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

Levy, Sharon

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0190246405 ISBN 13 : 9780190246402

Editeur : Oxford University Press Inc, 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 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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

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.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Oxford University Press Inc
• Date d'édition: 2018
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0190246405
• ISBN 13: 9780190246402
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 250
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Ufficio Anagrafiche Messaggerie; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8; Assago Milano; 20090; Italie