Surprisingly, or strangely enough, I thought Chapter 6 was the most optimistic and least critical chapter we’ve read from City at the Water’s Edge. Despite the scattered discussion regarding how many of our estuaries, marshes and other bodies of water have been extensively damaged due to overharvesting and pollution, I think much of this chapter focuses on the varied efforts to restore, preserve, and cleanup our wetlands.
To begin, I thought it was interesting how McCully explained how the Europeans equated undomesticated land to wasteland, as something that needed to be fixed and transformed. As we know the Europeans could never leave anything they “discovered” in America as they had found it; thus, they used wipmoleans or wind-powered mills to drain water from wetland and marshes to make the land usable. This type of attitude eventually translated into other harmful practices as the city began to industrialize rapidly. Eventually, as companies began to appear more frequently, massive amounts of sewage and waste were being dumped in our water. Honestly, I didn’t know how many different types of waste actually existed. I thought all waste was essentially the same in composition but was just dumped from different sources or places. However, what was even more appalling was how companies dealt with/handled this junk. She discusses how at one time a total of 50 million gallons of untreated waste were dumped into the Hudson River daily, an effect which could be felt all throughout New York. Or in another instance, she explains how companies, like GE, attested to dumping as much as 90 pounds of PCBs a day into the Hudson for decades. When reading, my main question was in the present-day how do we plan or take action so that companies can no longer break the law and dump chemicals or waste into bodies of water? With a growing population that is going to produce more waste, how are we going to accommodate for increased garbage? The real answer is getting environmentalists in charge of big companies and corporations so they can undoubtedly implement better ways to manage our waste. However, the issue lies in how we get businesses to want to abide by the law; maybe the answer is fines or penalties. This way we can continue to develop and urbanize but be more conscious of our environmental footprint, setting a good example for the populous.
McCall also provides an in-depth analysis of the protective measures taken over time to combat the problem with a growing amount of waste and sewage. She succinctly noted, “Government regulation alone can not remedy conditions unless public sentiment is ready to demand a strict enforcement of the necessary laws.” There is an existing cleavage between the formation of laws and how they are implemented. The text discusses an environmental coalition created, River Keeper, that had massive success in legal cases taken against GE and Coned. The great thing was this group recognized that the Hudson River and other waterways were a public resource and had to be protected as such. It was the public support and drive that enabled laws and policies to be executed to their fullest potential.
As a final note, I thought it was interesting to see how various facilities and plants were constructed to cleanup NY’s waterways and sewage systems. I think the effects of creating sewage treatments plants were incredibly drastic as the number of invertebrate species increased from 6-20 in NJ’s Raritan Bay. If only there were more in Astoria/LIC to lessen the nasty stench that is emitted from some of the chemical plants in the neighborhood.
