My group went to The Billion Oyster project on Thursday November 10th. This is an organization that helps preserve more oysters for the Hudson river. I didn’t know why at first but later on I learned that oysters actually help filter the water cleaning it more. We had to take a ferry to governors Island to get there. It wasn’t very long because it was only like a half a mile away. On the ferry we meet a student at the New York Harbor School that worked with the Billion Oyster Project because the school has about half of their curriculum at the organization. They learn how to drive boat steer boats keep people safe and boats and even make boats. They also help out the Billion Oyster project by dedicating their time working there. When we got there we immediately headed over to the location of the organization where we meet our employee of the day. She then put us into two groups. One group tagged oysters while the other cleans empty shells. When I was tagging oysters I learned that they would be sent to classes for school research. Then when I was cleaning oysters, I learned that the shells came from restaurants and gave them to the Billion Oyster Project. The reason we clean them is for new oysters to latch onto the clean shells and make their homes in there. Together we tagged around 220 oysters and cleaned about 72 bags of 50 or so oysters. That’s around 3600 oyster shells! During lunch we met another women who we talked to about our social justice project. She gave us a lot of information about topics and organization that we could look at. Our topic of water pollution was expanded a lot because of her. We are now looking into where our waste goes when we throw stuff away or when we flush our toilet. I found this fieldwork to be very successful and hope that the next ones are as informational as this one.
