The Death and Life of the Great Lakes Read online

  In memory of Michael Faricy

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE: THE FRONT DOOR

  Chapter 1.CARVING A FOURTH SEACOAST

  DREAMS OF A SEAWAY

  Chapter 2.THREE FISH

  THE STORY OF LAKE TROUT, SEA LAMPREYS AND ALEWIVES

  Chapter 3.THE WORLD'S GREAT FISHING HOLE

  THE INTRODUCTION OF COHO AND CHINOOK SALMON

  Chapter 4.NOXIOUS CARGO

  THE INVASION OF ZEBRA AND QUAGGA MUSSELS

  PART TWO:THE BACK DOOR

  Chapter 5.CONTINENTAL UNDIVIDE

  ASIAN CARP AND CHICAGO’S BACKWARDS RIVER

  Chapter 6.CONQUERING A CONTINENT

  THE MUSSEL INFESTATION OF THE WEST

  Chapter 7.NORTH AMERICA’S “DEAD” SEA

  TOXIC ALGAE AND THE THREAT TO TOLEDO'S WATER SUPPLY

  PART THREE:THE FUTURE

  Chapter 8.PLUGGING THE DRAIN

  THE NEVER-ENDING THREAT TO SIPHON AWAY GREAT LAKES WATER

  Chapter 9.A SHAKY BALANCING ACT

  CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE FALL AND RISE OF THE LAKES

  Chapter 10. A GREAT LAKE REVIVAL

  CHARTING A COURSE TOWARD INTEGRITY, STABILITY AND BALANCE

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  The Great Lakes watershed.

  INTRODUCTION

  There are few views that can draw noses to airplane windows like those of the Great Lakes. From on high, the five lakes that straddle the U.S. and Canadian border can appear impossibly blue, tantalizing as the Caribbean. Standing on their shores and staring out at their ocean-like horizons, it hits you that the Great Lakes are, in one significant way, superior to even the Seven Seas. The Great Lakes, after all, are so named not just for their size but for the fact that their shorelines cradle a global trove of the most coveted liquid of all—freshwater.

  The world’s largest freshwater system has captured the public’s imagination since the first European explorers arrived on the shores of the “sweet water seas” in the early 1600s convinced—or at least ever-hopeful—that on their far shores lay the riches of China. In 1634 voyageur Jean Nicolet paddled his birch bark canoe across northern Lake Huron, through the Straits of Mackinac and headed for the western side of Lake Michigan—a place no white man had evidently ever set eyes upon. Nicolet arrived in a bay on the far shore of Lake Michigan apparently trying to look like a local—in a flowing Chinese robe bursting with colorful flowers and birds. Although he might have thought he had finally finished the job Columbus started a century and a half earlier, he actually landed on the southern end of an arm of Lake Michigan known as Green Bay. There is a statue today of Nicolet in that robe that stands near the reputed landing site. It’s 20 minutes north of Lambeau Field, some 7,000 miles shy of Shanghai.

  It’s hard to fault Nicolet if he really did believe his journey had taken him to Asia, because there were no Old World analogues for the scope of the lakes he was trying to navigate. The biggest lake in France, after all, is 11 miles long and about 2 miles wide; the sailing distance between Duluth, Minnesota, on the Great Lakes’ western end and Kingston, Ontario, on their eastern end is more than 1,100 miles. No, the bodies of water formally known as the Laurentian Great Lakes are not mere lakes, not in the normal sense of the word. Nobody staring across Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie or Superior would consider the interconnected watery expanse that sprawls across 94,000 square miles just a lake, any more than a visitor waking up in London is likely to think of himself as stranded on just an island (the United Kingdom, in fact, also happens to span some 94,000 square miles).

  A normal lake sends ashore ripples and, occasionally, waves a foot or two high. A Great Lake wave can swell to a tsunami-like 25 feet. A normal lake, if things get really rough, might tip a boat. A Great Lake can swallow freighters almost three times the length of a football field; the lakes’ bottoms are littered with an estimated 6,000 shipwrecks, many of which have never been found. This would never happen on a normal lake, because a normal lake is knowable. A Great Lake can hold all the mysteries of an ocean, and then some.

