GREAT LAKES FATE
People are just one more species
affecting the ecology of the Great Lakes.
The worst one
Essay by Robert Kuhn McGregor
Illustrations by Daisy Langston Juarez
The Great Lakes define the shores of eight states, uniting them in a common ecological community,
dividing them from time to time in quarrels over the use, or abuse, of their shared aquatic boundary.
But the Lakes themselves defy boundaries, and a history of the Great Lakes region is less a political story than a cultural one. For the people who live in their vicinity, depend upon them for livelihood, for recreation, for inspiration, for life itself, these vast bodies of water define our geography.
We are of the Great Lakes region, a definition so familiar that it means virtually nothing at all. How easy to ignore that these are the world's largest reservoir of our most precious resource. How difficult to believe that these giants of nature are very young, and very fragile.
The Lakes confront us with peculiar contrasts, with contradictions that defy our ability to understand what they are. The Lakes rest in part on some of the world's oldest geology; the Lakes themselves are mere infants in geologic time. They are the sites of the best and worst of urbanization, and a vast transportation network sustaining commerce and industry. They are at the same time a symbol of wildness, of nature both gentle and ferocious, a living echo of what the world once was. Nature preserve, freshwater reservoir, natural resource, nuclear coolant, shipping lane, summer home, port of call, sewer: The Lakes are all of these.
The question is whether they can remain so.
The contradictions begin with our most elemental understanding of what the Lakes are. Traditional imagination makes the Lakes a part of Longfellow's nature "primaeval," immense inland seas, unchanging and virtually untouched until Europeans came in the 17th century. There are two mistakes in this assumption. First, the Lakes have been here for less than 12,000 years, a mere geologic eyeblink. And they are a dynamic system, always changing, despite our fervent desire to make them hold still. A young and dynamic system is a delicate one, even if it does extend over 70,000 square miles and impound 3,000 cubic miles of fresh water.
True, the Lakes rest on granitic rock more than three billion years old, the very bones of the earth. Yet, even the earth's crust moves around. The familiar contours of the modern Great Lakes, visible from the moon, emerged just 2,500 years ago.
Ice was the determining factor in the reconstruction. Glaciers more than a mile thick groaned through, beginning 22,000 years in the past. The ice scoured nearly everything down to bedrock, crushing forests, shoving rock and debris for hundreds of miles, building new hills, new basins. When the ice retreated in the face of global warming, the outlines of anywhere from four to seven new lakes began to take shape.
The warming was unsteady; the glaciers moved back and forth for quite some time. Finally free of the ice by 6,000 B.C.E., the ecology began to repopulate the region with plants and animals. The wind carried pine and maple seeds, blue jays sowed oaks (quite by accident), squirrels cached nuts that grew into walnut and hickory. The web of life established a dynamic equilibrium around huge bodies of fresh water still shaping themselves out of the glaciated landscape. The original coniferous forests gave way to broadleaf hardwoods as the climate grew warm, even warmer than it is now. When the northern hemisphere cooled once more, the hardwoods gave way to the spruce and pine so familiar in the Northlands today.
Nature is still at work. The earth itself is slowly rising, still rebounding from the weight of all that ice 12 millennia ago. Wind and water—the forces of erosion—reshape the coastlines constantly. Vegetation patterns react to subtle changes in weather, the influences of shifting animal populations. Where once caribou gamboled, moose have taken over the neighborhood,
22 July / August 1998 Illinois Issues
migrating in response to shifts in forest growth. Like all ecosystems, the Great Lakes region is restless with natural change.
People are participants in the process, influencing some patterns, responding to changes dictated by
other agents. Humans became part of the Great Lakes ecology some 9,000 years ago, migrating from the Western plains. These "Paleo-Indians" oriented their lives to big game hunting. Every mammoth they killed subtly changed the regional forests; as the great browsers disappeared, younger
vegetation saw more opportunity. Forests grew thicker.
