New Documentary Explores the Natural Wonders of NYC’s Jamaica Bay Through One of Its Most-Beloved Characters
Broad Channel is one of the lesser known of New York City’s 350 or so neighborhoods, a community of a few thousand residents on the only populated island in Jamaica Bay, directly across from JFK airport.
The Queens hamlet looks like a tiny seaside town, with modest houses on canals where the calls of ospreys and gulls juxtapose with the rumble of the A train and planes taking off and landing.
“A lot of people in New York don’t even know this exists,” says journalist and filmmaker Natalie Ruiz-Pérez, who for more than a year chronicled the work of local legend Don Riepe, the guardian of Jamaica Bay, who lives in Broad Channel and has devoted his life to protecting the bay and introducing other New Yorkers to the natural wonders and wildlife living in their backyard.
Ruiz-Pérez collaborated with fellow Columbia Journalism School graduate student Naeem Amarsy on the documentary “Tide and Time” (seen here for the first time), an outgrowth of their respective reporting on water-related topics.
“We both wanted to make a film about how climate change and sea level rise is affecting communities in New York City, but we didn’t want it to be a film that was straightforwardly about science,” said Amarsy. “We wanted something more subtle, poetic and implied, and we were able to do that through Don. People really consider him a public personality within the nature conservation circles in New York City.”
Filmmakers Naeem Amarsy and Natalie Ruiz-Pérez.
Broad Channel has repeatedly flooded; Riepe said his kitchen was under more than five feet of water during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. But it doesn’t take a hurricane: a full moon and a northeast wind are enough to send water seeping into his home. Around his island, the salt marshes of Jamaica Bay are also one of New York’s most important buffers against sea level rise and storms, but are shrinking as a result of climate change.
“Tide and Time” follows Riepe as he introduces fellow New Yorkers to the bay and its animal inhabitants like snakes, egrets, ducks, geese and horseshoe crabs through tours.
“What has always motivated him to keep doing what he’s doing, to live where he lives, and do what he does, is to help others appreciate the beauty,” said Ruiz-Pérez, “and do our best to protect it.”
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Erin Schulte is an editor and writer based in Washington, D.C. Before coming to Inside Climate News, she was a senior editor at Fast Company and at Hearst Magazines Digital Media, and was a reporter and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, covering the U.S. equities market for WSJ.com. She began her career as a city hall reporter at The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, and has also worked at newspapers in Nebraska, Washington, Michigan, and Iowa. A South Dakota native, she has a degree in journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.