Water Talks

From her location in the US, Pam Ferris-Olsen – storyteller, artist and advocate – travels the world digitally to talk with women about their connection with water for her project Women Mind the Water. I am delighted to join her to talk about my podcast Water Talks in this impressive line-up, including performance artist Sarah Cameron Sunde who also is a speaker in episode 3: Too Little.

Here’s the video of our conversation and the podcast:

https://womenmindthewater.com/artivist-series/artivist-series-tracy-metz

In this 10th and last episode of Water Talks, I meet Rohit Aggarwala, the Chief Climate Officer of New York City and the commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. He is deeply invested in using storm protection measures to not just build walls, but to make the city a better place for the people who live there, to give the city what he calls ‘a livable waterfront’. I spoke with him about the city’s sewers, about making the city more resilient with measures ranging from seawalls to rain gardens, and about the water around New York, which has gotten so clean that there are even dolphins swimming in it. But we can’t yet eat the oysters that grow there.

Rohit trained as a historian and worked as a journalist and as a consultant at McKinsey before going to work for former Mayor Bloomberg as the head of the office of long-term Planning and Sustainability. 

Listen to it here:

Landscape architect Kate Orff 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. 

This is the Big Five, the companion series to the podcast Water Talks, with five one-on-one longer interviews with some of the extraordinary speakers from the main episodes. You can hear her in episode 4 of Water Talks, ‘Too Dirty’. The podcast Water Talks was made during the New York Water Week and the UN Water conference in 2023.

Listen to it here:

Matthijs Bouw is a Dutch architect and urban designer who has lived in New York now for eight years. With his studio One Architecture and Urbanism he is working on ‘The Big U’, ten miles of infrastructure around the tip of Manhattan. His designs not only protect the island from storms, but also provide the local communities with valuable public space. Matthijs is also a professor of climate resilience at Penn University and the first Rockefeller Urban Resilience Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation.

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. You can hear Matthijs in episode 2 of Water Talks, ‘Too Much’. I spoke with him on the occasion of the New York Water Week and the UN Water conference in 2023.

Listen to it here:

Russell Shorto is an American writer and a historian, my predecessor as director of the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam and the author of ‘The Island at the Center of the World’, about New York in the seventeenth century when it was the Dutch colony New Amsterdam. He recently founded the New Amsterdam Project, under the auspices of the New York Historical Society. For this podcast he walked me through 17th century New York – or rather, New Amsterdam – and told me about the city’s intimate relationship with the water around it.

This is the Big Five, the companion series to the podcast Water Talks, with one-on-one interviews with some of the extraordinary speakers from the main episodes. You can also hear Russell in episode 2 of Water Talks, ‘Too Much’. This is the longer version of my interview with him during the New York Water Week and the UN Water conference in 2023.

Listen to it here:

‘Mister Water’: that was President Obama’s nickname for Henk Ovink. He was influential in shaping planning and water policy in the Netherlands, but he really made his name as a member of the task force Obama created in response to Hurricane Sandy. For the past eight years, he has been the Netherlands’ special envoy for International Water Affairs. He worked for a long time to organize the first UN conference on water in almost 50 years, together with Tajikistan. This is a big moment for him: the conference was the high point of his time as Special Envoy, and it marks the end of his term.

This is the Big Five, the companion series to the podcast Water Talks, with one-on-one interviews with some of the extraordinary speakers from the main episodes. You can hear him in episode 1 of Water Talks, ‘Too Close for Comfort’. This is the longer version of my interview with him during the New York Water Week and the UN Water conference in 2023.

Listen to it here:

Water Talks is a podcast about water: too much, too little, too dirty and … too unequal. During the UN Water conference, the first one in almost 50 years, and the New York Water Week, I spoke to a diverse group of people in New York and the Netherlands – artists, activists, academics, engineers, policy makers – about how we can and should move forward in order to save ourselves and our planet from the water crisis. This is the fifth episode: Too Unequal.

It’s about climate justice, about the tension between water as a source of profit and water as a basic human right. After all, if clean water has to be profitable, some people, lots of people, are sure to lose out. As the director of UN Habitat, Maimunah Mohd Sharif (photo) is dedicated to helping the global south get access to clean water and sanitation. Do we need big business to build the big infrastructure that brings clean water and safety to everyone? Thad Pawlowski of Columbia University and ‘constructive activist’ Murtah Shannon of Both Ends say: absolutely not. 

Listen to it here:

Water Talks is a podcast about water: too much, too little, too unequal and … too dirty. There is less and less potable water on the planet and what we do have is getting dirtier and dirtier. We’ve let ourselves ruin this essential resource for the sake of profit, or out of sheer carelessness. The Netherlands is good at keeping the water out, but Europe puts us at the bottom of its league when it comes to the quality of rivers and lakes.

In this week’s episode, called ‘Too Dirty’, we meet people who are raising the red flag, such as Li An Phoa of the Drinkable Rivers movement and the Dutch minister of Infrastructure and Water Management Mark Harbers – in New York he called on business to clean up its act! And did you know that oysters are fantastic water filters? (See me standing on a mountain of empty oyster shells on Governor’s Island). They’re cleaning up New York Harbor as we speak, thanks to the Billion Oyster Project, an idea based on landscape architect Kate Orff’s ideas about ‘Oyster-Tecture’. 

Listen to it here: