The Marsh Builders, Sharon Levy
The Marsh Builders, Sharon Levy
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The Marsh Builders
The Fight for Clean Water, Wetlands, and Wildlife

Author: Sharon Levy

Narrator: Karen White

Unabridged: 12 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/25/2018


Synopsis

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 U.S. 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; and the discovery that wetlands act as efficient filters for the pollutants unleashed by modern humanity.

About Sharon Levy

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by B. on August 11, 2023

Very well-researched. Levy somehow manages to make learning about sewage wastewater systems interesting. That's not all there is to the book, but it is a vast majority of it. It's also so fascinating to hear about efforts made to destroy environmental protections. It's so backwards, and it's always......more

Goodreads review by Reshah on August 05, 2023

Very cool book. It has a lot of history about the EPA and how waterways are protected and how those laws came to be. The history of human waster management ranging from throw it in the nearest body of water to building sewage absorption crop fields. There is also a bit of stuff about sewage as a dis......more

Goodreads review by Dhartridge on June 29, 2018

Well researched and meticulously documented book, features our beloved local marsh/sewage treatment facility and includes heaps of science and politics surrounding the development of this type of community amenity here in my hometown and various other places in the US and Europe. Local leaders figur......more

Goodreads review by Joe on March 01, 2022

A fascinating book. I wish I had known of it when I was studying environmental engineering in school!......more

Goodreads review by Michelle on October 22, 2021

Admirably comprehensive look at waste-water treatment, nitrogen pollution, and wetland science. I love a good city council fight with extremely detailed background on all the issues, so I was very invested in this book. I also like the wrap-up at the end, bringing everything that had been discussed......more