The Marsh BuildersPub Date : 2018-08-09DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190246402.003.0006
Amit Gupta
{"title":"Tides of Change","authors":"Amit Gupta","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190246402.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190246402.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"When Dan Hauser and his friend Wesley Chesbro won the Arcata city council race, their opponents did not concede gracefully. “I’m not a poor loser,” claimed Clyde Johnson, just before he called Hauser and Chesbro “rangatangs.” Then Johnson and the other disappointed candidates accused the winners of using dirty campaign tricks—just like President Nixon. Arcata’s weekly paper, the Union, ran the details of the post-election flap on its front page. That March of 1974, the national obsession with the Watergate scandal reached its peak. The president’s closest aides were on trial for burglary, wiretapping, and obstruction of justice. Nixon had become an international symbol of corruption, and the polls showed his public approval rating plummeting to an all-time low. So while Hauser and Chesbro could laugh off the comparison to an ape, when they were likened to the president the insult cut deep. It was a rough time to start a political career, especially in Arcata, an old logging town on the shores of Humboldt Bay in California’s damp northwest corner. The community was splitting in two like a redwood slat struck with an ax. On one side stood ranchers and timber workers, many of them descendants of the first pioneers to settle here in the 1850s. On the other were outsiders like Hauser and Chesbro, people who’d recently migrated to town to study or teach at Humboldt State University (HSU), and who’d decided to stay in this foggy enclave, 250 miles north of San Francisco. Now, for the first time, the outsiders controlled the city council. The old-time Arcatans felt like victims of an alien invasion. That feeling intensified when the national fad for high-speed nudity reached HSU. A few days after the election, four young guys ran naked through the University quad. Behind them, the crowns of the redwood trees at the edge of campus vanished into the fog. A cold rain fell as the earnest exhibitionists moved across the lawn, and goosebumps rose all over their bodies.","PeriodicalId":133667,"journal":{"name":"The Marsh Builders","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114971325","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Marsh BuildersPub Date : 2018-08-09DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190246402.003.0011
S. Levy
{"title":"The United States of Vanished Wetlands","authors":"S. Levy","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190246402.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190246402.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Before he became a revolutionary general and the nation’s first president, George Washington was a destroyer of wetlands. In 1763, he surveyed the edges of a million-acre expanse of wet forest that lay along the Virginia–North Carolina state line. He described the Great Dismal Swamp as a “glorious paradise” full of wildfowl and game. Still, he seemed to have no qualms about dismantling Eden. In 1764 he applied with five partners for a charter to create a business called “Adventurers for draining the great Dismal Swamp.” Their goal was to chop down and sell the timber from majestic cypress and cedar trees, then to plow the land for crops. The brutal work of digging drainage ditches and canals was done by slaves. By the time of the Revolutionary War, the Adventurers Company was producing 8 million shingles a year for sale—valuable slivers of wood cut from the swamp’s enormous bald cypress trees. There was profit in undoing wetlands. Draining a wetland also seemed to make a place healthier. People who colonized swampy land were plagued by a dreadful illness, one that often killed, and left survivors with recurring bouts of a bonerattling fever. Malaria—the name itself means “bad air”—was believed to be triggered by poisonous vapors rising from still waters. The drainage and destruction of wetlands was an unwritten founding principle of the US. The pattern began with some of the earliest European settlers. Well before the colonies won their independence, the loss of wetlands had led to pollution that changed the ecology of rivers and bays. Over the centuries, wetlands loss and water pollution have accelerated in tandem, driven by the need for farmland, the urge for profit, and the fear of disease. The history of these interwoven changes on land and underwater begins in the Chesapeake Bay, the site of the first permanent British colony in America. In the summer of 1608, Captain John Smith and the colonists of Jamestown were starving.","PeriodicalId":133667,"journal":{"name":"The Marsh Builders","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132704711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Marsh BuildersPub Date : 2018-08-09DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190246402.003.0016
