Before New York, there was nature. After New York, there will also be nature. Nature was, is, and forever will be a co-creator of the city we call home. The more closely we align our lives with the ways in which nature operates, the longer our city will endure and the richer and more profound our lives will become.
To see the nature of the place we now call the City of New York, ecologist Dr. Eric W. Sanderson and colleagues have spent more than 25 years reconstructing lives of the inhabitants of this remarkably rich and diverse coastal landscape as it existed on September 12, 1609, on the eve of a visit by the English navigator in Dutch employ, Henry Hudson. We call the landscape that became New York City Welikia, a borrowed word from the Munsee-Lenape language that means “my good home.”
Welikia was exceptionally productive and diverse, providing home to thousands of species and to the Indigenous Lenape people for 8,000 to 10,000 years before Hudson arrived. Enter to see the city like you’ve never seen it before, learn about the origins of place, and to appreciate the ways in which we have, do, and can shape our good home.
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