Science

A Fungi Pioneer’s Lifelong Work on Exhibit

Published

2 months ago

March 25, 2025

A Fungi Pioneer’s Lifelong Work on Exhibit

On an early summer day in 1876 near Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, a middle-aged woman carrying three large, putrid mushrooms repulsed fellow travelers riding a horse-drawn trolley car.

Even wrapped in paper, the stench of the aptly named stinkhorn mushrooms was overpowering, but the woman stifled a laugh upon overhearing two other passengers gripe about the swarm of flies around them. The smell didn’t bother her. All she cared about was getting the specimens home to study them, she would later write.

This was Mary Elizabeth Banning, a self-taught mycologist who, over the course of nearly four decades, conducted seminal research on the fungi of her state, Maryland.

Miss Banning characterized thousands of specimens that she found in Baltimore and the surrounding countryside, identifying 23 species new to science at the time.

A gifted artist, she collected these observations into a manuscript called “The Fungi of Maryland.” It consisted of 175 stunning watercolor plates, each an accurate yet intimate portrait of a given species, along with detailed scientific descriptions and anecdotes about collecting the mushrooms.

The manuscript was Miss Banning’s life’s work, and she yearned to see it published. But it ended up in a drawer at the New York State Museum in Albany, forgotten for almost a century.

A selection of her watercolors makes up the backbone of an exhibition at the museum that opened this month and runs until Jan. 4 of next year. The exhibition, called “Outcasts,” recognizes Miss Banning’s long-overlooked scientific legacy as well as the museum’s mycology collection, which is one of the most historically significant in the country, according to Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, the museum’s mycology curator, who conceived the exhibition.

Miss Banning called fungi “vegetable outcasts.” Back then (and all the way until 1969) fungi were classified as a peculiar type of plant. Most botanists from the mid-19th century viewed their study as a research backwater.

Miss Banning herself was an outcast. “She wanted very much to be part of the scientific community,” said John Haines, who was the museum’s mycology curator until he retired in 2005 and who has extensively researched her history. But as a woman living in the 19th century, that path was largely closed to her.

Similar to contemporaries such as Beatrix Potter, who also sought to make her mark on the emerging field of mycology, “the sentiment was, ‘Well, you go home and make your pictures,’” Dr. Haines said.

One scientist did give her the time of day: Charles Horton Peck, who worked at the museum as New York’s first state botanist from 1868 to 1913. Mr. Peck, a pre-eminent figure in American mycology, dedicated most of his career to fungi, collecting more than 33,000 specimens in surveys across New York and describing more than 2,700 new species in his annual reports.

“A lot of the fungi that people recognize from New York or from the Northeast are ones that Peck described,” Dr. Kaishian said.

Miss Banning first wrote Mr. Peck in 1878, asking for feedback on her manuscript. Unlike other scientists she had tried to contact, he wrote back, and they corresponded for nearly 20 years. Her letters, some of which are exhibited, offer a window into their relationship.

“You are my only friend in the debatable land of fungi,” she wrote to him in 1879. She chronicled her collecting forays and scientific observations, and relayed her dreams for the manuscript. “I have a powerful will,” she wrote in 1889. “I have made up my mind to brave defeat sooner than not make an effort to have the plants of Maryland published.”

Miss Banning’s letters were often whimsical and passionate. None of Mr. Peck’s letters to her remain, but his tone in other letters suggested he was much more restrained. Nevertheless, he treated Miss Banning like a respected colleague — offering her scientific mentorship, publishing descriptions of species with her support and even naming species after her. Their scientific bond was undeniable.

“This is a love story, but not between the two people — they were both in love with fungi,” Mr. Haines said. A play he wrote about their relationship drawing from Miss Banning’s letters will be performed at the museum on April 4 at a gallery opening event for the exhibition.

Love triangles, though, are especially prone to turning sour. With no publishing prospects of her own in sight, Miss Banning sent her manuscript to Mr. Peck in 1890, hoping that he could publish it. “He would have had the resources to make it a permanent part of the mycological record,” Dr. Kaishian said. But he never did.

Although she expressed how difficult it was to part from the work and begged him to reassure her that he appreciated its contribution to the field, she did not receive such recognition. “It seems to me by her letters that she died without really understanding the legacy, the value of her work,” Dr. Kaishian said.