Succeeding cultures undertook to manage nature for their benefit. Hunting some animals and ignoring others, encouraging selected species of plants, setting strategic fires, Native Americans shaped the ecology to their needs. They were not the only species at work—beaver constructed whole new habitats behind their dams, benefiting themselves and a variety of other species while severely hurting others. Moose aggressively (if inadvertently) regulated sapling growth of certain trees. People were just one more species, trying to manipulate the ecology to gain an advantage.
Matters are not really that different now. The largest differences between the days of Native American occupation and our own are simply numbers and expectation. The Indian bands occupying much of the Great Lakes region before European contact were hunter-gatherers; even the groups adapting to agriculture remained seminomadic. Populations were small and demanded little of nature. For those people, the proper path to wealth was to want little—possessions were a burden, figuratively and literally. Changing homes as many as six to eight times a year, they did not want to lug around much. Material wants were relatively few; small
numbers kept impact on the ecosystem light.
In the late 20th century, the peoples occupying the Lakes country live in much an opposite fashion. We are a culture that has suffered through both the neolithic and the industrial revolutions. Our population densities are immense, our minimal expectations of life very demanding. Even the most poverty-stricken exemplars of the simple life possess minimum standards of living far in excess of hunter-gatherers. We could not live like the Indians of the 16th century if we had to; even our minimalist ideas of food, clothing and shelter demand far more of the environment. We are consumers of massive amounts of energy that the rest of nature is made to provide.
Dwellers of the Great Lakes region, like all Americans, are especially adept consumers. We look back at a 12,000-year history of making nature produce material wealth. Our own revolution of 1776 created a social culture that made unbridled consumerism the right of every man and woman. Our symbols of well-being are largely material.
This is a culture that has proven very hard on the Great Lakes. European demand for fur virtually extirpated beaver populations in the region, triggering profound changes in nature's economy. Lumberers followed hard on the trappers, clear-cutting much of the forests and opening poor soils to unparalleled erosion. Iron and copper miners stripped away even the soil, leaving weary scars in the land when the last of the metals petered out. Fishermen fished until there were no more; shellfish collectors worked so thoroughly that many species have disappeared. The traditional approach to the Lakes has been largely extractive: strip away resources whatever the cost to nature, feed material demands elsewhere, get rich and get out.
The Lakes themselves assisted in the operation. A canal here, a few locks there, and the five freshwater seas became a beckoning highway extending halfway across the continent. Mariners came to respect the fickle nature of the Lakes, where a lulling calm could give way to killer storms in a matter of hours. Still the ships came, growing larger with each passing decade, and the ports grew to serve them. Heavy industry took root, and populations soared. Lots of people and lots of factories meant lots of waste. Where better to dump the tailings, the sludge, the sewage than the Lakes?
Massive urbanization and industrialization have spawned both enormous environmental problems and the first glimmerings of environmental consciousness. For all the political charge in the word "environment," the idea is rooted in the desire for an essential cleanliness necessary to life. The Great Lakes do not need people—nature will survive in some form, no matter what human beings manage to do. We need the Lakes to assure our own future. A little belatedly, we have realized that the poisons we dump, the sewage we flush, does not go away. Nature functions in cycles; all things return to haunt us.
Problems of cleanliness are legion in the Lakes. Back in Jane Addams' time, scientists finally demonstrated conclusively that disease was borne in human and animal filth, touching off a movement to clean the cities, construct proper sewage systems. Addams spearheaded a campaign that discovered the refuse packed onto Chicago streets, comprised largely of horse manure and human waste, was in places eight feet thick. Chicago built a sewer network, reversing the flow of the Chicago River to create the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which carries the city's waste to the Illinois River and on to the Gulf of Mexico. This was a step up from dumping raw sewage into Lake Michigan, the source for Chicago's drinking water. But the system is not entirely adequate, and several other cities dump into the Lake. The intake pipes for the water supply now extend more than a mile out from shore, in hopes of avoiding the intake of E. coli bacteria or worse along with the water.
