The Newtown Creek Sewer Shed is known for the pollution that reigns supreme over the creek and prevents people from wanting to confront how humans have allowed for conditions to become so horrible. The city created the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, using the portion of the money given by the Department of Environmental Protection left for artwork after the creation of the treatment plant (Ruen). The Newtown Creek Nature Walk, through the irony of its own existence, presents humans’ mistakes and misjudgments regarding the treatment of the environment.
The Newtown Creek Nature Walk presents an ironic perspective of what humans have made of "nature" in the quest for progress in industrialization #bcsfh2ohttps://t.co/sQDGbDTs0G
— Naveera Arif (@NaveeraArif) November 28, 2017
With a “brutalist” concrete pathway, the “nature” we see is that of the wastewater pools, a sewage treatment plant, and the large metallic buildings of our post-industrialist era, instead of pretty green forests and butterflies we would normally expect from a nature walk (Ruen). The water of creek is murky with visible rainbow swirls of oil when the sun is out. Grass is nonexistent; the only thing you can see is large slabs of concrete and gravel. This nature walk puts all of the effects we have had on our Earth on display for people to be confronted by the byproducts of careless industrialization that did not take into account the importance of the environment.
It inadvertently provides support for the idea of sustainability, in which the environment, society, and the economy, along with technology, work together to both help the earth and improve the well-being of humans. Maybe if we utilize the environment properly, the Newtown Creek Nature Walk can actually show nature as we would expect it to be.
