Nor Any Drop to Drink?: Why the Great Lakes Face a Murky Future
This content was originally published by ROBERT MOOR on 23 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
Source link
Egan goes on to reveal that the mussels are merely the latest in the Great Lakes’ long history of radical ecological mutations. Ever since the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, and accelerating after the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 — which allowed large shipping barges to travel from the Atlantic to Chicago — the lakes have experienced a parade of evermore villainous invaders. First, came the vampire-like lamprey, which spread across the lakes with shocking speed in the 1940s, before scientists brought them under control with designer poison. Then in the 1950s came a small bug-eyed fish called the alewife, harmless on its own, but which in the absence of predators, proliferated wildly. By 1967, they were swarming in schools some 10 miles long. To combat them, fishery scientists eventually imported half a billion salmon (including genetically modified “super salmon”), which thrilled sport fishermen, before the salmon and the alewife populations both, swiftly and more or less in tandem, collapsed.
Photo
The salmon-fishing craze, artificial as it was, had one salubrious side effect: It gave rise to a new ecological consciousness among those who caught and ate fish from the lake. When it was discovered in 1966 that the harmful pesticide DDT was accumulating in salmon flesh — a revelation due in part to the heroic reporting of Don L. Johnson at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the same paper where Egan now works — Wisconsin and Michigan became the nation’s first states to ban the pesticide. Today, in a stroke of irony, fishermen whose parents and grandparents had despised the alewife for outcompeting local perch now complain that actions must be taken to preserve the (invasive) alewife, in order to support the stock of (imported) salmon they grew up catching. This is a classic example of shifting baselines, an important concept that Egan, in a rare misstep, glosses over as “a fancy way of saying that kids are getting cheated out of the lakes their moms and dads loved.”
Thanks to a blind spot in the E.P.A. regulations, which allowed shipping vessels to dump bilge water teeming with tiny foreign organisms directly into the Great Lakes, in recent years a host of minor monsters has appeared on Midwestern shores: spiny water fleas, fishhook water fleas, the bloody red shrimp. But none, Egan writes, have been more destructive than the innocuous-seeming zebra and quagga mussels. The mussels managed to spread so quickly because they secrete a superglue-like adhesive that can stick to any solid surface, allowing them to cling to the hulls of speedboats, which then transport them to other lakes all across the continent. Making matters worse, the mussels suck up practically every speck of life in the water except a toxic form of blue-green algae called microcystis, which, due largely to a flood of under-regulated agricultural runoff, blossoms like an aqueous atomic bomb each summer. Egan warns that Lake Erie, which is currently experiencing the worst algal blooms of any Great Lake, and which provides the drinking water to 11 million people, could soon face “a natural and public health disaster unlike anything this country has experienced in modern times.”
Continue reading the main story
The book’s final chapters look to the near future, when a combination of climate change, a growing human population and even scarier invasive species (“monster-sized” Asian carp, the “razor-toothed” snakehead, a strain of toxic dinoflagellates known as “cells from hell”) will further destabilize the lakes’ already wobbly ecosystem.
In telling what might otherwise be a grim tale, Egan, a two-time Pulitzer finalist, nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative. The book’s title is a nod to Jane Jacobs, but its ideological and stylistic forebear is plainly “Silent Spring,” that ur-classic of red-flag-raising eco-journalism. Like Rachel Carson, Egan is careful to cloak his argument in terms policy makers understand, focusing more on financial damage and human health than any intrinsic, but incalculable, deep ecological value. (The damage caused by Caspian mussels to tourism and industry alone, for example, currently costs Great Lakes communities roughly $250 million annually.) However, one advantage Egan’s book has over Carson’s is its approachable style. As a narrator he tends to glide high above the action, but he frequently swoops down to describe his subjects at eye level, in order to show how massive structural problems affect individual lives. Rereading “Silent Spring” for the first time since high school, I was struck by how chalky it is, how crammed with scientific studies, how devoid of human drama. In contrast, Egan’s book is bursting with life (and, yes, death).
Like Carson, Egan is most galvanizing when he pairs alarming problems with the concrete and achievable solutions. His most convincing suggestion is that we should close the seaway to all overseas freighters, those oceangoing ships nicknamed “salties,” which inadvertently smuggle invasive species in their bilge-water tanks. It is a radical-sounding proposition, which the shipping industry vociferously opposes. But Egan shows that it is surprisingly feasible. It turns out that all of the foreign oceanic freight currently shipped to the Great Lakes each day could be brought in and out by a single locomotive. “If that train delivered as much ecological havoc as the salties have,” Egan muses, “it is unlikely the public would still allow it to be running down the tracks.”
Continue reading the main story
As a protest slogan, “Halt the Salties!” might just be punchy enough to work. Unfortunately, actually achieving it would likely require vigorous action from the E.P.A. and other legislators, which seems unlikely under the current regime. And, as Egan admits, contaminated bilge water is just one strand in a tangled net of dire problems facing the Great Lakes. The Trump administration’s budget proposal, meanwhile, guts a slew of programs designed to protect water quality, including the virtual eradication of a $300 million program created under the Obama administration to restore the Great Lakes ecology. On the campaign trail, Trump promised voters that he would ensure that all Americans had access to “crystal clear water.” But, as Egan’s book shows, clarity can be deceiving. What is needed now are legislators, activists, citizens and writers, like Egan, who have an appreciation for that murkiest, least attractive of qualities: complexity.
Continue reading the main story
The post Nor Any Drop to Drink?: Why the Great Lakes Face a Murky Future appeared first on Art of Conversation.
