Streambank / Catskills Community Restoration

WITH: TOOLSHED, TOWN OF PRATTSVILLE, GREENE CO SOIL & WATER CONSERVATION DISTRICT

Streambank is a community arts & restoration project currently being piloted in Prattsville, NY, that merges ecological restoration with cultural heritage, focusing on riparian buffer restoration and multispecies migration. By combining artistic practice with tangible environmental interventions, the project explores experimental land management strategies for carbon sequestration, flood mitigation, and circular economy development, ultimately nurturing deeper connections between humans and their shared landscape through a biocultural approach.

The “Streambank” project restores riparian buffers by removing itadori (aka “Japanese knotweed”) and planting willow, while exploring experimental uses of both plants through a network of artists and designers. We aim to show that long-term, non-chemical knotweed management can be self-sustaining and scalable through innovative uses of plant biomass in local circular economies, while restoring ecosystems, sequestering carbon, and making communities more resilient.

Our role in the project attends to the cultural and social dimensions that often fall outside the purview of traditional ecological restoration work—organizing people and networks, designing objects and processes, and building community—and that look beyond the here and now of our pilot site to work that is more regional and ongoing. Hence the name “Catskills Community Restoration.” This involves hosting residencies for compensated work and research at our pilot project located along a scenic stretch of Schoharie Creek in the town of Prattsville in the Northern Catskills.