  In 1950, when Northwest Airlines flight 2501 flying from New York City to Seattle disappeared from radio contact after it hit a summer storm over Lake Michigan, it was at the time the worst commercial aviation accident in U.S. history. The Coast Guard and Navy dispatched five ships to look for the wreckage. They dropped sonar devices, divers and drag lines into the lake to hunt for the nearly 100-foot-long fuselage that carried 58 souls.

  The wreck has never been found.

  Here is a different way to grasp the scale of the Great Lakes. Roughly 97 percent of the globe’s water is saltwater. Of the 3 percent or so that is freshwater, most is locked up in the polar ice caps or trapped so far underground it is inaccessible. And of the sliver left over that exists as surface freshwater readily available for human use, about 20 percent of that—one out of every five gallons available on the planet—can be found in the Great Lakes. This is not an insignificant fact at a time when more than three-quarters of a billion people don’t have regular access to safe drinking water.

  In 1995, World Bank vice president Ismail Serageldin made a provocative prediction: “The wars of this century have been fought over oil, and the wars of the next century will be on water . . .” Perhaps. But the biggest enemy facing the Great Lakes in the early 21st century is not would-be profiteers seeking to siphon them off to make far-away deserts bloom. The biggest threat to the lakes right now is our own ignorance.

  Nearly 500 years after Nicolet first nosed his canoe into the waters of Lake Michigan we are still treating the lakes the same way, as liquid highways that promise a shortcut to unimaginable fortune. Nicolet might have made an honest mistake. The same won’t be said for us, because continuing to exploit the world’s largest expanse of freshwater in this manner is wreaking increasingly disastrous consequences.

  YOU MAY THINK YOU KNOW THE MODERN HISTORY OF THE GREAT Lakes. The story of how by the middle of the 20th century industrial and municipal pollution smothered their beaches, of how hundreds of square miles of open water at that time were so devoid of oxygen they were declared “dead,” and of how the rivers that feed the lakes suffocated under chronic slicks of chemicals and oils prone to combust. And then the story of their revival, of how all the industrial plundering and wanton polluting finally spurred passage of the landmark Clean Water Act of 1972.

  That law did indeed bring dramatic reductions in the wastes tumbling into the lakes, and their recovery was as fast as it was dramatic. This is why lakefronts from Toronto to Milwaukee today glimmer with the glass of luxury condos and office towers, and why the land they sit atop is among the most expensive real estate in the Midwest. This is why Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, which famously exploded in flames, now draws more fishing lines than punch lines. And this is why when you cruise along Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive on a hot summer afternoon you will see hundreds of people lounging on the beach and splashing in the Lake Michigan surf, all literally in the shadows of the John Hancock Center and its neighboring skyscrapers. It all gives the impression that humans and the lakes have finally learned to get along. It’s a mirage.

  The story of The Death and Life of the Great Lakes takes you beneath the lakes’ shimmering surface and illuminates an ongoing and unparalleled ecological unraveling of what is arguably North America’s most precious natural resource. It’s about how the Great Lakes were resuscitated after a century’s worth of industrial abuse only to be hit with an even more vexing environmental catastrophe.

  Tragically for the Great Lak
es, the Clean Water Act helped to lull much of the public into thinking that the lakes had hit their nadir and were on their way to recovery throughout the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. But the law—or, more specifically, the agency charged with enforcing it—in fact did unfathomable damage to the lakes. It turned out that federal environmental regulators decided to exempt one industry’s form of “living pollution”—biologically contaminated water discharged from freighters. This exemption included overseas ships sailing up the manmade St. Lawrence Seaway that links the lakes to the Atlantic Ocean and to ports around the globe—China, finally, included.

