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The Marsh Builders
The Marsh Builders: The Fight for Clean Water, Wetlands, and Wildlife | Sharon Levy
3 posts | 1 read | 1 to read
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.
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suzisteffen
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Fascinating and agonizing. A journey, too - a very long book, but filled with information that makes me reconsider everything about water, regulation, marshes, swamps, and yeah, sewage. Ends strong. #science2K19

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suzisteffen
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Holy hell.

“The [Black] Swamp, once a forbidding and near impassable wilderness, was dismembered and used to feed an accelerating cycle of human industry. The great wetland trees - ash, elm, sycamore - were felled and used to build houses, make furniture, and fuel the railroads that sprouted up across Ohio. ... All this drove an orgy of forest-clearing and land-draining, which in the course of five decades ... completely erased the Black Swamp.”

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suzisteffen
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Really enjoying this as an #audiobook from #Hoopla. I almost always listen to nonfiction audio at 1.5x, and this is no different, but I really love it. So much good info and such great characters - I actually want to make a musical out of parts of this super book. #science2K19