vassel: you know, in the beginning, it was just people that came to help. we said, "hey, can you help collect metal, debris, and wood from the island?" and people showed up. "does anybody have a barge we can use?" people showed up. we were trying to stop the erosion on the midden. local business donated oysters to help us shore that up, so there was a lot of people in the community that came out to help with those efforts. koch: what we're standing on is the midden. a midden is a buildup of material, in this case, shells, mostly clam shells, that were deposited here by people over thousands of years, and so there's enough deposited here where it's raised this area a few feet. immediately after this got cleaned up, we noticed a bird community that moved in, shorebirds, and the invasive grasses were excluding shorebirds from feeding, right? there's this macroinvertebrate community that was being covered up, and i would say, between the sheet piling, the grasses, and all of our other native plantings, it really helped stabilize the area. vassel: as the island