Basically, New York was built on the backs of oystermen, and our streets were literally built over oyster shells.

Do you like oysters?

And then those spat are then seeded.

Reviving New York's rivers with oysters!

And the second one is when can we eat the oysters?

Here we are, back to our hero, the oyster.

And one oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day.

Many, many species depend on them.

How does the reef work? Well, it's very, very simple.

There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay.

So the oyster was the basis for a manifesto like urban design project that I did about the New York Harbor called oyster tecture.

They were key in our culture and our economy.

And also showing oyster gardening for the community along its edges.

You can see the eight chambers on the side host little baby oysters and essentially force feed them.

So rather than having 10 oysters, you have 10,000 oysters.

And already, commercial oyster larvae are dying at large scales in some places.

And the core idea of oyster tecture is to harness the biological power of mussels, eelgrass and oysters species that live in the harbor and, at the same time, harness the power of people who live in the community towards making change now.

We came back to our pile, it was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms, and the color changed to a light form.

We also learned at this time that you could eat an oyster about the size of a dinner plate in the Gowanus Canal itself.

Oyster reefs also covered about a quarter of our harbor and were capable of filtering water in the harbor in a matter of days.

But we imagine, with our calculations, that by 2050, you might be able to sink your teeth into a Gowanus oyster.

Shellfish, mussels, oysters, clams, tilapia, char these were the common species.

This image is an image of an oyster cart, which is now as ubiquitous as the hotdog cart is today.

So we were inspired by the oyster, but I was also inspired by the life cycle of the oyster.

The concept was to really knit this rope together and develop this new soft infrastructure for the oysters to grow on.

We reinterpreted this life cycle on the scale of our sight and took the Gowanus as a giant oyster nursery where oysters would be grown up in the Gowanus, then paraded down in their spat stage and seeded out on the Bayridge Reef.

And this glorious, readily available device is basically a floating raft with an oyster nursery below.

So now I want to introduce you to my new hero in the global climate change war, and that is the eastern oyster.

And finally, how much fun it would be to watch the flupsy parade and cheer on the oyster spats as they go down to the reef.

Architect Kate Orff sees the oyster as an agent of urban change. Bundled into beds and sunk into city rivers, oysters slurp up pollution and make legendarily dirty waters clean thus driving even more innovation in oyster tecture. Orff shares her vision for an urban landscape that links nature and humanity for mutual benefit.

So, albeit a very small creature and very modest, this creature is incredible, because it can agglomerate into these mega reef structures.

Finally, oysters can attenuate and agglomerate onto each other and form these amazing natural reef structures.

It can move from a fertilized egg to a spat, which is when they're floating through the water, and when they're ready to attach onto another oyster, to an adult male oyster or female oyster, in a number of weeks.

In fact I love the fact, I just have to mention this Rome in fact used to import oysters from London, at one stage. I think that's extraordinary.

But since we ate all the oysters and we ate all the fish that would eat the plankton, there's nothing to eat the plankton and there's more and more of it, so it dies of old age, which is unheard of for plankton.

For example, the proposed Financial Transactions Tax in the European Union implies a wide ranging impost generating more than 50 billion a year to shore up the EU s own finances and save the euro. The fact that 60 70 of the receipts would come from London is an added attraction for its continental advocates.

Compared to the body of an oyster, for example, chimpanzees and humans are at least 99 identical bone for bone, muscle for muscle, nerve for nerve, organ for organ. If anything, the DNA comparison underestimates the profound similarity of the human and ape bodies in the great tapestry of nature.