The terrain about which Baker wrote with such committing force was the coastal Essex of saltings, spinneys, sea walls and mudflats.
APLI Mumbai and Meera Sanyal Port activities should be reduced and the land carved up for different purposes: a nature park on the mudflats, a heritage and cultural zone near Sewri fort, a sports and education zone at Cotton Green, an innovation and incubator hub at Elphinstone Estate, and modern facilities for the fishing community.
From her apartment nearby, Amrita Sabnavis can just about see the sea: a scrap of blue beyond the new freeway, the mudflats and a swath of warehouses.
Meanwhile, the Bombay Natural History Society seeks protection for the Sewri mudflats, which hosts 140 bird species, including migratory pink flamingoes.
I've seen mudskippers fight in mini battles for territory, and monitor lizards race across the glistening surface of mudflats towards the safety of deeper pools.
The ranching of the mudflats has left little for them to eat, or created too much commotion.
On the other bank is Foshan's vision of its future: a pleasant ribbon of parkland, decorated with cherry trees, mudflats to attract birds and a skate-boarding rink.
Harland is thrown from the wreckage into the East River mudflats and is the only survivor.
They crawl around beaches and mudflats using tiny structures along the sides of their bodies that work like legs, but are in fact gills.
At least, says Wen Xianji of the WWF, work with foreshoremen in Guangdong and Fujian provinces to minimise bird disturbances is paying off.Worse, rich mudflats are being "reclaimed" for development.
The most notorious example, in South Korea, is a 20-mile (33km) seawall built to enclose a huge estuary and mudflats at Saemangeum, an area two-thirds the size of Singapore where 400,000 birds, including the spoon-billed sandpiper and Nordmann's greenshank, had fed.
