Disclosure notice: Not only did Erin Lovett of W.W. Norton send me a free unsolicited copy of Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes but she also included a press release with a detailed blurb and Q&A with the author. The PR folks obviously think I am an important person worth cultivating. Or not. Thank you, Erin.
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I’m not sure I would have read Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes without the publisher’s help (see above). Lately my only connection to the Great Lakes has been to scold people who claim that ‘the Great Lakes hold 20% of Earth’s freshwater’. For that to be true you need to insert ‘liquid surface’ or at least ‘surface’, as a modifier to ‘freshwater’.
You can bet Dan Egan, the award-winning Great Lakes reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, doesn’t make the aforementioned mistake nor any others that I could detect. As a WaterWonk who grew up in a Great Lakes state (New York – but way downstate near New York City) I admit to a fascination with the Great Lakes but a distinct of a lack of knowledge about such a huge body of water. Just a few years ago I finally got to see the Erie Canal on a trip from Buffalo to Cooperstown. Egan not only more than sated my knowledge gap but also left me with a sense of wonderment and concern for the Great Lakes and their future. My concern is further amplified when I hear and read reports of cuts in Great Lakes funding by the US federal government.
{Click on the graphic to enlarge it.]
Egan, who is (surprisingly!) the only full-time Great Lakes beat reporter on an American newspaper, knows his stuff when it comes to ‘North America’s Mediterranean Sea’. He correctly notes that the lakes are really a single, huge, slow-moving river as the water moves inexorably downhill from Lake Superior to Lakes Michigan and Huron (actually one huge lake), then to shallow Lake Erie and then over Niagara Falls, to its natural outlet at the east end of Lake Ontario - the St. Lawrence River/St. Lawrence Seaway. That, Egan says, is the lakes’ ‘front door’, first opened by the Erie Canal in 1825. He then proceeds to explain all the crap that has entered through the front door (think sea lampreys, zebra mussels, et al.). Egan notes that George Washington envisioned a way to connect the Great Lakes with the East Coast, lest the settlers 'out west' lose touch with the DC elite and link with Canada or Spain.
Egan has no great fondness for the St. Lawrence Seaway, which brought ocean-going ships from Europe and elsewhere knocking at the front door with assorted goodies and baddies in their holds. Until the Seaway, Niagara Falls formed an effective barrier for the four upper lakes (although the Erie Canal let some things in). Too bad the Seaway was too small from the start. Why? Egan explains all that.
If there’s a front door, there’s probably a back door, right? That would be the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which the City of Chicago opened in 1900 by reversing the flow of the Chicago River so that it flowed away from Lake Michigan and into the Mississippi River. That bit of engineering legerdemain kept the city’s sewage out of its drinking water supply - polluting the Mississippi River basin instead. So now the Great Lakes were connected to a huge basin - 40% of the conterminous US. Both doors were not very effective at keeping things in or out. Imagine the resulting mischief: the lakes could swap zebra and quagga mussels for Asian carp!
There’s more, too. Think toxic algal blooms in shallow western Lake Erie. Phosphorus-laden runoff, invasive mussels, and microcystis. Dredging woes. Climate change wreaking havoc with lake levels, lakefront property, and shipping. Thirsty Westerners reaching for their 1000-mile straws. And as for that phosphorus stuff, we can blame a German alchemist in 1669 for isolating the elemental form. Yes, Egan gives us history.
In the final chapter, ‘A Great Lake Revival’, Egan expresses some hope for the future. Both doors need to be closed - now! He worries that ignorance, not water profiteers or mussels, is the biggest threat to the ‘life’ of the Great Lakes.
I would concur with that 'ignorance' assessment. But I also think the governors of the eight Great Lakes Compact states will find it difficult to deny water to those in their own state but outside the boundaries of the Great Lakes watershed. The recent Waukesha case may be a harbinger. We'll see more, I suspect.
This is a wonderful, moving book and a call to action. Like other great nonfiction water writers – Cynthia Barnett, Charles Fishman, John Fleck, Marc Reisner – Egan writes with passion, crafting stories that interweave science, policy, the law, sociology, history, personalities, and more. It's a joy to read this book.
I now understand why Egan is alone when it comes to full-time Great Lakes reportage.
No one else can touch him.
Read this book.
"The Great Lakes don't belong to just the people who live on their shores. They belong to everyone, just like the federal forests out West. So in that sense everyone has a stake in how the lakes are managed...." - Dan Egan
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