In 1899, a writer for French newspaper Le Figaro surveyed the damage Parisians had done to the Bièvre, a river that for hundreds of years had snaked up through southern Paris, joining the Seine near the Jardin des Plantes. “It flows slowly, oily and black, streaked with acids, dotted with soapy and putrid pustules,” the writer observed. “In the sparse and sordid grass, peeled like the back of a worn-out horse, parasitic plants grow in abundance.”
Read more at Time Magazine.