The Marsh Builders: The Fight for Clean Water, Wetlands, and Wildlife

by Sharon Levy

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 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.

Genres: Audiobook, Nonfiction

250 pages, Hardcover

Published June 14, 2018

About the author

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Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fascinating. It goes through the use of marshlands as sewage filtration systems, cleaning water, creating habitat, and adding flood protection. It details the long political fight to try using rewilded mashland as an experimental sewage treatment for a small township over hooking into the county's new sewer treatment plant. Additionally, it discusses water contamination in general, both from point sources (e.g. factory drainage and dumping) and non point sources (farm field runoff), and the long road from the idea that "the solution to pollution is dilution" to the overwhelming evidence of the severe environmental and health impacts of dumping into water sources, like lakes, rivers, and oceans. Marshland ecosystems are much more resilient to waste water and nitrogen runoff from fertilizers than those of oceans and lakes, and can be an ideal final step in a filtration process. The book is incredibly well researched, and I'd likely read it again.

[B. Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 republicans. Levy makes a good point that public outrage was key to creating the EPA in the Nixon presidency, and in restoring it during Reagan's presidency, despite neither president caring about the environment. If only we had more outrage now.

Iowa also got a shoutout in this for being one of the more progressive Midwestern states in wetland creation (which I suspect will no longer be the case with Kim Reynolds terrorizing the state.) However, it does mention that agriculture from those in the Mississippi watershed are responsible for the deadzone in the gulf of Mexico. (Iowa. lol) Farm run-off is serious business.

I just wish people would wake-up and stop doing such horrendous things to the world. Or that the government would actually take responsibility and do something.

[Reshah · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 disease vector. The natural waste management systems are nearly utopian in their design and used by wild endangered birds birds. I hope to employ some of the information in the book to make a self cleaning pond for a few ducks I have. I would highly recommend this book.

[Dhartridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 figuring prominently in the parts about Arcata,CA are familiar faces about town, whose remarkable persistence created a useful and beautiful marsh enjoyed by thousands of visitors each year.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Michelle Bizzell · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 back to the urgent need for better solutions to non-point source water pollution in the US.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sharon Levy provides a well-researched and clearly organized survey of sewage treatment throughout the world. The linchpin of her book is the struggle 40 years ago to create the now iconic Arcata, California Marsh. As a non-scientist, I found the book easy follow and understand. The author has a gift for translating scientific terminology into plain English. However, a glossary would have been a huge help for lay readers, particularly in remembering the many acronyms used in the text. That lack was the main reason for a four-star rating rather than five.