Gowanus Canal Conservancy visit, 11/28/16:
We met with Michael Wasserman who has worked at the Gowanus Canal Conservancy for over a year. He gave us a tour and showed us the canal, where their growing plants and trees in giant dumpsters, their nursery where they keep and raise lots of plants and some of the parks that they created and fought for surrounding the canal. I learned that a lot of our sewage and a lot of rain water is in that canal and it smells really bad when you get close to it so conservancies like these try and help it and limit the amount of sewage as much as they can. It’s a big project but Michael said that it should be done around the year 2025. I thought that since our topic is water pollution we were going to focus on the ocean or maybe the Hudson river because I didn’t realize that there was a canal in the city. It definitely does have to do with our topic though because there is so much pollution and we saw ducks swimming in an area where there was lots of plastic waste, and I’m happy that we went there so we can learn about how much our waste impacts the environment around us and the animals living too. There was lots of construction around the canal and I think that some of the waste might be from that. He also told us that some people thought that everything would be easier if they just filled it in with landfill or something but people wanted to keep it. It’s a natural canal that we’ve had for a very long time and I think we should keep it because people have worked really hard on trying to make it and what’s around it better. Even though we didn’t volunteer hands on we got a tour and we learned and saw everything their doing to help the environment and to protect the canal.
