Plum Island; Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Backwards 2018

by William Sargent

For the past decade award winning science writer William Sargent has been exploring the effects of coastal erosion on Plum Island in Northern Massachusetts. For most of that time people had been making poor decisions based on faulty science. Things started to change when a group of Woods Hole scientists produced the first piece of solid science about the island. Armed with that understanding, residents took two steps forward to slow erosion until politics drove them three steps backwards in 2018. This book chronicles that tumultuous year.

174 pages, Paperback

Published May 23, 2018

About the author

William (Bill) Sargent is a relative of the painter John Singer Sargent and a son of a former governor of Massachusetts. He was primed early for a career in politics, but since boyhood he was far more interested in science than in traditional forms of public service. Nonetheless, at Harvard University he declared himself a government major - a plan that gave way the day he had lunch at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, where huge plaster casts of dinosaur tracks and the smell of formaldehyde triggered in the freshman his inborn love of nature. Sargent immediately switched from government to biology.

Sargent is currently a consultant for the NOVA Science Series and has written eight books about science and the environment, including The House on Ipswich Marsh (UPNE, 2005); Storm Surge (UPNE, 2004); Sea Level Rising (Schifferbooks, 2004); Crab Wars: A Tale of Horseshoe Crabs, Bioterrorism, and Human Health (UPNE, 2002); A Year in the Notch: Exploring the Natural History of the White Mountains (UPNE, 2001); The Year of the Crab: Marine Animals in Modern Medicine (1988). His Shallow Waters: A Year on Cape Cod's Pleasant Bay (1981) received the Boston Globe Winship award for the best book about New England and was the basis for a NOVA film, The Sea Behind the Dunes, selected by the National Audubon Society as the best natural history film of the year.