Kayla Weisdorf

In August 2021, a few friends and volunteers came together to sow four trial sites (SUNY Maritime College and Soundview Park in The Bronx, Little Bay Park in Queens, and Conference House Park in Staten Island) with eelgrass or Zostera marina seed.

The planting events were the culmination of a longer process of learning how to cultivate eelgrass begun in 2020 under the guidance of applied ecologists. Poring over nautical depth charts, long, observational shoreline walks, and sediment sampling and testing had led myself and collaborators to believe that eelgrass meadows might take root at these four locations.

Unfolding in public across three boroughs, this extended performance sensually demonstrated the challenges, but also the profound, varied pleasures that blossom from the labor of caring for planetary health, embodying the potential abundance available to us when we choose to meet the slow violence of the climate and biodiversity crises with imagination and playfulness.

While no newly established eelgrass was observed in the years following the plantings, that does not mean that urban seagrass meadows are unfeasible. This Green New Deal LARP—striving to reveal latent possibilities lurking in the shallows surrounding our cities, which we have ceded too long to industry—was an important first step, and its documentation will serve as the basis for the interactive howtoplantseagrass.com, a free online resource for the ethical, non-expert, would-be seagrass planter.

Incubated as a part of Visions2030’s Imaginator Start-Up Program. Core partners included Bart Chezar, Steve Schott of the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County Marine Program, Rob Buchanan of The New York Harbor Foundation/Billion Oyster Project, Robert Crafa and others at SUNY Maritime College, and Willis Elkins of the Newtown Creek Alliance. Documentation by Eddie Castro, Laura Sofía Pérez, and myself. The mesh BuDS jackets were patterned and sewn by Laura Kung.