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

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 the Author :
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. Karen White is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of more than fifteen novels, including The Time Between, On Folly Beach, and the Tradd Street series. A two-time recipient of the National Readers' Choice Award, Karen has been nominated multiple times for the coveted RITA Award. She has also been named twice as a finalist for the SIBA Fiction Book of the Year. Karen lives near Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband and two children.

Review :
Karen White's straightforward narration keeps the focus on the story.-- "AudioFile" "A powerful argument...Convincingly brings out how nature has ways we can learn from for treating sewage with a minimal environmental footprint." -- "Nitya Jacob, water policy analyst, consultant, and former head of policy, WaterAid India" "This fascinating audiobook about how Arcata, California, pioneered the use of wetlands to treat city sewage is a timely and involving listen--timely because the 1972 Clean Water Act is under new threat and involving because Karen White's straightforward narration keeps the focus on the story. It's a story that blends how little we knew about disease until recently--here's looking at you, cholera--with the effect of water pollution on human and environmental health...Enter the heroes of Humboldt County, who battled Big Sewage and re-created a marsh that attracts wildlife and people while filtering the yucky stuff. They're wonderful folks to spend time with." -- "AudioFile"