Muddy Waters: The Toxic Wasteland Below America's Oceans, Coasts, Rivers, and Lakes.

• Author: BROWN, VALERIE J.
• Position: Review

Muddy Waters: The Toxic Wasteland Below America's Oceans, Coasts, Rivers, and Lakes By Beth A. Millemann A Coast Alliance, Clean Ocean Action, and American Littoral Society Publication August 1999

At first glance, Muddy Waters: The Toxic Wasteland Below America's Oceans, Coasts, Rivers and Lakes is not particularly attractive, with its red title against a dull expanse of gray and white ocean breakers. Leafing through its pages, non-attorneys at least might be put off by columns of quoted bureaucratic jargon ad acronyms (MPRSA, EPA, PCBs, ARCS) and the occasional black and white photo of an undramatic piece of dredging equipment.

However, just as drab silts and sediments harbor a fantastic variety of life, so do the pages of Muddy Waters contain a wealth of good information. The subject itself--dredging and dumping of contaminated sediments in oceans, lakes, and rivers--isn't very sexy. Yet it behooves us to be aware that, because of these toxic deposits, most of our fresh and coastal salt waters are becoming dangerous to the health of humans and the myriad other forms of life in these areas. Sediments are where the buck stops, where millions of tons of agricultural runoff, industrial discharges, storm drain runoff, and dredged mud come to rest. If these deposits stayed put, we'd be relatively safe. But they don't. The deposited PCBs, heavy metals, fertilizers, pesticides, oils, and dioxins are taken up by the residents of sediments, in turn eaten by animals on the ocean floor, fish, and mammals, all the way up the food chain. They are also stirred up and moved around by storm surges and each additional load of dredge material dumped.

Muddy Waters addresses the history of ocean and river dredging and sediment dumping as well as relevant federal policies. The history is yet another nightmarish litany of insults and injuries to the world's lifeblood. For example, warnings not to eat fish because of high tissue levels of PCBs, mercury, pesticides, and dioxins have been issued by about half the 50 states, totaling about 11,500 advisories in the mid-1990s.

The familiar stubborn resistance of industrial interests to environmental facts, as well as the backstage machinations of the EPA, are also recounted by author Beth Millemann. For example, Millemann tells how the EPA prepared to release a list of contaminant point sources and contaminated sediment sites in 1994. Chemical manufacturers pressured the agency to delay, making the information...