Excerpt from The Villager

Photos by Jeremy Schaller

The Masters of Succession (MoS) Collective has recently been teaching people in the East Village and Lower East Side how to make — and then, even more fun, throw! — beneficial mud balls to help clean up polluted waterways. The collective’s Dee Dee Maucher led a workshop at M’Finda Kalunga Community Garden, in S.D.R. Park at Rivington and Chrystie Sts., last Friday evening. These balls would later be tossed into Brooklyn’s toxic Gowanus Canal. The balls pack EM, developed in Japan in the 1960s, which powers away pollutants. “They cleaned up Penang Bay in three years — they put in millions of mud balls,” Maucher said. Resembling oversize Dunkin’ Donuts chocolate munchkins, the cleansing clumps must be air-dried and fermented for two weeks before using. The event was part of the S.D.R. Park Sustainability Series on Friday evenings in which Time’s Up! and Green Map System are teaming up with the garden. In addition to the mud balls, the environmentalists have also been throwing oyster shells into the East River at Sixth St., to help re-create the city’s once-flourishing oyster banks.

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