Landscape ArchitectureSebastijan Jemec

Hemlocks At The End Of The Line: Tracing the Relationship of Historic Anthropogenic Impacts on the Hemlock Forests of the Catskill Mountains to the NYC Municipal Water Supply

This project looks at the Catskill Mountains as a territory shaped by historic cycles of extraction, operationalization, conservation, regulation, and evolution rather than as a natural landscape. The successional trajectories and changes of forest typologies are traced from precolonial history through various waves of exploitation from logging, land clearing for agriculture, to rapid deforestation by the tanning industry, abandonment and regrowth, and eventual reactionary conservation and preservation efforts. The riparian Hemlock forests of today are framed within a legacy of human intervention that has directly shaped the ecology and landscape of the Catskills region, and are directly connected to the development of New York City, some 120 miles south, whose municipal water supply is the largest unfiltered system in the world and comes from the Catskill Mountains watershed.