The fragility of the freshwater lakes
A journalist explores how the modern world impacts the Great Lakes
In 1634, early European explorer Jean Nicolet paddled his canoe through two of the enormous Great Lakes — Lakes Huron and Michigan.
When he landed in Wisconsin, he mistakenly thought he had arrived in, or near, Asia. But the Great Lakes are so vast and seemingly ocean-like to those seeing them for the first time, it’s tough to blame Nicolet, writes Dan Egan in his work, “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes.”
Lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario and Superior — containing 20 percent of all the surface freshwater on the planet — are “arguably North America's most precious natural resource,” Mr. Egan writes.
Despite their vastness and spectacular beauty, they are ecologically fragile and facing threats on a number of fronts, as Mr. Egan highlights.
Among them: invasive species such as zebra and quagga mussels brought in by overseas ships, the specter of diversion from the dry and growing southwestern United States, and farm fertilizer runoff that leads to toxic algae blooms like the one that struck Toledo, Ohio, in 2014.
That incident, where a harmful algae bloom arrived at the site of the city’s water intake pipes in Lake Erie, left an area of half a million people unable to drink their tap water for several days.
While this was the first incident of a major Great Lakes city left without safe drinking water because of algae caused by agricultural runoff, it probably won’t be the last.
Mr. Egan warns the days-long water crisis did not result in enough legislative and regulatory changes. It was not treated like the 1969 Cuyahoga River Fire which spurred recognition of pollution problems and major environmental legislation.
There’s also the problems that will be caused by climate change: warmer water and air temperatures, Mr. Egan writes “will super-charge the Great Lakes’ precipitation-evaporation cycle; more water will go up in the sky, and more will come down” which could mean over time, swings of eight to 10 feet in water levels.
To folks who don’t live near the lakes, that might not sound like a big deal, but Mr. Egan notes lakeside cities are home to “millions of people and trillions of dollars of homes, skyscrapers, factories, rail yards, roadways, navigation channels and canals, sewage treatment plants, drinking water intake pipes and nuclear reactors, all clinging to the modern shoreline, all needing the water levels to basically stay where they have been for the last century and a half.”
Mr. Egan, a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, doggedly travels around the lakes and beyond, interviewing researchers in Duluth, Minn., watching efforts in Chicago to halt the spread of invasive carp, explaining the factors that cause harmful algae blooms from Maumee Bay State Park east of Toledo, and traveling to the southwest to compare how western states have more aggressively fought the spread of invasive species
Mr. Egan skillfully weaves into one narrative how history, science and ecology — as well as politics and economics have shaped the lakes and the problems facing them.