city but so many kids never see it. It’s something that everyone should experience.”
Waldman’s passion for a waterway that serves as a conduit for much of the city’s sewage paved the way for the creation of a multimillion-dollar research center.
The Jamaica Bay Science and Resilience Institute, led by the City University of New York, is now spearheading research projects on everything from the resiliency of the bay’s salt marshes to strategies for withstanding another Hurricane Sandy.
Brooklyn College is the lead CUNY campus on the project. The college is expected to name an executive director to run the project in the coming weeks, CUNY officials said.
“We’re going to use Jamaica Bay as our lab and attempt to understand how we can make it more resilient both in terms of the ecosystem and also in terms of the safety and well being of the human community,” Waldman says.
“Jamaica Bay is our lab but our questions are larger than Jamaica Bay. They’re really about urban water systems worldwide.”
Waldman’s obsession with the bay and its surrounding waterways began in the mid-1980s.
At the time, he was hired by the Hudson River Foundation for Science and Environmental Research to research striped bass. It was supposed to be a temporary job. Waldman stayed for 20 years.
“I saw this system that was always considered a joke come back before my eyes,” says Waldman, who grew up exploring Long Island Sound in the Bronx.
Waldman went on to a career as an academic, studying the New York Harbor and Jamaica Bay.
The CUNY-led research center would likely have never come to be were it not for a serendipitous conversation Waldman had in the fall of 2011.
Waldman had been invited as a lecturer on a cruise through Jamaica Bay run by the National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy. On the way back to port, the Conservancy’s CEO Marie Salerno asked Waldman what could be done to help the bay.
He proposed creating an ecological research center.
“I said the national parks are hotbeds of research, and I felt more could be done at Jamaica Bay,” Waldman recalls.
Salerno took the idea to then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Waldman says.
A few months later, he was among a group of big shots at the Arsenal at Central Park when Bloomberg and Salazar said that they intended to create a world-class nature center on the bay.
Waldman and three other CUNY academics started working on a proposal for the project. Then Hurricane Sandy struck.
“All of a sudden the importance of resiliency of the bay and the environment in general became acute,” Waldman says. “It took on gravitas. Bloomberg wanted it to happen.”
The center, a research consortium led by CUNY, has since received $11.3 million in grants. It’s projected to create more than 784 jobs related to research and construction.
CUNY is now working to find a site for the research center and finalize plans to build a custom vessel capable of scouring the bay that’s large enough to carry entire classes of students.
“It’s a phenomenally rich ecosystem,” Waldman says. “It’s been inspiring to see an urban ecosystem within the city withstand so much disturbance.”
Waldman is convinced that studying the bay can help solve some of the biggest questions facing humankind in the era of climate change.
“To me, the challenge is we have a huge number of people living in communities in the Jamaica Bay watershed,” Waldman says. “Many of them are vulnerable to coastal flooding and will be more so as we have more floods in the future.
“You need protection from catastrophic events like Sandy, but you also need access to a flourishing ecosystem for the community,” he adds. “You can’t just build walls along the shore. You need to protect the habitat as public resource.”
Waldman’s team is now working on the environmental history of the bay — seeking an answer to the question of how it transformed from its original wild state to what it is today.
“Did it ever have eel grass? What happened to the oysters? There was a huge oyster harvest here in the 1800s and 1900s and now you can barely find an oyster in the bay,” he says.
Standing on the banks of the bay last week, Waldman’s enthusiasm was matched by the students he encountered from Public School 309 in Brooklyn.
“It’s nice to see the nature in person,” said Nina Crespo, 12. “We’re learning about the animals and plants, and it’s good to be here.”
Nina’s teacher, Lenore Tripoulas, agreed. “A field trip like this to the bay might be one of the only chances kids have to really experience nature,” she said.
Waldman, for his part, points out that the bay is “one of the world’s largest urban watersheds.
“We have this ecosystem within the city limits that is stressed beyond belief and yet is still functioning,” he says. “So it’s a terrific lab for studying the big questions.”
Here’s a look at other CUNY STEM initiatives:
Transportation Technology, Sustainable Fuel and Product Development in New York City — Awarded $9 million to renovate existing space to create a hub for transportation technology, sustainable fuel and development of hybrid and electric vehicles.
Allied Health Training for Employment — Awarded $2.2 million to update equipment and resources to expand degree and nondegree programs in allied health care fields, one of the largest growing sectors of private employment in the city.
Big Data Consortium — Awarded $15 million to develop the college’s high-performance computing center and establish programs in data analytics.
Advanced Manufacturing for Economic Development — Awarded $1.5 million to develop a center focused on the groundbreaking field of 3-D printing.
New Media Jobs Incubator and Innovation Lab — Awarded $4.6 million to enable students to learn and experiment with 21st-century digital content.
