The great challenges of the Great Lakes

PETOSKEY, Mich. — The Great Lakes: great source of resources, great venue for hunting and harvest for indigenous people, great movements of population and manufactured products, great resources for a thirsty and energy-hungry continent, great effect on the culture of the two countries that share these great waterways.

And great challenges. “We do not see them as the first Europeans saw them, with wide-eyed astonishment: vast inland seas — and, amazingly, fresh,” Canadian historian Pierre Berton wrote in his 1996 “The Great Lakes,” explaining that the great explosion of population along these bodies of water — now 34 million, about a twelfth of the American population and a third of Canada’s — “meant fundamental changes, not just in the land bordering the lakes but also in the entire continent, for the presence of the lakes is responsible for this huge concentration of people in the continent’s heart.”

The lakes account for a fifth of the world’s fresh water — enough to cover Europe from the Iberian Peninsula to the Benelux countries to Italy. They stretch a length equal to that between Paris and Bucharest. They gave sustenance to tens of thousands of Chippewa, Fox, Huron, Iroquois, Ottawa, Potawatomi and Sioux peoples before the Europeans arrived. They provided the colonizing whites with their first great trade route across the wide continent. They were a battleground of two of the great empires of the 18th century. They divide the two great countries of North America.

But for all the colorful tradition and rich history — the stories about the 120 bands of native peoples who made the region their home until the great disruption of the European ascendancy, the tales of the couriers de bois and their fur trade, even the modern-day wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald — the Great Lakes are under great stress, their future health uncertain, the remedy for their ills unknown, or beyond our will to contemplate or implement.

“The Great Lakes is the greatest body of water in the world,” Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown told me the other day during a holiday with his grandchildren only a half mile from Lake Erie. “The entire Midwest and our activities from fishing and recreation to safe drinking water and manufacturing depends on cleaning up the Great Lakes. We have neglected this for too many generations.”

Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy has catalogued the challenges from climate change alone: an increase in high-volume precipitation storms; the introduction into the Great Lakes region of new viruses, diseases and insect pests; and the prospect of periods of extreme heat.

The Michigan Council on Climate Solutions has outlined several goals, some of which — incentives for electric vehicles, a new emphasis on electrified public transportation, a clean-fuels offensive — would mean a transformation of the culture and economy of a state whose economy has for a century depended in large measure on automobiles and other vehicles powered by fossil fuels.

“The impacts of climate change already are, and will continue to be, deep and widespread in the Great Lakes region,” said Jenna Jorns, the program manager of the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments project undertaken by the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. “Climate change will only further exacerbate vulnerable populations already under stress in our region because of economic and social inequality, such as poor communities in legacy cities, tribes and Indigenous populations.”

A study by that project, done with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations, found that the average air temperature in the Lakes region climbed by 2.3 degrees since 1951 and that total annual precipitation increased by 14 percent, with the lakes rising at an “unprecedented” rate since 2014 and with summertime lake surface temperatures rising 4.5 percent between 1979 and 2006.

That’s not all. There are warnings about harmful algal blooms in the lakes, swifter evaporation rates, more frequent droughts and a decline in the whitefish and lake trout that are the signature foodstuffs of the region and part of the folklore of the Great Lakes.

In a giant system like the Great Lakes there are multiple stressors that can negatively affect the animals, plants and water. A lot of things are happening at the same time — the spread of invasive species, increased salt pollution in the lakes’ tributaries, nutrient pollution from the banks of the lakes, the growing presence of microplastics in the waters.

Then add climate change and there’s a lot that scientists don’t know about the interactions between these factors, historic pollution in the watersheds flowing into the Great Lakes and global warming. “The science is slow to catch up on this, but the interactions probably won’t be good,” said William Hintz, a freshwater ecology specialist with the University of Toledo’s Lake Erie Center, “We have made strides in addressing the issue but there’s a lot more to be done.”

There’s real urgency. Eight years ago, contaminated Lake Erie algal blooms prompted officials in Toledo to cut off water supplies, forcing half a million to forgo cooking, drinking, or brushing their teeth with tap water.

The future could bring even more dramatic change accompanying the increase of nearly 4 degrees in wintertime temperatures, including as many as 37 more days a year of 90-degree temperatures and as many as 19 more days of 100-degree temperatures.

We are just coming to terms with the fact that the timber, coal and iron that comprised the richness of the Great Lakes is contributing to the danger to the health of the Great Lakes — and that early steps like the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement that Canada and the United States signed 50 years ago haven’t been sufficient. “There are new challenges and much unfinished business,” Western Michigan University environment and sustainability expert Daniel Macfarlane wrote this spring in the online journal The Conversation.

He explained that “toxic pollution in the Great Lakes remains a colossal problem that is largely unappreciated by the public, since these substances don’t always make the water look or smell foul.”

This past week I have been sitting by Lake Michigan, walking along Lake Michigan, biking past Lake Michigan and thinking about Like Michigan. I’ve devoured fried Lake Michigan smelts and broiled whitefish. I’ve ventured into the cool waters of Lake Michigan. And always have I worried about Lake Michigan. You should too, and you can add Ontario, Erie, Huron and Superior to your worries. These lakes are great. Their challenges are, too.