In one of her last letters to Mr. Peck in 1897, six years before she died, destitute and alone in a rooming house in Virginia, Miss Banning lamented the book’s loss. “I hardly know how I ever came to part with my illustrated book,” she wrote. “To tell you the truth, I long to see it and call it my own once more, but this could never be.”

“That just still brings tears to my eyes,” Dr. Haines said.

It was Dr. Haines who originally brought Miss Banning’s manuscript to light.

An eccentric curator showed it to him when he visited the museum for a job interview in 1969. He recalls being dazzled by the colors, which were superbly preserved by the fact that the pages had not been open to sunlight for decades.

He exhibited some of the paintings in 1981, and they were shown a few more times, including in Talbot County, Md., where Miss Banning was born. With the help of this spotlight, Miss Banning was inducted into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994. But since the mid-1990s, in part because the pigments degrade quickly in the light, the pictures had been packed away.

Beyond Miss Banning’s work, “Outcasts” gives visitors a glimpse into the broader historical context of mycology. “Fungi are enormously critical organisms that, going back hundreds of millions of years, have shaped the very texture of the earth,” Dr. Kaishian said. “But their stories are still mysterious and often neglected.”

In addition to Miss Banning’s watercolors and letters, the exhibition includes a host of other artifacts and experiences. Visitors can explore one of Peck’s microscopes and mushroom specimens collected by Miss Banning as well as ones collected recently by Dr. Kaishian, or marvel at a set of strikingly realistic wax sculptures of New York fungi made for the museum in 1917 by an artist, Henri Marchand, and his son Paul.

Murals made by museum artists illustrate the biology of fungi, the role they play in the ecosystem and their evolutionary history. A rare fossil of Prototaxites, a 30-foot-tall fungus that lived during the Devonian period about 400 million years ago, points to just how significantly the Earth has changed over time.

Overall, Dr. Kaishian said she hoped that the exhibition demonstrated why natural history collections like this one deserve public support and preservation.

The 150-year-old specimens hidden in cabinets that visitors rarely see help scientists map the limits of different organisms, both geographically and genetically — and that makes it possible to document changes to biological diversity in the face of climate change, for example.

“Natural history collections are active repositories for contemporary research,” Dr. Kaishian said. “There needs to be a lot more science communication about what goes on here and why it matters.”

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Science

In Their Final Moments, a Pompeii Family Fought to Survive

Published

6 hours ago

May 11, 2025

Press Room

In Their Final Moments, a Pompeii Family Fought to Survive

One day in the year 79, Pompeii came under fire. The explosion of nearby Mount Vesuvius sent a mushroom cloud of ash and rock into the atmosphere, pummeling the ancient Roman trading hub and resort in a ceaseless hail of tiny volcanic rocks.

Many residents ran for their lives, trying to find safety with their loved ones before searing volcanic debris buried the estimated 1,500 residents who remained in Pompeii.

In a study published last month in the journal Scavi di Pompei, scientists documented events at one home in the doomed city where a family sought refuge inside a back room by pushing a wooden bed against a door in a vain attempt to stop a flood of volcanic rocks from the sky, known as lapilli.

The small-but-well-appointed residence is known as the House of Helle and Phrixus, after a richly decorated fresco in the dining room. It depicts the mythological siblings Phrixus and Helle escaping their wicked stepmother on a winged ram only to have Helle fall and, ominously, drown in the sea below.

As with many ancient Roman residences, its atrium, an open-roof room centrally located in the home, was used for ventilation and rainwater collection. But on that day, the recess allowed volcanic rock to more rapidly overtake the space. Most Pompeians “had no clue what was happening,” said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, an author of the study and the director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. “Many thought the end of the world had come,” he added.

In the years that followed, the hot ash that eventually buried the home solidified and left an imprint that archaeologists filled with plaster to reconstruct the shape of the wooden bed that remained. The technique helps illustrate the horror of the Pompeian dead in their final moments and how perishable everyday items made of wood, textiles and leather were situated in their environments.

The skeletal remains of four people, most likely members of the same family, were identified in the study. The lapilli, which reached heights as high as nine feet in some locations, could not be controlled, and researchers believe the people made a final attempt to escape, leaving the small room in which they had barricaded themselves. They got only as far as the triclinium, the formal dining room where their remains were found.

“The family in the House of Helle and Phrixus probably died when the so-called pyroclastic flow, an avalanche of hot ash and toxic gas, arrived and parts of the building collapsed,” Dr. Zuchtriegel said.

