It’s History

Long Island is home to roughly 5,000 miles of hand-carved canals — an extensive drainage network that began as ditches dug by early Dutch and English settlers to harvest salt hay and was expanded during the New Deal when workers dug millions of feet of trenches to control mosquitoes. This documentary examines how those drainage systems ultimately backfired: they caused soil subsidence, introduced legacy chemicals into the local food chain, and created a "highway" for ocean surges that now threaten suburban neighborhoods. It traces the history of human intervention that transformed a natural coastal barrier into a modern environmental crisis.

#longisland #history #environment
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Plunging 900 feet into the earth, the Lavender Pit is a 300-acre open pit in the Mule Mountains near Bisbee, Arizona. Opened in the 1950s as an extension of the underground Copper Queen Mine, it extracted copper while physically erasing portions of the nearby town.

This episode explores the pit’s century-long mining saga, its transition into a toxic waste basin and controlled environmental containment area after underground veins were exhausted, and the lasting runoff and landscape changes. Also covered: local minerals, including Bisbee Blue turquoise.

#MiningHistory #BisbeeArizona #IndustrialRuins
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I didn’t know carriers sailed on Lake Michigan
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Times Beach, Missouri, grew in the early 20th century from a newspaper marketing stunt into a bustling Route 66 weekend destination with over 2,000 residents. A dust-control campaign led a local waste-oil hauler to secretly mix industrial dioxin into road spray, causing one of the United States’ most devastating environmental disasters. The documentary examines the contamination’s impact on residents, the 1982 flood that sealed the town’s fate, and the large federal operation that buried the town’s remains under a man-made hill.

#timesbeach #route66 #history
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I explored Chicago’s most dystopian tower 🏙️
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