In 2007 artist Eve S. Mosher used beacons and chalk to mark the projected high water line in Brooklyn and Manhattan. (Battery Park photo by Hose Cedeno courtesy highwaterline.org)
Artist Eve Mosher in 2007 (Photo courtesy highwaterline.org)
“I never wanted this to be a reality,” artist Eve Mosher wrote on her website the week Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New York and New Jersey. ”Five years ago I couldn’t have even imagined it.”
In 2007 Mosher created High Water Line, a public art project in Manhattan and Brooklyn that brought the topic of climate change directly to the city’s residents. Using topographic maps, satellite images, research from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, and a Heavy Hitter (a machine typically used to draw chalk lines on ball fields), Moser walked 70 miles of New York coastline, drawing a blue chalk line on the ground ten feet above sea level—the anticipated high water line due to climate change. In other areas, where she was unable to draw a line, she marked the high water boundary with illuminated beacons.
“High Water Line” in the West Village as Eve Mosher drew it in 2007 (Photo courtesy evemosher.com)
(Photo by Curtis Hamilton for The Canary Project courtesy highwaterline.org)
Installing beacons beside the Brooklyn Bridge (Photo courtesy highwaterline.org)
Sea life inside one of the beacons that Eve Mosher installed in New York (Photo courtesy highwaterline.org)
Elizabeth Kolbert describes Eve’s project in a recent issue of The New Yorker :
Ten feet above sea level was the height that waters were expected to reach in New York during a hundred-year flood. Owing to climate change, though, the whole concept of a hundred-year flood was becoming obsolete. By the twenty-twenties, according to a report that Mosher read by a scientist at Columbia University, what used to be a hundred-year flood could be happening once every forty years. By the twenty-fifties, as sea levels continued to rise, it would become a twenty-year event. And by the twenty-eighties it could be occurring as often as once every four years. Mosher couldn’t understand why a projection like this wasn’t a major topic of discussion in Washington. In fact, it wasn’t being discussed at all.
As Mosher made her way around Brooklyn and, later, Manhattan, she hoped that the High Water Line, as she called her project, would prompt people to ask her what she was doing. “I wanted to leave this visually interesting mark, to open up a space for conversation,” she said last week
The audaciousness of Mosher’s project allowed her to engage with an economically and racially diverse group of residents. As she walked through neighborhoods, she talked to people, handed out flyers, and explained her motivations for drawing a 70-mile line through their communities. Workshops, education booklets, and a website were also an integral part of the project.
Eve Mosher talking with residents during her High Water Line project (Photo courtesy evemosher.com)
Tracing the “High Water Line” along the battery (Photo by Hose Cedeno courtesy highwaterline.org)
Beacons marking the high water line in Battery Park (Photo by Hose Cedeno courtesy highwaterline.org)
