The Green-Wood Cemetery gates are surprising and delightful just to look at, but did you know that living inside is a group of colorful, squawking monk parrots? Originally from Argentina, how they got here is as confounding as their presence. Was it crate that broke on the tarmac at JFK Airport? People releasing pets? The story is murky, but the way these birds affect the local ecology might be even more interesting.

The Gowanus Canal is one of New York's prime examples of what happens when industrialization proceeds with impunity. This once-vital transportation artery (connected to the Buttermilk Channel and the Erie and Atlantic Basins, all surrounding the neighborhood of Red Hook - a "sailor town" if ever there was one), it is now an infamous superfund site, along with Greenpoint and Long Island City's Newtown Creek--and for similar reasons. This 1928 image depicts a tugboat-pulling barge on the Canal. Note the wharf with barrels and assorted debris at left, the docked barge reading "Lackawanna Railroad", and the warehouses, factories, and smokestacks at right. By the 1990s, it was recognized as one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States.

Waterfront industrialization is both a vital piece of Brooklyn's history and one with deep environmental impacts. Domino Sugar was the flagship brand of the American Sugar Refining Company, which was founded by Henry Havemeyer in 1891. In 1857, Havemeyer, Townsand, and Co. created a refinery on South Third Street in Williamsburg, where undeveloped land, a deep-water harbor, and abundant cheap labor soon attracted other sugar refineries. When it opened, Havemeyer’s refinery had a daily capacity of 300,000 pounds of raw sugar – more than all other New York City refineries combined. By the 1870s, the figure was more than 1 million pounds a day, and Havemeyer was employing 1000 workers for each shift. Sugar refining was the city’s most profitable industry from 1870 until its decline during WWI.

If during the 19th century, New York's coastlines were ravaged by industry, by the 21st century, they've become vulnerable to rising tides and extreme weather patterns. In a 2012 New York Times article that appeared just after Hurricane Sandy, the author observes, "In retrospect, after the storm, it looked like a perverse stroke of urban planning. Many of New York City’s most vulnerable people had been housed in its most vulnerable places: public housing projects along the water, in areas like the Rockaways, Coney Island, Red Hook, and Alphabet City." In fact, this was very intentional marginalization, an effort begun in the middle of the 20th century. Now flood resiliency initiatives have become a central part of environmental activism in these communities. Louis Valentino Pier, Red Hook.

In the late 1920s and ’30s, Columbia Smelting and Refining Works operated on the corner of Hicks and Lorraine Streets in Red Hook. By 2012, testing indicated that lead levels on the sports fields on Bay Street had reached toxic heights. While the Environmental Protection Agency officially classified the area as brownfields at that time, it's taken fully 7 years for the playing fields to be shuttered for remediation, exposing thousands of Red Hook residents to dangerous levels of lead in the meantime.

Given the circumstances, it seems impossible to avoid saying something about beating a dead horse. Between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, Dead Horse Bay endured relentless pollution from the nearly two-dozen factories ringing the marsh (horse-rendering; fish oil) and surrounding garbage incinerators. As if that weren't enough, once the plants closed, the marsh itself was used as a landfill. Over capacity by the 1950s, a burst cap (too little, too late) resulted in garbage literally spewing continually onto the beach and into the ocean. Nowadays, according to Atlas Obscura, "Thousands upon thousands of bottles, broken and intact, many over 100 years old, litter the shore. Other hardy bits of trash pepper this beach of glass: leather shoe soles, rusty telephones, and scores of unidentifiable pieces of metal and plastic. The beach is usually empty, conjuring a quiet, eerie post-doomsday kind of scene."

Coney Island, another low-lying, coastal community, has also been beset by corporate pollution later exacerbated by extreme weather. Coney Island Creek is composed of two sea inlets, one dividing Coney Island from Gravesend, and the other separating Sheepshead Bay from Manhattan Beach. In fact, along with Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal, Coney Island Creek ranks among the most polluted sites in Brooklyn. For years, a nearby housing complex—Beach Haven, owned at the time by Fred Trump—was illegally pouring 200,000 gallons of raw sewage into the creek on a daily basis, and residents who used the waterway for recreation and fishing were never warned. Hurricane Sandy caused the toxic waters to overflow into the surrounding neighborhood, resulting in significant damage and contamination.

You may know that Prospect Park is 585 acres of rolling meadows, waterways and woodlands in the heart of New York’s most populous borough, but did you know that it's also home to Brooklyn’s only lake and last remaining forest? It's an important wildlife habitat that supports more than 250 species of birds, as well as largemouth bass, and bluegill and pumpkinseed sunfish. This photo was snapped by a Brooklyn Daily Eagle photographer in 1954, during the Abraham & Straus Junior Angler Fishing Contest in Prospect Park.

Though New York State legislation allocated 39 acres for a botanic garden in 1897, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden did not officially open to the public until 1911. In 1915, it became home to one of the first public Japanese gardens in the United States. This photograph depicts the lagoon, greenhouses, and the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, which later became the Brooklyn Museum.