I personally found this chapter to be the most depressing and pessimistic of the ones that we have read in the book. The only humorous part was probably the reference to the blues singer Muddy Waters in the title of the chapter. The content itself just reinforced McCully’s scathing condemnation of the practices that European colonists and even recent inhabitants of the New York City metropolitan area have carried out in the waterways that have been a major part of our history, culture, and geography. From personal experience, I am a resident of Northern Queens, and whenever I travel during low tide on Astoria Boulevard or the Whitestone Expressway by Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, I have to deal with the ungodly stench of decades-worth of dumping. I never would have thought that so many fish, mollusks, crustaceans, aquatic plants, amphibians, and reptiles once called places like these their homes, which are now wastelands deprived of oxygen and nutrients and full of materials toxic even to us.
All of the habitats that McCully discusses in other chapters, when taken as a whole, highlight the rich biodiversity that we take for granted, but this chapter in particular shows how our own population has been directly affected by our destruction of the environment, not solely the other organisms and non-living components. For example, the water pollution caused by dumping from factories located along the water has sickened and killed hundreds of us over the years, but the same cannot be said of deforestation, over-exploitation of the natural flora, or the hunting of birds. This does not even take into account the 2,215,890 fish and billions of fish eggs and larvae destroyed by the Indian Point nuclear power plant in 1977 (McCully 88). One would think that this would have encouraged us to do something about this issue before it got out of hand, but despite its severity, it has been treated with the same negligence and indifference as many other ecological problems. Also, since water flows all around the globe and is not static like a forest or grassland, McCully emphasizes this by saying that “Industrial wastes combined with commercial and domestic wastes – a total of 50 million gallons of untreated wastes – were discharged into the river daily, polluting the waters upstream and down. No longer confined to the New York metropolitan region, the problem now concerned the whole watershed.” (McCully 86).
At least the government has passed some legislation to combat this situation, including the creation of agencies to regulate dumping and advocate transparency and accountability, as well as sewage treatment plants to render the areas cleaner and more suitable for species to live and breed. Many of these have worked, and the amount of different species in areas has grown exponentially in just a few decades. On the other hand, building a sports complex in the Meadowlands has definitely not helped biodiversity; the fact that a deal had to be made to develop part of the land in exchange for restoring other parts of the land demonstrates the preference for short-term profits to benefit a few instead of long-term solutions to benefit everyone. Hopefully this mindset can shift in the right direction, but as history has shown, not even the dire, devastating effects of water pollution can ring the bell loudly enough for immediate change.
