The Death and Life of the Great Lakes Book Review
Earlier this year, Michigan'due south Department of Natural Resources made a novel offering in the proper noun of environmental stewardship: come up upwardly with a plan to proceed invasive Asian bother out of the Cracking Lakes and you could win a million dollars.
Merely, to hear Dan Egan '12JRN, a reporter for the Milwaukee Periodical Sentinel, tell it, this was not going to be easy money. The Great Lakes, for all their dazzler and wonder, have no natural defenses against bighead and argent carp, which swallow so much plankton that they threaten to decimate the food concatenation of any body of water they inhabit. And, as Egan reports, in that location is prove that the carp may already have made it into Lake Michigan, rendering the competition moot.
In Egan's meticulous retelling, the presence of the invasive carp in US waters can be traced to an Arkansas farmer who, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, imported what he idea was grass bother — a more benign relative that helpfully devours aquatic weeds — to assistance in the cleanup of polluted streams. Upon realizing his mistake, the farmer did the right thing and turned his carp stocks over to state fishery workers. But the impairment may have already been done.
The Death and Life of the Nifty Lakes, Egan's first book and the winner of the Graduate School of Journalism's J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Laurels, is full of stories like this one: head-slapping moments of human error, with a whiff of hubris. At the same time, the book emphasizes the difficulty of foreseeing the potentially dire consequences of seemingly innocuous actions.
What makes the Nifty Lakes — which contain 21 percent of the earth'south surface freshwater — unique, Egan argues, is too what makes them uniquely vulnerable. Originally formed past retreating glaciers, the lakes spent the better part of fourteen m years completely isolated from other bodies of water. Like Native Americans unprepared for the inflow of smallpox, they were, as Egan puts it, "ecological babies" until the tardily nineteenth century, when invasive species started wandering up the man-fabricated Erie Canal.
There are now more than than 180 non-native species in the Great Lakes. They came past gunkhole, mostly, hiding in the ballast like stowaways. Some, like coho salmon, were fifty-fifty introduced on purpose, to heave the local economy. (It'due south a lot more than fun, apparently, to catch salmon, which put up a fight, than native trout, which have all the resistance "of a snagged rubber kick.") So many mussels have taken up residence in Lake Michigan that they are filtering out well-nigh all the plankton, a major nutrient source for other lake dwellers. "This well-nigh vodka-clear water is non the sign of a good for you lake," Egan writes.
Invasive species aren't the only danger the lakes face up. For several days in 2014, Toledo lost its entire water supply to a toxic algal bloom. The yr earlier, the water level of Lake Michigan hit a record depression, before surging over iii feet in just two years, prompting floods in Chicago. The culprits here are familiar: agricultural runoff and global warming.
Structuring the volume geographically, Egan travels from one terminate of the lakes to the other, a remarkably aggressive narrative project. He'southward a gifted storyteller, and each chapter tin can be as entertaining equally a good novella. But the overarching theme — the sense of mounting danger each time a new species slips into the lakes — tin can get swamped by an backlog of anecdotes and characters.
Still, Egan — a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting — draws a vibrant portrait of the lakes and brings a pressing environmental outcome to wider attention. This is what expert science journalism ought to practice: make us aware of issues we didn't even know affected us, rendering the familiar strange and the strange familiar. The Great Lakes are a vital part of American life and lore; but, as Egan demonstrates, in that location's a lot we still don't know well-nigh them, and our ignorance could come to haunt u.s.a..
Fortunately, Egan shows that all isn't lost — at to the lowest degree not yet. Thanks to new policies requiring ships to flush their ballasts, the influx of invasive species has all simply stopped. Floating docks are helping mitigate the swings in lake level. Genetic engineers are devising means to return bother infertile. And who knows? Someone may nevertheless claim Michigan's tantalizing million-dollar prize.
Source: https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/book-review-death-and-life-great-lakes
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