Natalie Jeremijenko

Biochar is a by-product of a process that converts waste into energy. When mixed into soil it promotes plant growth, soil biodiversity, and helps breakdown industrial contaminants. Most importantly, it provides long-term (thousands or millions of years) carbon sequestration. BIOCHAR MARKS THE SPOT is a public experiment to exhibit the effects of enriching the soil in a 60ft ‘X’ with biochar.

Want to be part of a community experiment to sequester carbon and invest in soil health? Bring along your waste materials (like junk mail) to one of our Biochar Barbecues this summer and help transform it into biochar for the park grounds, or for AgBags, or beyond.

FARMACY is a distributed urban farm incorporating soft architecture AgBags. This vertical plot is mounted on an appropriated structure and hosts Tayberries (Raspberry x Blackberries), Nasturtiums, and other delicious edibles. AgBags can adapt to other urban structures, including railings, windows, and parapets creating arable territory out of thin air. Dispensed at Socrates and distributed through Ravenswood and Long Island City, FARMACY improves air quality, increases biodiversity, and improves environmental health in addition to producing urban edibles.

To participate in Farmacy CO-OP, host AgBags, or explore new urban edibles see http://environmentalhealthclinic.net/farmacy/.

The silver screen suspended above is illuminated at night after sunset. The beam of light shines over the plantings, attracting moths, and casting dramatic shadows as they play out their nightly dramas of love, survival and cross-species seduction.

Moth Cinema displays and amplifies the presence of moths, and our success in creating healthy habitat for their benefit, and ultimately ours. Moths are valuable pollinators that provide critical connections in our networked urban ecology. The habitat, containing tasty provisions, host and nectar plants, demonstrates an alternative to the moth-hostile light-polluted urban environments we have created.

These Socratic moth celebrities become leading lights guiding us towards a healthy and bio diverse urban ecosystem – one upon which our own health critically depends.

In collaboration with Alexander Felson

We are spectators to the greatest species extinction crisis since the dinosaurs: amphibians. Salamanders are critical keystone organisms particularly in the verdant North-eastern USA, and yet we continue to cut off their migration corridors, desiccate the vernal ponds where they breed or stock them with fish, and smear them like cream cheese across our roads.

Can we adapt our urban infrastructure to support the organisms upon whom our healthy systems depend?

What comes first: the salamander or the migration route?

Like humans, salamanders avoid dark tunnels. The pattern of holes is a projection of the stars at this location, providing celestial orientation and dappled daylight similar to that on forest floors. By creating a micro-speedbump we provide the gentle reminder to people in vehicles above that we are not alone. Follow on Twitter: anything that passes through the tunnel will tweet at @SlmndrSuperhigh.

TREExOFFICE is a new co-working space and open plan office in this Poplar tree (Populus nigra). With views of the Manhattan, WIFI and locally produced power, this new place provides an ideal location to reinvent your work habits and habitus, to reconsider parks as productive workspaces, and to improve your relationship to natural systems. Exploit the flexibility of mobile computing and book your spot now in a rejuvenating summer workplace; a special conference room; a memorable meeting space; a finish-that-paper-place; a write-that-screenplay/novel/song-space.

N.B. This facility is owned and operated by the tree for the benefit of the tree, i.e. the tree is the landlord.