He and his colleagues suggest that the remains of the four people found in the home were from a family that stayed behind and may have included some enslaved members who worked at the residence. Still, archaeologists don’t know for sure if they lived there or simply took refuge after the homeowners had already escaped.

“It’s not certain that the individuals found in the house as victims were part of the family,” said Marcello Mogetta, an associate professor of Roman art and archaeology at the University of Missouri who was not involved in the study.

Among the skeletal remains was a bronze bulla that belonged to a child. The ancient amulets were worn like lockets around the necks of young free boys to shield them from danger until they reached adulthood.

“The amulet was supposed to protect them, so there’s a cruel irony to the fact that it didn’t,” said Caitie Barrett, a professor of archaeology at Cornell University who was not involved in the study.

Bourbon explorers sent by Charles III in the 18th century carried out rudimentary excavations of Pompeii that disturbed the skeletal remains of the victims found in the House of Helle and Phrixus. When they tunneled into the residence in search of valuables like jewelry and artwork, they left behind holes in the walls. These early excavators often had little interest in human remains, either in respecting their preservation, dignifying their deaths or studying their material culture.

But today it’s the human toll that feels most prominent for archaeologists and for many of the visitors who regularly pour into Pompeii. Whether or not the remains belonged to those who were indeed family will be something that researchers may try to uncover through DNA analysis in the near future.

Family or not, it doesn’t change the human tragedy of the story.

“Whatever the nature of their specific relations, they would have been the last people to offer each other comfort at the end,” Dr. Barrett said.

Science

Antelope Valley residents say they are fed up with rampant dumping, official inaction

Published

8 hours ago

May 11, 2025

Press Room

Antelope Valley residents say they are fed up with rampant dumping, official inaction

Eric Eller likes to ride his dirt bikes through the canyons, dry riverbeds and rocky outcroppings of the Antelope Valley in the high desert north of Los Angeles.

Eller’s an off-the-grid kind of guy with a “Mad Max” vibe — living in a house on a remote plot of land next to a jury-rigged trailer where he tinkers with the remnants and pieces of gutted automobiles, motorcycles and other mechanical debris.

But Eller’s isolation was obliterated last June when dozens of big dump trucks began snaking up the dirt road behind his house and discarding their loads into the nearby dry river canyon. The caravan of waste-haulers continued in the days that followed, often arriving after sundown or in the dark hours before dawn.

Two months later, the convoys abruptly stopped. But not before the makeshift dump’s surface had been camouflaged with dirt and mulch — much of which has since blown away, revealing a 30-foot-deep noxious stew of chopped-up concrete, plastic tampon applicators, faded plastic children’s toys, toothbrushes, syringes, empty caulking tubes, two-by-fours, faded books, weathered Styrofoam pipe insulation, plastic bucket tops and more.

EL MIRAGE, CA – APRIL 18: A truck leaves the Circle Green mulch dump site near El Mirage on Friday, April 18, 2025. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Across the Antelope Valley, waste trucks are hauling garbage in from the Greater Los Angeles area and Central Valley towns such as Bakersfield, and then dumping it at makeshift sites. Letters, bills and envelopes visible at several of these waste sites in April showed addresses in Pacoima, Los Angeles and Van Nuys, among other cities.

“Illegal dumping has been a problem in the Antelope Valley for decades,” said Chuck Bostwick, a senior field deputy for Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who represents much of the area. “But it’s gotten worse in the last two or three years, markedly worse.”

In some cases, such as the site behind Eller’s home, the waste sites are flat-out unauthorized. No landowner has given permission to dump at the site, and the waste consists of construction, household and medical debris.

But in others cases, the waste-haulers have the landowners’ permission to dump — but are disposing waste that should be going to landfills equipped to handle household and industrial waste, lawsuits claim.

In one lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, residents claim that major residential waste-hauling companies including Athens Services, California Waste Services and Universal Waste Systems are dumping hazardous substances without authorization.

The suit claims these companies are disguising the construction and demolition debris as “green waste by unlawfully covering this waste with highly flammable wood chips and other organic waste.”

Eric Casper, the president of California Waste Services, said in an email that his company has “never engaged in dumping waste of any kind, at any time, in the Antelope Valley — legal or illegal. Nor anywhere else.”

A sneaker among the trash dumped at Adobe Mountain

Athens Services also denied any illegal dumping, saying in a statement that California’s organics recycling law “encourages sending compostable material to third parties such as farmers and other property owners for beneficial use. This is the material that Athens Services produces and distributes.”

