New York Harbor is a rich aquatic wilderness that surrounds the world's greatest city. Once a pristine estuary bristling with oysters and striped bass, visited by sharks, porpoises, and seals, the harbor suffered centuries of rampant environmental abuse; garbage dumping, oil spills, sewage sludge, pesticides, heavy metals, poisonous PCBs, landfilling, and dredging greatly diminished its life, in some places to nil.
John Waldman chronicles this history, focusing on the animals, water quality, and habitats of the harbor, with personal accounts of the explorations of its farthest 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. And his prognosis is a good one. Environmental action and awareness has allowed the harbor to begin cleaning itself. Although it will never regain its native biological glory, the return of oysters, striped bass, and a host of other creatures are symbols of what once seemed impossible - New York Harbor reborn. Heartbeats in the Muck is for readers who love probing and important books about natural history such as Beautiful Swimmers.
"Waldman's background as a field biologist has equipped him to describe the harbor's ecological history, but his gift for graceful narration is all his own." - Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
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