McCully did a pretty good job telling us how much literal crap is dumped into our waterways with this chapter. I feel like this topic, more than the other chapters, is one most of us can relate to. We’ve all spent time by the piers or the beaches so we have seen firsthand how disgusting the water can get because of factories dumping random things into it and people also just throwing things in willy-nilly. It’s hard to imagine it being so bad in the 1920’s that Manhattan was called “a body of land entirely surrounded by sewage.”
This might have to do with how most people think water just washes things away; that if they dump their waste into the water without treating it, it will just go away and not be their problem anymore. As McCully shows us though, this is not the case. We are all hurt by what happens to the water. One of her examples was the nuclear plant in Buchanan, NY which killed millions of fish that got caught in the overheated water in their turbines (88). One accident wiped out millions of living creatures. That’s pretty intense.
Another thing she mentioned was PCB’s and how they infect the fish in the water, fish people eat. Then if these fish are eaten by pregnant women or kids, those people can get sick (90). We depend on the water for so many things, so that by destroying it as a clean source, we slowly destroy ourselves. Yet we’ve been doing just that. We over-harvested oysters, destroyed marshes by draining them, changed the salinity of ecosystems. The latter being especially bad when we increased it and hurt organisms that needed lower levels to survive (93).
