The Death and Life of the Great Lakes - Dan Egan

Recently my boyfriend decided that we should read more books together so that we can discuss them, and since more books is always okay with me, off we went.  He picked the first book, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, which was also hugely interesting to me because I grew up on the Great Lakes, specifically Lake Erie but with visits to Lake Michigan and also the Niagara River in the Niagara Falls area.  I'm familiar with zebra mussels and sea weed and algae slicks and dead fish on the beach.  I knew that the Cuyahoga River used to catch fire with some regularity, and that Erie, PA was the largest freshwater fishing port in the world, and that the lake just didn't freeze over like it used to, and that Lake Erie was, quite frankly, pretty polluted and gross.  But I didn't know how bad things actually were.

Egan divides his book into three parts: the front door, the back door, and the future.  The "front door" to the Great Lakes is the Saint Lawrence Seaway, over which foreign ships bring cargo and also ballast water laden with invasive species, which they then proceed to dump in the Great Lakes.  Enter the zebra mussel and the quagga mussel, plagues upon fresh water systems everywhere.  This part also deals with the sea lamprey (mostly dealt with now due to a massive ongoing poisoning campaign--pleasant, right?), the alewife, and the chinook and coho salmon, planted in the lakes by a misguided campaign by one person to make the lakes into some sort of sport fishing paradise.  All of this, of course, ravaged the lakes' natural ecosystem, to the point that they will never truly recover.  The "back door" is the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which connects the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River Basin.  Not only has it provided a route for the quagga and zebra mussels to spread to much of the country beyond the lakes, but it's providing a route for extremely invasive species of Asian Carp to get into the lakes, which would make all the devastation the mussels have wreaked look like nothing.  This part also talks about runoff that has led to toxic algae blooms on Lake Erie that threaten clean water supplies.  And finally, the third part talks about threats to the lakes from climate change, cities wanting to funnel away the water for various reasons, and finally a drop of hope in the bucket of despair in regards to how the lakes are, in some small way, adapting and people are working to "fix" them.

This is a bleak book.  Despite Egan's attempts to show that, if we really try, we can stop the damage and start to repair it, it's pretty clear that the lakes will never be what they once were again.  The invasive species can't be gotten rid of.  There's some hope with genetic manipulation of them, but that can be a Pandora's box all on its own.  And then there's an absolute reluctance for people to actually do anything to begin with.  Farmers don't want to change their fertilizing practices, saying that the agricultural runoff isn't really due to them, even though there's overwhelming evidence to show that it is.  Agreements to funnel water away from the lakes keep going through.  There's no real teeth in an order that ships coming from overseas implement better methods of cleansing their ballast tanks of invasive species before dumping in the lakes.  And everyone fights tooth and nail against suggestions to cut the Chicago canal off from the lakes to stop the march of Asian carp.  All of this despite the fact that all of this going on is costing money and stopping it would not really affect trade or the economy at all.  It's infuriating.  Rage-inducing.  And pretty darn hopeless.

This is an excellent read, though.  Egan's writing is engaging and informative at the same time, and he writes in a narrative style while still conveying so much about the state and future of the lakes.  Sprinkled with interviews and anecdotes, I could definitely see the years of reporting that went into what ultimately became this book.  It's also an important read, and I think that it should be pushed on pretty much everyone possible.  The Great Lakes aren't just the problem of the people who live on them; they are twenty percent of the world's available surface freshwater.  That said, there is something that I think was missing here, and that is that the book is written almost entirely from an American perspective.  Egan's an American who did this research for American papers, so that's understandable.  However, Canada also touches the Great Lakes and has a ton of influence on what happens to them!  I would have loved to see something from the other side of the border--a part, a chapter, something other than a few lines about Canadian initiatives that match American ones.

Overall, an excellent read albeit a depressing one.  Read it anyway.  Educate yourself.  Water is everyone's problem.

4 stars out of 5.