Slow Down and Reach Out (and We'll Be There): A Response to 'Shellfish as Living Infrastructure' by Kate Orff

摘要

Historically New York Harbor supported hundreds of square kilometers of oyster beds, yielding perhaps 700 million harvested oysters per year at its peak in the late 1880s (Kurlansky 2006, Royte 2006, Bain et al. 2007). By the 1920s, the beds had become unharvestable because of depletion of the resource and closures from raw sewage contamination (reviewed in Kirby 2004). When the Hudson River Foundation took the lead in investigating the feasibility of restoring oyster populations and the reefs they form in the New York Harbor region, they assembled a team of scientists in 2009 from around the U.S. with expertise in oyster restoration, aquaculture, ecology, pathology, genetics, and other disciplines. The initial result was the Oyster Restoration Research Project (ORRP) which was designed to build upon previous studies in the region (e.g., Franz 1982, Bain et al. 2007, Starke et al. 2011) and assess oyster restoration potential at five sites, each with different environmental regimes, from the lower Hudson River to Staten Island. Phase 1 of this study was completed in 2012 (Grizzle et al. 2013) and Phase 2 is underway, focusing on larger scale restoration at one pilot site in the Bronx at Sound-view Park. Orff briefly describes these efforts in her essay, and both of us have been a part of the project since before 2009. Based on our experiences in the region and elsewhere we are responding to Orff's essay "Shellfish as Living Infrastructure," providing some context from our restoration work and others. Our aim here is to comment on her proposed approaches in light of a shifting focus in the last few decades to oyster restoration for ecological reasons rather than mainly human harvest.