Universal Waste Systems and other companies named in the suit didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor have they filed responses to the federal suit.

Residents say there are more than 100 dump sites scattered throughout the valley — from Lake Los Angeles to the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve and north to Mojave — that they contend are unauthorized.

Some of these sites cover hundreds of acres and extend dozens of feet deep. And residents worry that what they can see — from the roads or their homes — is just the tip of a malodorous and malignant iceberg, and that there are probably dozens more they haven’t yet identified.

They complain they are plagued by the toxic, sour and rotten-egg like smells emanating from the discarded trash that cooks in the hot sun and then wafts across their properties.

They also note that the flammable mulch and other materials in the dump, combined with a broiling desert sun, makes for an acute fire risk.

Between 2020 and 2024, the Los Angeles County Fire Department responded to 42 mulch or trash-related fires in the Antelope Valley, ranging from a quarter-acre to 22 acres, ultimately costing taxpayers roughly $1.6 million to extinguish, according to Los Angeles County documents.

Ashley Mroz, who lives in the Antelope Valley community of Neenach, said a mulch-covered dump site spontaneously combusted near her home last summer.

“It had been smoldering for days and days,” said Mroz, one of the plaintiffs in the federal court suit. “We could not even go outside. The smell was so horrific.”

And the scourge has spread beyond the dump sites: Shredded plastic debris can be seen hanging from roadside Joshua trees and creosote bushes. While a midday view across the arid landscape reveals a sea of glimmering, reflective glass shards, like the tips of cresting waves over a vast, brown ocean.

According to Antelope Valley residents and the federal suit, property owners in some cases have given permission — and received payments for — waste to be dumped on their land. Not only do these sites pose a nuisance to the neighbors who live adjacent to or near them, in some cases the material being dumped includes industrial and household waste that can leach into the groundwater.

In its statement, Athens pointed out that property owners sometimes give permission to accept material from multiple waste companies.

“To the extent there are any instances of noncompliant material, we are confident the evidence will demonstrate that it came from another source,” Athens said.

Encounter in Adelanto

On a blustery day in April in the high desert town of Adelanto, local residents watched as two dump trucks offloaded their waste into a San Bernardino county-certified organic waste dump site that is surrounded by eight- to 10-foot high berms of mulch-like waste laced with shredded plastic, insulated wires and chopped-up, plastic children’s toys.

Through a break in the berm, the residents could see that the ground around the recently dumped haul glittered in the sunlight with broken glass, while stalks of what appeared to be insulated wires and rigid plastic stood sentry across the 138-acre expanse.

Two men sitting in a silver GMC pickup truck who were watching the disposal drove over to the gawking residents.

When the residents asked who they were and what the trucks were dumping, the men declined to answer and referred questions to the owner of the property, which The Times later determined to be Kevin Sutton, the owner of a company called Circle Green Inc. Sutton didn’t respond to requests for comment.

As neighbors and a Times reporter and photographer drove away from the site, the silver pickup followed for several miles, tailgating and swerving erratically. The truck turned around only when the small caravan came across a handful of heavily armed California Fish and Game law enforcement agents parked alongside the road.

“It’s the Wild West out here,” said Kristina Brown, a Lancaster property owner who is a party to the federal suit.

A convenient dumping ground

The Antelope Valley’s proximity to Los Angeles and its vast stretches of wild desert make it a prime target for unauthorized dumping.

Sitting at roughly 3,000 feet above sea level, and surrounded by the Tehachapi, Sierra Pelona and San Gabriel mountains, the valley is also divided by jurisdiction — with Los Angeles, Kern and San Bernardino counties all claiming some territory.

“For decades, our illegal dumping was small-time stuff,” said Bostwick, Supervisor Barger’s field deputy. “It was somebody who had a sofa they couldn’t be bothered to take to the dump or they didn’t want to pay, so they dumped it out in the desert. There was commercial dumping then, but it was small time as well.”

But then the state’s waste laws changed, he said.

Starting in 1989, California began requiring municipalities to divert 50% of their waste away from landfill and toward more sustainable waste management solutions, such as recycling and compost. And as Bostwick noted, the vast open spaces of the Antelope Valley beckoned.

In 2022, lawmakers implemented Senate Bill 1383, which initially mandated the diversion of 50% of all food and organic waste away from landfills, but increased to 75% on Jan. 1, 2025. Another 2020 law closed a loophole that had allowed waste companies to dump green waste in landfill, but not have it counted against them. As a result, the need for dumping grounds increased again.

