A drag queen discusses the Emerald Tutu in the winning video entry for the 2018 MIT “Climate Changed” competition. Watch the video here.

It was the drag queen that drew me in. Of course, any climate project named the “Emerald Tutu” would pique my interest, but using a drag queen on their official website to promote coastal resilience? This was no longer a fascinating project for this climate journalist to write about: it was destiny.

Welcome to the Emerald Tutu, a trailblazing “seapunk,” queer, and award-winning nature-based solution to protect Bostonians from the climate crisis.

A wardrobe upgrade for Boston’s coasts

A model of the Emerald Tutu along Boston’s shoreline. Photo credits: MIT

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Gabriel Cira, co-creator and project lead of the Emerald Tutu. Before our conversation, I scrolled through the ET website, learning about the project and how it works. While the tagline that I wrote above: “a net of floating plant life” is sufficient for a subheader, the actual mechanics of the Emerald Tutu are much more complex. Asked to describe the project in lay terms, Cira says:

“[It’s] a new type of infrastructure, one that uses the structural properties of plants rather than the structural properties of concrete and steel, in order to help the urban coastlines, infrastructure, and neighborhoods change and adapt to a new climate situation where there’s intensified storms, rising sea levels and more frequent flooding.”

He explains that the project’s use of plant power in lieu of carbon-intensive materials is representative of an exciting new direction for municipal infrastructure in the age of the climate crisis. But before we dug into the nuts and bolts–or, really, seeds and soil–of the Tutu, I asked Cira about its origins.

An architect by trade, Cira created the Emerald Tutu concept with Dr. Julia Hopkins, an environmental engineering professor at Northeastern University and coastal hydrology expert. The pair designed the Tutu in 2018, naming it after Boston’s “Emerald Necklace,” the famous chain of public parks that loop around the city.

Their early designs for the Tutu won a number of research awards which eventually snowballed into a major grant from the National Science Foundation. With the NSF funds, the Emerald Tutu bloomed, much like its floating plants. Their research team expanded, real-life prototypes were tested, and now the project regularly garners national media attention with features in publications like The Boston Globe and The Guardian.

The cutting edge of coastal resilience is in the seas, not the sand

With its seaside sprawl and busy ports, Boston, like all coastal cities, is highly vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis. The city’s sea level is expected to rise by around a foot by 2030, and bring with it increased tidal range, wave energy, erosion, and storm surges. Fortunately, former Mayor Marty Walsh kicked off a citywide resilience plan back in 2016 entitled “Climate Ready Boston”, an initiative to implement resilient infrastructure across town. Under current Mayor Michelle Wu, Climate Ready is still underway, building seawalls and elevating streets, but Cira tells me that traditional infrastructure may not be the best solution for coastal resilience.

Instead of concrete seawalls, Cira favors a new type of infrastructure modeled by the Emerald Tutu, known as nature-based solutions (NbS). In a climate context, NbS are used in the engineering world to harness the power of organic life to mitigate impacts like storm surges, flooding, and more. Cira mentions that most of the nature-based solutions we see today are stormwater focused, citing infrastructure such as parking lot swales that collect water to prevent runoff and flooding.

Nature-based solutions like swales are proven to be ecologically and economically sound, Cira explains, and thus have been largely successful as of today. However, when discussing the scope of coastal resilience, he adds that “engineering with nature for coastal protection has been kind of spotty.” He continues, “A lot of scientists, a lot of researchers, policy people, and governments are starting to think about nature-based infrastructure for coastal uses. But the truth is that the existing solutions are not really dependable enough.” Cira adds that these existing solutions, like shoreline artificial marshes, aren’t consistently successful, thus giving coastal NbS projects somewhat of a bad reputation.

Aiming to break the mold, the Emerald Tutu goes where most nature-based solutions have never gone before: offshore. True to its name, the Emerald Tutu itself is a network of interconnected floating “modules” positioned offshore, forming a Tutu-esque ruffle pattern around Boston Harbor. Salt marsh grasses and many types of seaweeds grow in the biomass substrate packed in the module’s pouch, forming a living, floating nursery of plant life.

Left: The most recent module prototype launched in May 2022. Right: The module grows grass on top and seaweed below. Both images courtesy of the Emerald Tutu’s website.

What makes the Tutu’s offshore strategy sing is its “ruffles.” The network of modules is designed in a beehive-style hexagonal pattern, with each unit tethered to its neighbors. This interconnection breaks up incoming wave energy by splitting the force between the connected modules, thus producing a “dampening” effect. In action, the multiple rows of modules intercept incoming waves, transforming a potentially destructive surge into a less powerful tide as it passes through the network. This dynamic design differs from traditional seawalls in this sense, as it interacts with incoming impacts as they approach the shore, not when they’ve already arrived.

The Emerald ethos: a symbiotic, seapunk stewardship

Behind the scientific research, an ethical commitment to a community-first, “seapunk” vision influences the Tutu’s design.

In its original form, “seapunk” refers to an early 2010s underground aesthetic with roots in vaporwave-style music and aquatic-themed fashion. In the context of the Emerald Tutu, seapunk means something different. The Tutu’s seapunk undercurrent is more akin to solarpunk, the sci-fi, nature-based futurist movement that centers community and techno-optimism. As Cira describes, the Tutu’s seapunk vision is all about challenging traditions, innovating freely, empowering the community, and even having fun. It is this seapunk affinity that weaves together what I’ll call the “Emerald ethos,” the vision for a symbiotic stewardship between nature-based infrastructure and the community it serves.

