Bibliograph

The marsh builders, the fight for clean water, wetlands, and wildlife, Sharon Levy

Type

Label

The marsh builders, the fight for clean water, wetlands, and wildlife, Sharon Levy

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

The marsh builders

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

1019844099

Responsibility statement

Sharon Levy

Sub title

the fight for clean water, wetlands, and wildlife

Summary

"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"--Jacket

Table Of Contents

Cholera's frontiers -- Tides of change -- The microbe solution -- Emperor Joseph's roots -- Strangled waters : first wave -- Fighting the big sewage machine -- The United States of vanished wetlands -- Revolution -- Do-it-yourself wetlands -- Strangled waters : second wave -- Wild things -- Of time and the wetland -- The tide rises -- The fight this time

resource.variantTitle

Fight for clean water, wetlands, and wildlife

Classification