Letters in Conversation

Eleanor Macagba, Bry LeBerthon, Gray Cooper Mahaffie

We had settled on the trip to the Billion Oyster Project as our focused subject, yet struggled to find a format that could properly encapsulate all the ideas we had brainstormed—it seemed that, from this trip, we had each come out with different connections to the cluster of foodways and migratory currents. Finally, we settled on the format of letters, which was heavily inspired by “On Water, Salt, Whales, and the Black Atlantics: A Conversation between Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Christina Sharpe,” from The Funambulist.

We thought this format was perfect to show our individual takeaways from the trip, which made sense with its format—the hands-on experience with the oyster beds and the guided silent meditative walk allowing for a more personal and intimate experience of oysters, and Governors Island as a whole. Also, it allowed for us to explore several lenses and connections between the cluster, which had been so diverse in ideas and speakers, and the trip—first, taking from the environmental lens of the previous cluster; then, navigating through the discussions of food and even the more creative interpretations of migrations such as Carlos de los Reyes’ practical theater; overall, looking at the colonial and imperialist effects on the environment. Finally, the format, as used in The Funambulist originally, was a means of critical analysis that builds off of each other in hopes of illuminating the greater themes mentioned prior and building a communal compendium of knowledge. A lot of the benefit of the letter format is that we mentioned our own backgrounds and how that affected our perception of the trip and our greater relationship with nature. Carlos de los Reyes guided a practical theatre experience by reaching out often to the audience to see what background knowledge they had beforehand (like when he asked us what we knew about the Philippine War before going into the exercise). Similarly, our BOP guide asked us what we already knew and what we were excited to learn about coming into the project. Writing first about our experiences of the city and our knowledge coming into the trip allowed us to situate ourselves within the greater historical and cultural context of our environment, which consequently informed our perspectives.

Some questions and further analysis we’d hope the project would inspire in readers are: how can we not only look for ways to remediate the environment, but also involve the community? How is history made, and who decides our collective urban history?1 And, finally, how can we begin to remediate our ways of thinking about food, and its connections with people and the environment—especially considering how oysters, an organism we mainly think of as serving a culinary purpose, is now used as a means to restore our waterways?

1. This is a question that has come up for us as we discussed how shocked we were by the fact that we didn’t know anything about the amount of oysters that used to be in the city, and how many of the Indigenous ways of life here are erased by colonial institutions, thus affecting what we remember as a city, and what we are taught in our school.

Dear Eleanor and Bry,

I hope you are both doing well and are preparing for warmer days to come this summer in New York City. Eleanor, I know you’ve lived here a long time and have witnessed many hot summers here. I have actually never spent a summer in NYC. I’ve spent almost four years here (minus the summers), grown into a young adult here, transitioned here, found independence here, and lived through a pandemic here. And yet, this magnificent city is not my home enough to stay for the summer. I love NYC now, but I hated it in those first two years living in a dorm by the constantly bustling Union Square Park. I missed silence desperately, and most of all, I missed trees. There are so few trees in this part of Manhattan. There were many reasons Manhattan didn’t feel like a real place to live those first two years, but the lack of natural escape or connection to a natural ecosystem was always my biggest complaint and it’s the reason I’m leaving. So I had to jump at the opportunity to join both you and our class to attend a nature-themed field trip (when was the last time I got to go on a field trip!) to the Billion Oyster Project (BOP) on Governors Island, a place on my NYC bucket list. There is a theory about the downfalls of Environmental conservation. Environmental conservation labels one thing nature and one thing not. President Roosevelt was famously an environmental conservationist, creating over 150 national parks in the United States. But did you know that to create our National Parks in order to “conserve the land,” he forcibly removed all of the native populations living there? An idea was born then: to conserve nature was not to use sustainable or indigenous practices to maintain the natural environment, but to sever the land from human use and erase its indigenous history. Environmental conservation was not about conserving what was there, but about creating a new land that is “untouched” and pure.

Visiting the BOP was cathartic for me. I wonder if it was for you both as well? I see the skyline as deadly, each tall building as a killer or a monument to killers. I think now about Michael Menor Salgarolo asking us to close our eyes and picture being in the marshes that the first Filipino community occupied in the United States. He was able to take us to a place that literally no longer existed. While at Governor’s Island I should have closed my eyes and gone back as well. I get sad sometimes. I should have closed my eyes.

