Here's a witty and informational YouTube video about Jamaica Bay by Dana Lee Cohen of Brooklyn, NY that I recommend watching and passing on to others...
The Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge is one of the world's most important estuaries as well as a stop over for 300 different species of wildfowl as they migrate across the Americas. Yet as I perused Mayor Michael Bloomberg's PlaNYC, supposedly a plan to make my hometown more viable through the future's tides and tribulations, I couldn't find the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, as if it did not exist! Nor did I hear mention of the seven city sewage plants along its lovely shores, nor how we need to reduce nitrogen in our treated sewage to reduce fishkill caused by de-oxygenation of Jamaica Bay's Wildlife Refuge secondary to the nitrogenous and Chlorine-rich under-treated 300 million gallons of sewage New York City releases on a good day, nor did I read of how successful ecological restoration efforts led by the National Park Service's George Frame have been, nor how important it is to fix the sinkholes in the Bay and research the pollutants. These were left off in favor of the dicussion of storm management systems which, while glorious, will not in and of themselves save our glorious bay, particularly given the onslaught of continued immigration into NYC in the next few years which will certainly increase the load on our sewage systems.
According to the Clean Water Act, the Bay must become swimable by 1992...oops, what happened? Permits to pollute our harbor illegally and leave it less than swimable and fishable have been given to the Department of Environmental Protection through 2017! What is needed is not the legal research Bloomberg suggests but the legal backbone to get on the Department of Environmental Protection to remind them that they are a not-for-profit agency subject to the law!
This film is a letter to Mayor Bloomberg to give him something to do besides tax and jail the poor and entertain the rich and militarize the cops. He should save Jamaica Bay and restore 50 acres of salt marshes each year through George Frame's tried and true methods, at the cost of 25 million dollars per year, and take it all out of the Department of Environmental Protection's HUGE budget until they start building green Guggenheims, or Living Machines, ideas which I have already testified about twice in the City Council, skyscrapers of bioremediation, or other reasonably priced and non gas-guzzling bioremediation efforts based on John Todd's work at the University of Vermont, so that our treated sewage, or black water, becomes aerated and healthful to the wildlife which proliferate and participate in New York City's self. This film takes you along into the adventure of activism and invites you to become part of the movement toward sustainability and freedom from bankers and fictionalists in government. We must call them on their crap. Mayor Mike is so fond of calling us on our crap, fictional arrests of innocent citizens, fictional fines, infringements on our freedom all over the place, like his veto on public gatherings at Central Park. I call his efforts to save Jamaica Bay weak, fictional, and complicit with the illegal deal-making in Washington so common that no one really remembers, it's, um, illegal. I remember and let's all remember, for our children's sake, for a beautiful city that deserves the real protection from storm swells that salt marshes provide, and for the infrastructure, schools, churches, apartments and lives that might be lost if we do not make a concerted effort to restore The Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge today.
This film was produced, edited, directed, written and is starring Miss Dana Lee Cohen, with the assistance of Saiming Char. It is dedicated to George Frame and to Jesus the Christ Almighty. But a lot of it was improvisation. I really hope you enjoy it!