S. Levy
{"title":"Of Time and the Wetland","authors":"S. Levy","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190246402.003.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190246402.003.0016","url":null,"abstract":"At the oldest of Arcata’s treatment wetlands, it’s now possible to walk on water. Over three decades of filtering sewage, Arcata’s wetland cells have developed floating mats of dead cattail stems and leaves underlain by living roots, resilient enough to support a person’s weight. The short journey across Treatment Wetland 3 is a strange experience, like walking on a soggy trampoline. Water seeps through the cattail mat and into footprints. On a February day, a dense maze of brown cattail stems stretches twelve feet above the wetland’s surface, their shaggy brown seedheads waving in the breeze. A stroll across the treatment wetland is as close as a modern American can hope to get to the feel of the floating tule islands that William Finley camped on in the upper Klamath Basin in 1905, and that crowded California’s unspoiled marshes before the Gold Rush. The floating mats in Arcata were created by accident when the city’s treatment plant operators increased the depth of the treatment marshes, part of an effort to improve their declining performance. To their surprise, the dense growth of cattail rose off the bottom and continued to thrive, roots dangling in the water. The wetlands have aged. “Arcata’s is the grandmother municipal treatment wetland,” says David Austin, an environmental engineer with CH2M Hill who specializes in treatment wetlands design. Austin remembers studying the Arcata wetlands as a student at University of California at Davis in the 1990s. “It was a pioneering system. Now it’s an old design— one that wouldn’t be used today.” In 2016, three decades after Bob Gearheart’s unconventional marshes began cleaning Arcata’s sewage, the city’s wastewater plant faced a crisis. During the cold rains of winter, the system often failed to perform to the standards set in its discharge permit. Every part of the plant had aged to the point where its performance was in decline. At the headworks, the two giant Archimedes screws that push raw sewage uphill through a coarse screen had been running for decades; their metal housings were rusting away.","PeriodicalId":133667,"journal":{"name":"The Marsh Builders","volume":"111 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115853896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Marsh BuildersPub Date : 2018-08-09DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190246402.003.0013
S. Levy
{"title":"Do- It- Yourself Wetlands","authors":"S. Levy","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190246402.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190246402.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Bob Gearheart emerged as Arcata’s marsh guru during the city’s long battle with the state water bureaucracy. This unpaid post demanded that Gearheart crank out proposals for wetland treatment at a frenetic pace, knowing that the city’s financial future depended on his work. He wore a smile, energized by the pressure. Gearheart’s son, Greg, grew up to become an environmental engineer working for the state water board. He earned his engineering degree at Humboldt State, studying with his father. He remembers his dad happily engaged during the battle for Arcata’s alternative treatment system, at the same time he was teaching a full load of classes. “My dad likes a fight,” Greg says. “He adapts well. People put an obstacle in front of him, and he figures out a way to make it look like it’s not really a problem. He makes it look like it was stupid on his opponent’s part to put the obstacle there.” In 1977, the elder Gearheart proposed a first: a wetland built to treat municipal wastewater to the standards required under the Clean Water Act. He possessed a serene certainty that he could make this untried system work. “I had no data until we did the pilot study,” he remembers, “but I was one hundred percent confident.” The power of aquatic plants to cleanse polluted water had first been tested in the 1950s by Käthe Seidel, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. She showed that while some wild plants were killed off by waters tainted with phenol—a toxic organic compound used in making plastics—others had a remarkable ability to adapt. At first contact, effluent containing phenol caused bulrush stems to wither away, but the roots survived and in time sent up healthy new shoots. Bulrush, it turned out, could break down phenol, metabolizing it into the amino acids that build protein. The plant also thrived in domestic sewage. Seidel used carefully groomed cultures of wetland plants, rooted in beds of gravel or sand through which effluent flowed.","PeriodicalId":133667,"journal":{"name":"The Marsh Builders","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128573264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}