  The Seaway, which opened in 1959 with all the hoopla of a lunar landing, never lived up to its hype. Today an average of only about two overseas freighters visits the Great Lakes each day during the nine-month shipping season (the Seaway closes each winter due to ice). The oceangoing ships that make the trip into the lakes aren’t super-sized container vessels hauling high-value goods like Sonys and Toyotas. The cramped shipping channels of the Seaway can only accommodate 1930s-sized freighters, and these ships typically bring in foreign steel and haul out U.S. and Canadian grain. But the Seaway ships have also been hauling something not listed on their manifests—noxious species from ports all over the world that are inexorably unstitching a delicate ecological web more than 10,000 years in the making.

  The Environmental Protection Agency apparently received no statutory authority from Congress to make this exemption for Seaway vessels and other freighters visiting U.S. waters. The agency, for whatever reason, decided to quietly tweak the regulations the year after the Clean Water Act was passed, probably to save some hassle and money by giving the shipping industry a free pass to dump their ship-steadying ballast water. The rationale at the time was that ballast tanks weren’t full of noxious stuff like oils or acids. They held nothing but seawater. The folly here is that ballast water isn’t just water. It swarms with perhaps the most potent pollutant there is: DNA.

  It would be hard to design a better invasive species delivery system than the Great Lakes overseas freighter. The vessels pick up ballast water at a foreign port to balance less-than-full cargo loads. When the ships arrive in the Great Lakes, cargo is taken onboard and the ballast water—up to 10 Olympic swimming pools’ worth per ship—and all the life lurking in it gets set loose in the lakes. As one exasperated Great Lakes biologist once told me: “These ships are like syringes.”

  The Great Lakes are now home to 186 nonnative species. None has been more devastating than the Junior Mint–sized zebra and quagga mussels, two closely related mollusks native to the Black and Caspian Seas. A college kid on a field trip in the late 1980s was the first to discover them in the Great Lakes. In less than 20 years the mussels went from novel find to the lakes’ dominant species. Sandy beaches still rim the lakes, but if Lake Michigan, for example, were drained it would now be possible to walk almost the entire 100 miles between Wisconsin and Michigan on a bed of trillions upon trillions of filter-feeding quagga mussels.

  The mussels, which have no worthy natural predators in North America, have transformed the lakes into some of the clearest fresh­water on the planet. But this is not the sign of a healthy lake; it’s the sign of a lake having the life sucked out of it.

  The cumulative toll of the EPA’s long-standing ballast water exemption (an exemption that it is now under court order to remedy—someday, or decade) is far more dire than a burning chemical slick on a polluted river. Native fish populations have been decimated. Bird-killing botulism outbreaks plague lakeshores. Poisonous algae slicks capable of shutting down public water supplies have become a routine summertime threat. A virus that causes deadly hemorrhaging in dozens of species of fish, dubbed by some scientists the “fish Ebola,” has become endemic in the lakes—and threatens to spread across the continent.

  ICONIC DISASTERS HAVE A HISTORY OF PROMPTING GOVERNMENT action. Three years after the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969, Congress passed the Clean Water Act. Two decades later, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground and dumped 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, images of cleanup crews using paper towels to cleanse tarred birds helped press Congress into doing something it should have done years earlier. It mandated double-hulled oil tankers.

  But the disaster unfolding today on the Great Lakes didn’t ignite like a polluted river or gush like oil from a cracked hull, and so far there is no galvanizing image of this slow-motion catastrophe, though a few come to my mind. One is the bow of an overseas ship easing its way into the first navigation lock on the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Great Lakes’ “front door” to fresh waves of biological pollution. Another is a satellite photo of a green-as-paint toxic algae slick smothering as much as 2,000 square miles of Lake Erie.

  Yet another is the grotesque mug of an Asian carp, a monster-sized carp imported to the United States in the 1960s and used in government experiments to gobble up excrement in Arkansas sewage lagoons. The fish, which can grow to 70 pounds and eat up to 20 percent of their weight in plankton per day, escaped into the Mississippi River basin decades ago and have been migrating north ever since. They are now mustering at the Great Lakes’ “back door”—the Chicago canal system that created a manmade connection between the previously isolated Great Lakes and the Mississippi basin, which covers about 40 percent of the continental United States. The only thing blocking the fish’s swim through downtown Chicago and into Lake Michigan is an electrical barrier in the canal—one that has a history of unexpected shutdowns.

