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Oxford University Press, USA
The Marsh Builders: The Fight for Clean Water, Wetlands, and Wildlife
The Marsh Builders: The Fight for Clean Water, Wetlands, and Wildlife
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Swamps and marshes once covered vast stretches of the North American landscape. The destruction of these habitats, long seen as wastelands that harbored deadly disease, accelerated in the twentieth century. Today, the majority of the original wetlands in the US have vanished, transformed into
farm fields or buried under city streets. In The Marsh Builders, Sharon Levy delves into the intertwined histories of wetlands loss and water pollution. The book's springboard is the tale of a years-long citizen uprising in Humboldt County, California, which led to the creation of one of the first U.S. wetlands designed to treat city
sewage. The book explores the global roots of this local story: the cholera epidemics that plagued nineteenth-century Europe; the researchers who invented modern sewage treatment after bumbling across the insight that microbes break down pollutants in water; the discovery that wetlands act as
efficient filters for the pollutants unleashed by modern humanity. More than forty years after the passage of the Clean Water Act launched a nation-wide effort to rescue lakes, rivers and estuaries fouled with human and industrial waste, the need for revived wetlands is more urgent than ever. Waters from Lake Erie and Chesapeake Bay to China's Lake Taihu are
tainted with an overload of nutrients carried in runoff from farms and cities, creating underwater dead zones and triggering algal blooms that release toxins into drinking water sources used by millions of people. As the planet warms, scientists are beginning to design wetlands that can shield
coastal cities from rising seas. Revived wetlands hold great promise for healing the world's waters.
Author: Sharon Levy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 06/14/2018
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.10w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780190246402
Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2018
farm fields or buried under city streets. In The Marsh Builders, Sharon Levy delves into the intertwined histories of wetlands loss and water pollution. The book's springboard is the tale of a years-long citizen uprising in Humboldt County, California, which led to the creation of one of the first U.S. wetlands designed to treat city
sewage. The book explores the global roots of this local story: the cholera epidemics that plagued nineteenth-century Europe; the researchers who invented modern sewage treatment after bumbling across the insight that microbes break down pollutants in water; the discovery that wetlands act as
efficient filters for the pollutants unleashed by modern humanity. More than forty years after the passage of the Clean Water Act launched a nation-wide effort to rescue lakes, rivers and estuaries fouled with human and industrial waste, the need for revived wetlands is more urgent than ever. Waters from Lake Erie and Chesapeake Bay to China's Lake Taihu are
tainted with an overload of nutrients carried in runoff from farms and cities, creating underwater dead zones and triggering algal blooms that release toxins into drinking water sources used by millions of people. As the planet warms, scientists are beginning to design wetlands that can shield
coastal cities from rising seas. Revived wetlands hold great promise for healing the world's waters.
Author: Sharon Levy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 06/14/2018
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.10w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780190246402
Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2018
About the Author
Sharon Levy is a science writer based in northern California. Her work appears in Undark, BioScience, Nature, and other magazines. She is the author of Once and Future Giants: What Ice Age Extinctions Tell Us About the Fate of Earth's Largest Animals.
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