With my eyes open, I was able to see what was “natural” about the city on this tour. The BOP tour both honored that yes, NYC’s natural environment has been pillaged and destroyed through colonial history, but it also did not throw out the idea that the city is still a place for nature to exist. In fact the BOP believes that nature can thrive in this place again. I am a pessimist who’s lost too much hope, but meeting our guide, employed because some High Schoolers came up with an idea to help save NYC through growing a population of oysters in the bay, made me feel hopeful again and it grounded me to my city which I love. What did you think of the trip? With love, Gray

Dear Gray and Bry,

I first heard of the Billion Oyster Project (BOP) through my middle school, which was partnering with the organization in the Gowanus Canal. I never got to be a part of the program, mostly because I had missed the deadline—but it was interesting just how quickly it had slipped from my mind, and how in a city such as this one, nature can fade into the background. I walked across the Gowanus Canal every morning and afternoon, coming and going from school. The Gowanus is known to be one of NYC’s most polluted waterways, definitely not safe for any drinking or swimming. On rainy days, the smell of sewage would overpower my walks across the bridge. But otherwise, the canal had never come to mind. So I think I had the opposite experience from you, Gray—I don’t often miss silence, nor trees, because I often don’t even think about nature, especially when they are underwater, below my line of sight.

The same applies to Governor’s Island, a place I have visited many times. I have even seen the BOP’s sign on their building’s door, yet never considered it as a place that could nurture so many oysters. It was mind blowing to think there is a whole ecosystem that can exist in a place I simply assumed was incredibly polluted to the point that it could not nurture life.

Resilience and loss were the words that stuck with me as I heard our guide talk about the students and the organization’s efforts to restore the health of the waters that had once been so populated with oysters.

Because not only had the oysters disappeared but a whole way of life, indigenous people and a culture of fishing and commerce. The trip was a lesson in capitalist and imperialist greed, but it also gave us hope as the organization showcases the power of community- and school-led initiatives. It is incredible to think that an organization born out of a school on Governors Island could reach me all the way in a school in Brooklyn Connections I could see between this trip we took and our current cluster weren’t so evident at first—I thought there was probably more of a connection between this and our environmental cluster. But as I thought about it, and thought about the physical changes of our natural environment based on the migration and destruction of peoples, I realized how pertinent it was to our topic of migration and doorways. I was wondering if you found any of these connections, or whether you found the words of our speakers or the authors we read to be applicable here.

In discussion with Luis and Mariko, they noted the idea of terroir described by Amy Besa, which already felt familiar due to my upbringing in France—the idea that a plant’s soil, climate, and terrain can change the taste of final product, often used in terms of wine and grapes. It’s funny because often, in American circles, growing crops and how well it is done is centered on the farmer—but for French winemakers, it has always been about the land itself, giving agency to the land as a being that can affect the crop itself. I’ve seen this firsthand in the manner my French friends’ parents have discussed the grapes they grew, offering a lot of the credit to the land itself. This feels connected to our trip with BOP because of just how much the environment determines our foodways—and how much it can be changed through environmental detrimentation.

The ways in which humans manipulate the environment, separating out oysters to give out single servings when eating them is now surreal—and the fact that the very food that once inhabited this area en masse is now the organism that can hopefully restore the environment also feels incredible to imagine.

I also thought of our latest discussion with Claro de los Reyes from APT. To me it felt evident that BOP is acting towards both environmental renewal, and cultural rehabilitation— through its teaching and educational trips such as the one we went on. I could find a clear connection between the practical theater practice Reyes mentioned and the immersive experience of actually touching the oysters and being in the natural environment. One of Atlantic Pacific Theatre’s (APT) main philosophies was: “to create a space for this community to untangle and uphold the inherent wonders of their culture on their own terms” (Applied Theatre with Youth: Education, Engagement, Activism 2021). To an extent, I believe BOP does this through its capacity for the individual exploration of the oyster beds, although rather than engaging actively, we mostly received environmental information from a teacher.

The Billion Oyster Project can in fact learn from the applied theatrical practices of APT in that APT considers how we can reach out to marginalized communities, and how we can do so in a way that allows for cultural sensitivity, agency, and learning. Still, it’s amazing to think that the New York Harbor School, a school with more than half BIPOC students, gets access to this space and works with BOP.

And, overall, what further questions did this trip leave you with? I know I was left wondering what the future of Governor’s Island was, and whether it would meet the same gentrified/green washed fate as the East Coast Resiliency Project, which we explored in a previous project through your images Gray. The guide briefly mentioned that the EPA banned the BOP from being out in the Gowanus anymore; I wonder why, and if there’s a connection to the ideas I’m exploring. I hope that the BOP stays strong and maintains its foothold in Governor’s Island, at least.

Love, Eleanor Dear Eleanor and Gray,

As always, it’s wonderful to hear from you both! As days grow warmer and longer (and more humid, ugh) and New Yorkers start to venture back outdoors, I like to think all of NYC has been thinking a little more about the natural world we live in and ways to preserve it. Obviously, though, that’s a little overly idealistic– even when it comes to myself. I have to say I’m in the same boat as you, Eleanor, or a similar one. I grew up in Southern California, where great open expanses of land were expected more than they were appreciated and all beaches seemed swimmable. I’ve never really thought about preserving the water or maintaining its cleanliness, mostly because the ocean has always seemed to me to be something so massive that it is near insusceptible to humanity’s selfishness. Sure, I’ve thought about litter and the trash island somewhere in the ocean, but the water itself becoming near septic with human waste and refuse? Impossible, right?

