The Marsh Builders cover art

The Marsh Builders

The Fight for Clean Water, Wetlands, and Wildlife

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Marsh Builders

By: Sharon Levy
Narrated by: Karen White
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Only £0.99 a month for the first 3 months. Pay £0.99 for the first 3 months, and £8.99/month thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Start my membership

About this listen

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 20th century. Today, the majority of the original wetlands in the US have vanished, transformed into farm fields, or have been 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 US wetlands designed to treat city sewage. The book explores the global roots of this local story: the cholera epidemics that plagued 19th-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.

©2018 Sharon Levy (P)2018 Tantor
Biological Sciences Biology Ecology Nature & Ecology Science Habitat

Listeners also enjoyed...

Breakpoint cover art
Big Ratchet cover art
Rising Tides cover art
Green Hell cover art
Toxic cover art
The Origin of Feces cover art
Nature's Fortune cover art
Scatter, Adapt, and Remember cover art
Climategate cover art
Never Out of Season cover art
This Is the Way the World Ends cover art
Salmon Wars cover art
Burn cover art
Water 4.0 cover art
Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter cover art
The Madhouse Effect cover art
No reviews yet