Luiz Amorim
Driving through the New Jersey Meadowlands I’ve seen miles of golden waves along disturbed waterfronts. Once a thriving estuarine marsh, the Meadowlands were later gutted by extractive industry, poisoned by heavy metal runoff and slashed by the New Jersey Turnpike. What remains is a flooded expanse overtaken by a highway and a sea of phragmites — the aftermath of industrial ruin. Landscape architect Peter Del Tredici reminds us that phragmites are not always the problem, but rather a symptom: ‘Simply remove the I-95 highway, restore tidal flow—and the marsh will return.’ 1 Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, an 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River and lined with oil fields and petrochemical plants, was once home to vast salt marshes. This landscape too has been overtaken by ghost forests of phragmites as one of the few species that can survive its heavily contaminated air, water and soils. It is a species that stands in solidarity with the hundreds of environmental justice communities who live and work amidst the contamination.
From the oil fields of Cancer Alley to the highway shoulders of the Meadowlands, to the channelled edges of the RISD farm, phragmites emerge again and again. They are the othered survivors of forgotten places. Their dance speaks to the ghosts of extraction, displacement and neglect that lie beneath the surface.
And still — they stand. They whisper. They move. Not invaders but witnesses of a weeping landscape.
Brian Tarnowski, The Guardian
facing page, top: entering the seeming inpenetrability of phragmites. far left: Barrington Beach, Rhode Island left: Aerial photograph of my meander at Barrington Beach, RI
this page top: New Jersey Turnpike on flooded Meadowlands right: Oil refinery in a field of phragmites
1 Peter Del Tredici, ‘The Flora of the Future’, Places Journa l, April 2014. Accessed 15 Jul 2025. https://doi. org/10.22269/140417
29 on site review 47 :: standing still
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