The Tutu is designed to foster a symbiotic relationship with the city. Local citizens will act as its stewards, maintaining the network as it protects their shores. Cira brings me into this vision for the Tutu as an economic and social fixture in Boston’s neighborhoods, explaining that the Tutu will be “woven into the social fabric of a local place, so people that live there are responsible for and invested in the care of their infrastructure.” Cira contrasts this symbiosis with the current steel and concrete norm, saying “it’s not responsible to build infrastructure that takes only specialized construction work that only small teams of workers can do, because you dump incredible amounts of public money into the hands of very few people.”

Instead of the stagnant steel-and-concrete norm, Cira envisions infrastructure as a living, ongoing project that “feeds” the community. “I always like to think of the idea of a nursery where nature-based solutions can be grown, harvested, and incubated until they’re ready to be launched. It could be a source of jobs and a source of livelihood for a lot of people, and that has a direct relationship with the infrastructure that it’s feeding. I think there are so many amazing possibilities to weave the economics and social stewardship with the way infrastructure works.”

The Emerald Tutu, like the plants that it grows, is a complex, living project, as much a part of the community as it is its infrastructure. After describing this symbiosis to me, Cira finishes by saying that he finds it “inspiring and even poetic that people could be so closely related with something called infrastructure in their home area.”

Empowering Eastie to build environmental justice

A screenshot of East Boston and neighboring communities on the “Massachusetts 2020 Environmental Justice Populations” map. Credits: MA EOEEA

Due to its history of environmental justice issues, East Boston is where the Emerald Tutu plans to begin its rollout, Cira tells me. If you take a look at the environmental justice (EJ) map created by the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, you will notice that East Boston and the surrounding area has one of the densest EJ populations in the state. The shades of yellow, pink, blue, and green in the map above represent varying EJ factors as established by the state Legislature, including:

• The annual median household income is 65 percent or less of the statewide annual median household income.

• Minorities make up 40 percent or more of the population.

• 25 percent or more households identify as speaking English less than “very well.”

• The annual median household income of the municipality in which the neighborhood is located does not exceed 150 percent of the statewide annual median household income.

EJ populations often suffer from environmental injustices thrust upon them by powerful actors who are difficult to challenge. For example, many East Boston residents are currently fighting the development of an electrical Eversource substation that advocates say could cause further pollution in an already polluted, congested area. As EJ communities like East Boston are limited in their ability to prevent environmental injustices, they are often seen as prime dumping grounds for waste materials.

Cira describes the menagerie of waste in Eastie with no small amount of frustration. “East Boston has been intensely polluted all the way from the days of whale oil rendering and shipbuilding to today. So there’s tar, chemicals, and whale oil leftovers there… Now you have giant piles of road salt in Chelsea Creek, you’ve got oil and jet fuel for Logan Airport pumped in, and all this has happened for decades now and there’s just incredible amounts of air and groundwater pollution.”

This historical environmental justice status, compounded with the area’s climate vulnerability, is why the Emerald Tutu is focused on East Boston, Cira tells me. “Our initial proposal looked at East Boston because it is basically the front line for coastal flooding and climate-related disasters in all of Boston. So it’s the most crucial place to think about coastal resilience right now.”

To build this coastal resilience, the Emerald Tutu seeks to empower Eastie residents to take charge of the development on their doorsteps. For the last year and a half, the Tutu team has been working with Eastie Farms, a local grassroots nonprofit that focuses on food justice and urban agriculture. Together, they created a geothermal greenhouse intended to serve as not only a place to grow food sustainably, but also to teach the community about nature. Now, Cira and his team, along with Northeastern researcher Dr. Randall Hughes, are partnering with Eastie Farms on a research proposal aiming to initiate further nature-based infrastructure projects in East Boston.

Cira describes this partnership as one that follows the lead of community leaders, not outside institutions. “What I love about it is that a community group is responsible for infrastructure. It’s an Eastie Farms project, not like an outside research institution’s project, which I find really powerful. A community group, with the help of the Emerald Tutu and an academic researcher, is taking on new types of responsibility and new types of scientific exploration.”

Will Boston don the Emerald Tutu?

As of right now, the Emerald Tutu is still in the testing phase. Cira tells me that the next step for the project is building a “floating frame” in Chelsea Creek–a circular net of pipes and ropes that will accommodate Emerald Tutu prototypes for experimentation. After a hearing on September 7, the Boston Conservation Commission voted to subject the floating frame proposal to further review before approval. Now, the Tutu team is currently moving through the bureaucratic process to get the floating frame project approved as quickly as possible.

Cira tells me that if the floating frame is able to get in the water soon, Bostonians could expect to see the Emerald Tutu in the harbor by 2024. While the Conservation Commission is currently stalling progress, I expect that, with Mayor Michelle Wu’s Green New Deal plans for Boston, any further red tape will be in short supply.

Cira is hopeful for the Tutu’s future. “I want to make it happen and I hope the city will work with us and test it out. A Green New Deal city is a powerful thing, and I hope that we can be a part of that.”

Joey Wolongevicz is a freelance journalist covering the climate crisis and environmental issues for the Boston Hassle.