While the prospect of consuming our own wastes is a serious problem, it is not the only one. Up near the Illinois-Wisconsin border, the entire harbor bottom at Waukegan is coated with PCBs, a product of decades of unrestricted industrial dumping before the 1970s. No one knows quite what to do about it. Just east of Chicago, the Grand Calumet River dumps an ominous mixture of industrial effluents—
23 July / August 1998 Illinois Issues
products of eight major industrial concerns at Gary, Ind., and environs—directly into Lake Michigan. A grassroots remedial action plan involving a quilt of federal, state, county and city government agencies has found cleanup unusually difficult.
The problem is not limited to dumping our refuse into the Lakes. The Illinois fishing handbook warns against eating Great Lakes fish for a variety of reasons, one of which is mercury contamination. Acid rain, a product of windborne pollutants from the Great Lakes states, fall on those ancient basaltic rocks in the Upper Lakes region. Acids eat away the rocks, releasing natural mercury into the water, which the fish absorb.
Ironically, the nightmare of industrialization and urbanization has done much to inspire our love of the Great Lakes. This is America; people need elbow room, at least occasionally. The northern Lakes regions have become a recreational escape for tens of thousands; they have also become a symbol of the wilderness many spirits have discovered they desperately need. The two values do not synchronize. As historian Roderick Nash put it, we are in danger of loving nature to death.
National parks and recreational rivers dot the Great Lakes coastline: the Apostle Islands, Isle Royale, Sleeping Bear, Indiana Dunes. Every Lakes state has endeavored to set aside lakeshore preserves, often in conflict with wealthy individuals who have claimed much of the choice landscape for themselves. Large portions of the upper Lake Michigan coastline are fenced off and guarded against trespass. In the public parks, government managers attempt to balance the
dictates of two very different constituencies. Recreational vacationers want to enjoy nature: on motorboats, dune buggies, motorcycles, four-by-fours, RVs the size of trailer trucks. They want paved roads, modern amenities and a nature that is convenient and safe. Environmental preservationists, arguing that untamed nature is a spiritual tonic as well as a functioning system necessary to human survival, warn that we can tame nature to the point of endangering our future. Every wetland we destroy reduces the ability of the Lakes to purify themselves; every forest we compromise means that much less clean air.
The Lakes mirror the ambiguities of modern life. The southern half of the region is the history of our civilizing: the huge cities, tortured landscapes, poisoned waters. The Northern Lakes are remnants of North America's ecological past; wolves again hunt moose in pine forests shaped by the industry of beaver. The delineations are less than perfect, though. Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, where pioneer ecologist Henry Cowles developed his ideas on plant succession, is just downwind from the steel mills of Gary. The western lake bottom of wild Lake Superior is coated with asbestos, waste material dumped from a taconite mill at Silver Bay, Minn.
Throughout the Lakes region there are recognitions of the beauty and necessity of the natural whole; everywhere there are ill-begotten monuments to greed, miscalculation, ignorance, callous disregard and plain foolishness. At last count, the United States and Canada had identified 41 toxic pollution sites on the Great Lakes.
The Great Lakes as we know them are a moment in time. They will inevitably change because nature is dynamic. Plant and animal successions are at work; erosion is changing the shorelines, despite human attempts to prevent its effects. Eventually the glaciers will return, wiping the slate clean. A new ecosystem will take shape in the wake of their retreat. Life and nature are constants, for another four billion years or so, anyway.
The real questions are not about nature. They are about us, human beings, one more species attempting to manipulate nature to gain an advantage. We exist because an ecosystem produced us, the same system that produced the Great Lakes as we understand them.
If we poison and dirty that system beyond recognition, what guarantees do we have? The Great Lakes existed in a largely pristine, if shifting, form for about 12,000 years. In less than two centuries, Americans have fouled these lakes, in some places beyond hope of repair. Human beings cannot live without fresh water.
We love the Lakes. We forget them to the point of hating them, too. They are our destiny.
Robert Kuhn McGregor is an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He is the author, most recently, of A Wider View of the Universe: Henry Thoreau's Study of Nature, published last year by the University of Illinois Press.
This article was made possible by a grant from
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
24 July / August 1998 Illinois Issues
Learning to share the resources
The politics surrounding the Great Lakes is a story unto itself.
