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This Fine Piece of Water by Tom Andersen, Yale University Press, 拢17.50, ISBN 0300082509

LONG Island Sound was once one of the richest estuaries in the world鈥攁nd home to edible oysters the size of loaves of bread. It is a 177-kilometre-long strip of water varying in width from 1500 to nearly 34000 metres. It separates Connecticut from the strip of land known to New Yorkers as Long Island (or, as locals say it, 鈥淟awn Guyland鈥�).

When I was a teenager in the late 1960s, the Hudson River was too polluted to swim or fish in, so my one fishing trip was an excursion on the Sound, where beginner鈥檚 luck caught me a flounder.

Since then, the Hudson has had Pete Seeger and the Clearwater Foundation to rescue it from the polluters, but not so the Sound. Instead, it had a near-death experience. In 1987, the Sound鈥檚 oxygen levels dropped to zero. One biologist thought her instruments had broken, until the massive fish die-off began. Lobsters even crawled onto land and expired in their desperate search for oxygen.

This Fine Piece of Water is a biography of the Sound from its formation to the present. Ever since Europeans landed there, the pattern of discovery, use and abuse of resources repeats. But the biggest threat throughout has been overpopulation and sewage disposal. This story does not yet have a happy ending. Even after the post-1987 Save the Sound project began to have some success, the late 1990s saw more fish kills as a result of temperature changes, possibly due to global warming.