Cities, counties and towns that fail to meet the diversion rates risk fines of up to $10,000 a day.

Residents, lawmakers and experts say while the spirit of these laws is noble, in many areas of the state, the infrastructure to handle the diverted waste is lacking — especially in Southern California, where there is not nearly enough farmland or water to handle the increased volumes of green waste leaving the region’s cities and suburbs.

As a result, waste companies and haulers — trying to keep costs down and maintain city contracts — are tempted to dump the waste wherever they can, while local governments are reluctant to crack down on violations, Bostwick said.

State regulations have made “disposal much more expensive and hard to deal with, and so that’s increased the financial incentives for companies or individuals to just dump illegally,” he said.

There’s also very little enforcement.

According to Los Angeles County data, while taxpayers spent roughly $1.3 million between 2017 and 2018 to mitigate illegal waste disposal in the region, that number jumped nearly fourfold in 2022-2023, when taxpayers had to foot $4.46 million to mitigate the problem.

At the same time, the number of cases filed with the Environmental Crimes Division of the district attorney’s office decreased from 15 in 2019 to three in 2023.

In February, CalRecycle, the state’s waste agency, finalized emergency orders they say should empower local law enforcement agencies to stop the illegal disposal. Previous regulations only allowed for action against the owner of land where the disposal was occurring. The new orders allow enforcement officials to target parties that are dumping the materials and the facilities that provided the material.

The orders came after officials from the state agency came to visit the area in October 2024 — prodded by Brown, Mroz and other local residents, many of whom have spent years calling state and local officials about the problem.

Enforcement of these orders, however, is the responsibility of the county, said Lance Klug, a spokesman for the state waste agency.

“Local enforcement agencies can best speak to their enforcement actions to date, and any anticipated next steps, now that emergency regulations are in effect,” he said.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors adopted a measure last year requiring mulch suppliers to take back any contaminated or illegal waste dumped on private land. The measure, which was sponsored by Barger, also directed county agencies to require “stringent record keeping for all land application operations regarding the origin of all incoming loads and testing results from all mulch suppliers.”

County officials couldn’t immediately provide numbers recently when asked how many enforcement actions had been taken.

“There’s literally no enforcement,” said Brown, who worries that the situation is only going to get worse.

Last month, Eller was riding his dirt bike when he stumbled upon a 60-acre expanse of freshly dumped construction debris, medical waste and compost on a plot of land miles away from any major road.

The tire marks from dump trucks hadn’t yet been blown away by the incessant gales of the high desert. No fences or berms were erected to contain the site, making it impossible to see from the road or along the horizon.

He said it feels like they are living in a real-life game of whack-a-mole: As soon as he and his neighbors identify and report one site, the haulers move onto another.

And they say they feel abandoned by regulators, who they say are doing nothing to stop it.

“It feels like we’re screaming into the wind,” Brown said.

Science

At the Biennale in Venice, a Fantasy Island Imported from Mexico

Published

23 hours ago

May 11, 2025

Press Room

At the Biennale in Venice, a Fantasy Island Imported from Mexico

Mexico City’s small urban farms — known locally as chinampas — practice a sort of agriculture in reverse: instead of bringing water to land as most farms do, chinampas bring land to water.

The chinampas in use today go back about a thousand years, to when Aztec farmers began building rectangular fields on top of vast lakes and growing food for what was then the city of Tenochtitlan. There were tens of thousands of chinampas at one point, arranged in strict grids with narrow canals between them, though many were destroyed or abandoned (along with the rest of the Mesoamerican metropolis) after Hernán Cortés and his invading Spanish soldiers rearranged the civic order in 1521.

But working chinampas continue to exist in the southern Mexico City neighborhood of Xochimilco — despite continuing encroachment by developers and competition from factory farms — operating mostly as family businesses that produce heirloom lettuce, radishes, dahlias and other crops. Lately, the farms’ irrigation-friendly ways are getting fresh attention in a world rocked by climate change and suffering from widespread droughts.

Could other places around the globe borrow the idea of creating “floating islands,” as the fields are sometimes called, which are engulfed by water? A team of Mexican designers, landscapers and farmers believes the ancient technology may be widely adaptable, enough that they will recreate a chinampa for their country’s pavilion at this year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice.