  The Chicago canal has also turned the Great Lakes’ ballast water problem into a national one, because there are dozens of invasive species poised to ride its waters out of the lakes and into rivers and water bodies throughout the heart of the continent. Species like the spiny water flea, the threespine stickleback, the bloody red shrimp and the fishhook water flea. All organisms you probably haven’t heard of. Yet.

  Few out West, after all, had ever heard of quagga mussels—until they tumbled down the Chicago canal and metastasized across the Mississippi basin and, eventually, into the arid West, likely as hitchhikers aboard recreational boats towed over the Rocky Mountains. The mussels have since unleashed havoc on hydroelectric dams, drinking water systems and irrigation networks in Utah, Nevada and California and the federal government estimates that if the mussels make their way into the Northwest’s Columbia River hydroelectric dam system they could do a half billion dollars of damage—per year.

  The engineers, water managers and biologists out West who view the Great Lakes as a beachhead for invasions that inevitably go national look at the Seaway and are incredulous at the recklessness of leaving this door to the entire continent open. So are most people, once they understand the vastness of the problem, and the tiny industry causing so much of it.

  If we can close these doors to future invasions, we may give the lakes, and the rest of the country, time to reach a new equilibrium, a balance between what is left of the natural inhabitants and all the newcomers (there are already signs in some areas of the lakes that native fish are adapting to a diet based on zebra and quagga mussels). And if we do this, then we can focus on the major problems that still plague the lakes, which include the overapplication of farm fertilizer that is helping to trigger the massive toxic algae outbreaks, the impact a warming globe is having on the lake’s increasingly unstable water levels and the need to protect lake waters from outsiders seeking to drain them for their own profit.

  Like generations of the past, we know the damage we are doing to the lakes, and we know how to begin to stop it; unlike generations of the past, we aren’t doing it.

  This situation reminds me of those black-and-white photos of settlers standing next to a mountain of bison skulls during the Great Plains slaughters of the late 1800s. The skulls were considered garbage at the time. Some were crushed and used as a cheap form of pavement, before they became so rare so quickly that by the early 1900s they were already fetching $400 apiece from collectors trying to cling to a fragme
nt of what had been squandered.

  Every time I see one of those pictures I’m struck with two thoughts. What in the hell were they thinking? And, more importantly: Is what we are we doing to the Great Lakes today going to leave our own great-­grandchildren equally baffled?

  PART ONE

  THE

  FRONT

  DOOR

  Chapter 1

  CARVING A FOURTH SEACOAST

  DREAMS OF A SEAWAY

  In 1957 legendary CBS newsman Walter Cronkite—lauded as the most trusted man in America —stared into the camera and told viewers that the “greatest engineering feat of our time” was under way. He wasn’t talking about the Soviet Union rocketing the stray dog Laika into orbit, or that year’s development of the first wearable pacemaker, or the recent opening of the United States’ first commercial atomic power plant. He was talking about humans “conquering” nature on a scale and in a fashion never before attempted.

  “Right now the greatest concentration of heavy machinery ever assembled—over 3,000 pieces of equipment—are at work on one of the greatest projects in the history of mankind,” Cronkite said as he stood in front of a map of the deep blue Great Lakes and the even deeper blue Atlantic Ocean. He fixed his eyes on the camera and spoke boldly of a construction project that would, in effect, do no less than move the Atlantic Ocean more than 1,000 miles inland, to the middle of North America.

  The idea was to scrape and blast a navigation channel along and through the shallow, tumbling St. Lawrence River that flows from the Great Lakes out to the ocean in a manner that would allow giant freighters to steam from the East Coast into the five massive freshwater inland seas. This manmade nautical expressway, as narrow as 80 feet in places and, in one particularly tight section, crossing over a roadway, would open up some 8,000 miles of U.S. and Canadian coastline to ships from around the world. The hope was that essentially landlocked Great Lakes cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Toronto would blossom into global ports to rival commercial hubs such as New York, Rotterdam and Tokyo.