Water Talks Tracy Metz

Episode Notes
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 Rohit Aggarwala, the Chief Climate Officer of New York City and the commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. He trained as a historian and worked as a journalist and as a consultant at McKinsey before going to work for the former Mayor Bloomberg as the head of the office of long-term Planning and Sustainability.
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.
LINKS:
ROHIT AGGARWALA
PlanNYC

"Image Credit: Rebuild by Design/The BIG Team.”

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Episode Notes
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.

LINKS: KATE ORFF

"Image Credit: Rebuild by Design/The BIG Team.”

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Episode Notes
Shownotes:
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.

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

"Image Credit: Rebuild by Design/The BIG Team.”

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Episode Notes
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.
This is a conversation with Russell Shorto. He is an American writer and a historian, a former 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 the podcast ‘Water Talks’ he walked me, Tracy Metz, through 17th century New York - or rather, New Amsterdam - and told me about the city’s intimate relationship with the water around it.
You can hear him 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.
Links:
Russell Shorto
New Amsterdam Project

"Image Credit: Rebuild by Design/The BIG Team.”

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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.
This is a conversation with ‘Mister Water’ himself: 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. This is a big moment for him: he worked for a long time to organize the first UN conference on water in almost 50 years, together with Tajikistan. It was the high point of his time as Special Envoy, and it marks the end of his term.
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.
Links: Henk Ovink

"Image Credit: Rebuild by Design/The BIG Team.”

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Episode Notes
This episode is 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, Maimounah Mohd Sharif 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 to everyone? Thad Pawlowski of Columbia University and ‘constructive activist’ Murtah Shannon of Both Ends say: absolutely not.
This show is about climate justice. That’s why this fifth episode of Water Talks is called: Too Unequal.
Links:
Maimunah Mohd Sharif

Thaddeus Pawlowski
Murtah Shannon

Henk Ovink

"Image Credit: Rebuild by Design/The BIG Team.”

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