“Chinampas have a simple and intelligent design, created in a collective way that benefits not only people but all of the surrounding living beings, too,” said Lucio Usobiaga, a team member who has spent the last 15 years defending the remaining chinampas through a nonprofit he founded called Arca Tierra.

Mexico’s pavilion is a neat fit for the biennial’s main exhibition, “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective,” which is intended to show design projects that address climate change in creative ways. The chinampas are at once man-made and organic and can succeed only if there is cooperation among farmers, policymakers and the growing number of tourists who float through on popular canoe tours, gazing at fields of corn and flocks of egrets and pelicans.

Promoting the chinampa as an inspiration for eco-friendly design was an obvious choice for the biennale, team members said. “Venice is also built on water and has the same kind of vulnerabilities that Xochimilco has,” noted Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo, a founder of the design firm Pedro y Juana.

They pointed out that Venice and Xochimilco were added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites in the same year, 1987, and both places are island communities navigable by boats and working to balance the positive and negative aspects of tourism.

Venice has its iconic gondolas, while Xochimilco has its trajineras, flat-bottomed vessels, decorated in bright colors and fake flowers that take visitors on party-themed excursions. Both boats are operated by pilots who push them along channels using long poles.

As for how to recreate a chinampa on-site, that took some imagination. And compromise.

The Aztecs constructed their islands over time, using reeds and branches to make fences in the mucky lake bottom. These formed boundaries for multiple layers of sediment and decaying vegetation (and sometimes human sewerage) until the islands rose far enough above water to be farmed. In addition to growing crops like corn, beans and squash — using the traditional milpa agricultural method that naturally preserves nutrients in soil — they planted trees on the corners of the islands to stabilize the land.

Mexico’s pavilion, inside the biennale’s Arsenale complex, will feature a stripped-down version, much smaller than the 500 square meters (0.12 acres) of a typical chinampa. The exhibition will be enhanced by videos produced in Mexico City featuring real chinamperos, as the farmers are called, and bleachers will be installed along the walls. Artificial lighting will replace sunshine.

In the center will be a working garden planted with vegetables, flowers and medicinal herbs. (The crops were started in an Italian nursery and transferred to the Arsenale by boat in mid-April.) They will mature during the biennale, which continues through Nov. 23.

“By the end of the biennale, we will be able to harvest corn and make tortillas,” said Mr. Usobiaga. “Before that, we can harvest beans, squash, tomatoes and chiles.”

Visitors will learn about special seed cultivation techniques that are unique to chinampas and will have the chance to plant seedlings themselves.

In a nod to local agriculture, the chinampa will also employ a version of vite maritata, a practice established in ancient Etruscan agriculture that calls for planting grapes around trees, which serve as a natural trellis system for the vines. The exhibition team sees a link between the two forms of agro-forestry, combining trees and crops into one ecosystem.

“We are going to see this dialogue between two ancient cultures that both have a lot to say about how we can move forward,” Mr. Usobiaga said.

The exhibition team members said they wanted to be careful not to overly romanticize chinampas because they are not easy to duplicate on a scale that could feed a large population today. The farms work in Mexico City because they sit on a lake that lacks an outlet to another body of water, making water levels relatively easy to control. The opposite is true, of course, in Venice, which is on a lagoon close to the sea and always under threat from flooding.

Also, the economics of small farms — high production costs, low yields because of their size — make it difficult to turn a profit. Farmworker wages are generally too low to support people in urban areas, and the backbreaking work of planting and harvesting has lost prestige.

“This is a big problem here, that people, especially young people, don’t want to work the soil on chinampas anymore,” said María Marín de Buen, the team’s graphic designer.

Even in Xochimilco, many chinampas lie fallow because their owners cannot make a living. Some have been turned into soccer fields, which are rented out to the community; others are event venues where people celebrate weddings or birthday parties. Officially, the land is restricted from development, as well as from cattle grazing and the hunting of endangered animal species, though these things happen with alarming frequency.

Still, the team sees something inspirational at play: a connection between nature and the built environment, between existing water resources and the need to construct houses and schools. Architects who visit the biennale may not go on to design large swaths of farmland, but they can replicate the idea on a smaller scale using whatever conditions exist, said Jachen Schleich, a team member who is a principal of the Mexico City architectural firm Dellekamp + Schleich.

“Even if somebody does this in his backyard, he can at least feed his family, or the people on the four floors of his building, Mr. Schleich said. “It could be like a micro-intervention in the landscape or a public space.”