Heartbeats in the Muck: The History, Sea Life, and Environment of New York Harbor

by John Waldman

“Gives the reader a sense of lost New York, of the incredibly rich and biologically diverse ecosystem that once was the lower Hudson River estuary.” —Ted Steinberg, author of Gotham UnboundHeartbeats in the Muck traces the incredible arc of New York Harbor’s environmental history. Once a pristine estuary bristling with oysters and striped bass and visited by sharks, porpoises, and seals, the harbor has been marked by centuries of rampant industrialization and degradation of its natural environment. Garbage dumping, oil spills, sewage sludge, pesticides, heavy metals, poisonous PCBs, landfills, and dredging greatly diminished life in the harbor, in some places to nil.Now, forty years after the Clean Water Act began to resurrect New York Harbor, John Waldman delivers a new edition of his New York Society Library Award-winning book. Heartbeats in the Muck is a lively, accessible narrative of the animals, water quality, and habitats of the harbor. It includes captivating personal accounts of the author’s explorations of its farthest and most noteworthy reaches, treating readers to an intimate environmental tour of a shad camp near the George Washington Bridge, the Arthur Kill (home of the resurgent heron colonies), the Hackensack Meadowlands, the darkness under a giant Manhattan pier, and the famously polluted Gowanus Canal. A new epilogue details some of the remarkable changes that have come upon New York Harbor in recent years.“Full of humor and a picaresque joy in the almost absurd persistence of Gotham’s underwater ecosystems, Heartbeats should be read by every urbanite who dreams of a better relationship with nature.” —Paul Greenberg, New York Times-bestselling author of Four The Future of the Last Wild Food

161 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 4, 2012

Reviews

[Carrie Laben · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compulsively readable overview of the ecology of New York Harbor, from the first observations by Europeans through the post-Clean Water Act restoration and, in the epilogue of the revised edition, up through early 2012. Of course, early 2012 is a time ago now (among other things, this edition just misses dealing with Hurricane Sandy's impact on the New York coastline) and one hopes for a third edition.