The New York Harbor is obviously not the ocean, and is also incredibly unclean and marred by years of industrialization, but through the Billion Oyster Project I still found myself shocked to learn the amount of damage we’ve managed to do to the ecosystems there. New York Harbor went from the world’s top oyster producer to a body of water that can produce nothing edible at all? I struggle to wrap my head around that, even as I write this, and yet I find myself relieved that the city has faced some kind of karmic retribution for the damage it’s done. At least it can no longer profit as much off of the water it so uncaringly destroyed, I figure. At least killing off the oysters forced NYC to ultimately come back full circle and attempt to restore what it destroyed.

I have a story for you, Gray, about conservation—or lack thereof. I live in the Chinatown area of Manhattan, right by a little patch of greenery called Collect Pond Park. It’s barely a park—it has an empty reflecting pool in its center, surrounded by garden tables and chairs and a few patches of fenced off plants. If you come to visit, you might not even notice it, much less realize that it was formerly the site of a beautiful ancient lake formed by the melting of a glacier and sustained by New York’s underground hot springs. You definitely wouldn’t know that it was originally named for the oyster shells indigenous peoples left in and around the lake’s banks. During the industrial revolution, the lake was used to dispose of waste from the area’s surrounding factories, and got so polluted that the city could find no solution but to drain it completely, fill it, and turn it into the park that it is today. The canal dug and used to drain the lake was filled too, and is what we now know as Canal Street. It’s basically ancient history now, there’s no longer even a whisper of a way to salvage and conserve that lake, but it enrages me to think about—the waste, the complete erasure of history and culture, and the amount of damage done to not only the environment but the people living there (the diseased lake brought down property values in the area, driving it to become an immigrant-heavy community despite unsafe living conditions). When you go to the park now, you can see that its name was chosen as an homage to its history, but you don’t get to see that the park only exists because that history of the place was completely destroyed by human greed. It’s giving Roosevelt vibes, is it not? I think that if New York Harbor wasn’t such an asset, something New York tycoons needed to make a buck, it would have suffered a similar fate.

Thinking about New York Harbor’s future as a potential producer of oysters again, I can’t help but think about our class’s conversations about foodways, the ways that a community’s food is a reflection of the community itself. Salgorolo described how St. Malo’s inhabitants became fisherman because it provided them a means to escape society, Saed described how Uzbek-American food has been shaped by the diaspora’s history (Saed 2013), Gan explains how a grain of rice may be able to revolutionize our methods of consumption (“An Unintended Race | Miracle Rice and the Green Revolution”), and that is all part of it, but perhaps Mabolon sums up the sentiment best in Champorado Dreams—she highlights that a fish head is a symbol of the working class, corned beef is colonialism in a can, and “I am remembering myself / as I look down into a plate / of adobo.” Cuisine is an echo of history, a reflection of a community’s needs and tastes, and can also be a beacon of hope and evolution. Before the 19th century, oysters were consumed by all classes of New Yorkers, and New York Harbor’s “best oysters in the world” could be consumed as high-end cuisine and street food alike. What did that say about the city, the fact that anyone could enjoy one of its greatest natural luxuries? Now that only the wealthiest New Yorkers can enjoy oysters, oysters which no longer come from its own harbor, has the city lost something quintessentially New York? Can this city still be seen as the great equalizer it was perceived as eons ago? Wealth disparity is rampant in nearly every city, but New York City has been especially known for it in the past few decades. I’ve always wondered if there’s some way the city could become what it once was again (or never was, but has always been perceived as), a land of opportunity and limitless potential, a place where anyone can come from anywhere and become someone successful from New York. Could oysters be it? I hope the BOP is around and successful long enough for us to find out. HAGS (and eat lots of oysters while you’re at it)! With love, Bry

Bibliography

Brenner, Lisa et al. Applied Theatre with Youth: Education, Engagement, Activism. Routledge, 2021.

Gan, Elaine. “An Unintended Race | Miracle Rice and the Green Revolution.” Environmental Philosophy, Vol.14, No. 1, 2017. Web.

Mabalon, Dawn. “Champorado dreams”(1995). Amerasia Journal 44.3, 2018, 126-130.

Saed, Zohra. “Samsa on Sheepshead Bay. Tracing Tracing Uzbek Foodprints in Southern Brooklyn.” in Ku, Robert Ji-Song, Manalansan, Martin F. and Mannur, Anita. Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. New York University Press, 2013.