Photo by A. Miller-Rushing.

Susan Peters, who moved from the East Coast to Tucson, Ariz., a couple of years ago, calls her adopted town an “oasis” -- never mind that it only gets 12.6 inches of rain each year on average. “I have a very green, beautiful yard with desert-adapted plants, not the East Coast kind of thing,” she says.

She especially likes her 35-year-old saguaro cactus -- the kind “you always see in Westerns,” she says. But if her cactus is ever going to land a starring role in the movies, it’s going to need to grow some arms, and Peters says that could take another 40 years. It’s also going to require water -- lots of it, and somehow it doesn’t look as if that’s in the cards. In recent decades, the Tucson area has suffered the grip of a combination of sustained drought and high temperatures possibly unrivaled since medieval times.

Almost as good as a parking lot: An artist's rendering of the completed river restoration in downtown Yonkers. (Image by City of Yonkers.)

For nearly 100 years, New York’s fourth largest city sat on top of a hidden river. The Saw Mill, or Nepperhan ("rapid little water," its original Native American name), rose and fell with the seasons beneath a crowded parking lot in downtown Yonkers. Tiny fish struggled to carry on the cycles of life in its darkened waters, even as a bustling city above wrestled its way through a whipsaw economy.

The river ran through the center of town, and had played a central role in its history -- as early as the 1600s, it inspired the mills and industries that powered the town’s expansion. But by the early 2000s, the Saw Mill had not been seen in downtown Yonkers in living memory. Then a few imaginative residents had the idea that if the city could bring new life to the river, the river could help sustain the city.

Sanitation workers handle drums of DDT at the Brookfield landfill in 1971. (Photo by Staten Island Advance.)

It’s a clear sunny Saturday afternoon in 1972 in the idyllic suburban neighborhood of Great Kills, on New York City’s Staten Island. You’re just pulling the AMC Ambassador station wagon out of the Brookfield landfill after dropping off a couple of trash bags full of lawn clippings. You’ll stop off next door at the bakery for some cupcakes for the kids and be back in the carport in two and a half minutes, just in time to catch the Mets game over the radio out by the grill. It’ll be a good day as long as the wind keeps blowing the right direction.

Such was life near Brookfield, a landfill that was an eyesore and bane of the community for decades. But after 40 years with this unwelcome neighbor, Great Kills residents learned at a December meeting that they are finally about to have their say over what goes into the 132-acre former dump at the end of the block. An evolving spirit of partnership has begun transforming the site into a major New York City park, perhaps unique in the nation.

John McLaughlin, the ecologist managing the restoration for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, says that when completed, it will be one of the largest chunks of natural landscape in the city, and the first landfill in the United States to be converted into an “ecologically functional wetland park.”