The Great Lakes: New, old challenges

PETOSKEY, MICH. » The Great Lakes: Great venue for hunting and harvest by Indigenous people and vast 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 book, “The Great Lakes,” explaining that the explosion of population along these bodies of water — now 34 million, about a 12th 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 coureurs de bois and their fur trade, even the modern-day wreck of the SS 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 depend on cleaning up the Great Lakes. We have neglected this for too many generations.”

Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy has cataloged the challenges from climate change alone: an increase in high-volume precipitation storms; the introduction into the 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 that has for a century depended in large measure on automobiles and other vehicles powered by fossil fuels.

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

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

The future could bring even

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.

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

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, I have 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.