This is the Big Five, the companion series to the podcast Water Talks, with five one-on-one interviews with some of the extraordinary speakers from the main episodes. 

This is a conversation with Kate Orff. She has her own studio, Scape, and is a professor at Columbia University in New York. Time Magazine called her one of the 100 most important people of 2023. She coined the term ‘Oyster-Tecture’, a method of using oyster shells to create ‘living breakwaters’ that not only help clean the water of New York Harbor, but also will help calm the waves during the next superstorm. 

You can hear her in episode 4 of Water Talks, ‘Too Dirty’. This is the longer version of my interview with her during the New York Water Week and the UN Water conference in 2023.