The use and abuse of the Lakes' rich resources have often put the eight states that touch its shores at odds. (Illinois, for example, has landed in court countless times for its diversion of water.) Still, government and private organizations are attempting to address a range of man-made problems in the Lakes region.
The Council of Great Lakes Governors, which was created in 1983 to address economic and environmental issues, is holding its annual meeting this month in Chicago. In fact, Illinois is an active member of that voluntary organization. Gov. Jim Edgar co-chairs the legal issues working group for the brownfields project; former Gov. James R. Thompson headed the organization from 1986 to 1988.
Among the environmental issues facing the Great Lakes region:
Exotic species. Economically, these animals are considered pests. Ecologically, that point is debatable. What can't be disputed is that these species, officially classified as "aquatic nuisances," are here because of us. In 1921, sea lampreys traveled through the Welland Canal and landed in Lake Erie. These parasites "virtually destroyed trout fishery" in the Lakes, says Michael Quigley, an ecologist with the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Other nonnative species started showing up increasingly after the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959.
"Aquatic nuisances present an extremely significant impact," says Mike Donahue, executive director of the Great Lakes Commission, an organization of state officials and private individuals. They compete with the Lakes' native species for food and often prey upon native species. "Ultimately, they upset the food chain and the entire ecosystem."
And once there, they're there to stay, says Donahue. Despite years of eradication efforts, a large population of sea lampreys is now concentrated in St. Mary's River, which connects Lake Superior to Lakes Huron and Michigan, according to Patricia Cicero, policy analyst for the Northeast-Midwest Institute, a nonprofit environmental group.
In all, about 140 exotic species are now present in the Great Lakes, including the zebra mussel, the round goby and the ruffe. The zebra mussel is infamous for clogging intake valves. The round goby and the ruffe are displacing native fish species.
While some of the nonnative species made their way to the Lakes through waterways, as the sea lamprey did, many are brought in through ship ballast water—water scooped from the sea and carried on ships for stability after cargo has been unloaded. This ballast water, and all the organisms contained within, was routinely dumped in the Lakes, introducing exotic species. But recent regulations have forced ships to dump their ballast water at sea before entering any freshwater bodies, a move that should help prevent introduction of new species.
A further priority, however, is to contain exotic species within the areas they have already infiltrated, preventing spreading to other lakes and rivers. Toward that end, new techniques are under development. Electric barriers extended across the bottoms of waterways are one promising technology for combating the spread of the round goby, which first appeared in the Lakes in 1990.
Sediment contamination. After the ban on the pesticide DDT and the industrial chemicals known as PCBs, experts believed contamination in the tissues of Great Lakes fish would decline. And at first it did. Then the decline leveled off, and, in some areas, contamination levels inched back up. The reason: toxins hidden in the mud on the bottoms of the Great Lakes. Bottom-dwelling animals feed in the mud, taking the toxins in and passing them along the food chain.
Storms and ship propellers can also release the toxins, stirring up what has long been buried.
Water diversion. An Ontario corporation's plans to export water from Lake Superior to Asia caused controversy. Due to protests from neighboring Great Lakes states and provinces, that proposal is now dead. But it is proposals of that sort that worry Donahue. "Such a move could set a legal precedent allowing for larger water diversions in the future."
Currently, Illinois is the only state that diverts Great Lakes water. And the state has come under fire for diverting more than is authorized„about 200 cubic feet of water per second more, according to the best measurements available. Illinois has struck a deal with the other states, pledging to replenish the excess water diverted from Lake Michigan.
Still, Donahue says most diversions do not have a noticeable impact on the Lakes' water level. The larger concern, he argues, is that there is no "legal and institutional infrastructure in place for managing water." He's worried that in the future we will see more proposals like that of the Ontario company. And such diversion proposals could even come from other states seeking to access Great Lakes water through the Mississippi River, although a federal law requires approval of all the Great Lakes states' governors before any other state can divert large quantities.
Jessica Winski
25 July / August 1998 Illinois Issues
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