The Death and Life of the Great Lakes in Science and Inquiry

Oct 20, 2017 Katy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is an excellent read on the Great Lakes and water in the USA. It is a call to heal our waters before it is too late.

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Nov 07, 2017 Charlene rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: ecology, evolution, biology, climate

A few chapters toward the beginning moved a bit too slowly for me, but the rest of the book was great. The first half of the book should have been subtitled: What are Ballasts and How Can They Affect the Health of Lakes and Even Threaten the Lives of Humans? The short and interesting answer is that boats are built with areas that can be filled with water, ballast water, which is taken in upon takeoff and dumped when the boat fills up with cargo. If the water that was taken in the boat comes from A few chapters toward the beginning moved a bit too slowly for me, but the rest of the book was great. The first half of the book should have been subtitled: What are Ballasts and How Can They Affect the Health of Lakes and Even Threaten the Lives of Humans? The short and interesting answer is that boats are built with areas that can be filled with water, ballast water, which is taken in upon takeoff and dumped when the boat fills up with cargo. If the water that was taken in the boat comes from an environment that is suitable for salt water species and is dumped in a completely different environment, like the water of the Great Lakes, it can wreak havoc on the eco systems that took a long time to develop in the Great Lakes. In a very short time, that ecosystem can be destroyed and create an environmental crisis. The chapters go into extreme detail about how scientists came to understand that the ballasts were indeed what was ruining the ecosystems, and thus the health of, the Great Lakes. I was very interested in the general picture but felt that there was detail added that actually took detracted from the main message because I felt too bogged down in minute and unnecessary detail that kept stealing my focus.

All the detail added up to the fact that ballast water brought in foreign species, mainly through bringing eggs from seawater species and dumping it in the lakes. The EPA thought ballast water harmless and allowed ships to dump their ballast water without having any guidelines. That all changed when researchers made the issues public. To fix the problem, the ballast water had to be bleached to sterilize it and then treated with vitamin C to neutralize it before it could be dumped into the lake.

To make up for the over-detail-sharing, the author included a story about how ballast water made a ship wobble until it tipped and sank, killing more passengers than the Titanic.

Ballast water is not the only thing that has threatened the health of the Great Lakes. Phosphorus was a huge problem. This is one of the biggest problems with allowing sewage to flow into a body of water. Human urine contains a lot of phosphorus, which poisons lakes. For science lovers, you will really enjoy the story included about how one scientist boiled down buckets of urine to isolate phosphorus and how upon its discovery, was seen as a cure-all. It reminded me a lot of how radium was viewed in society before everyone realized how dangerous it actually was. Climate change is also creating a significant problem for the health of the Great Lakes.

At its core, this book read like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, warning its reader about how different pollutants can affect our most valuable natural resources. It was, at times, shocking how devastatingly fragile the fresh water environment is and it was made very clear how important it is to care for this resource. The book ends with suggestions about how to do just that. We should listen carefully to this warning. ...more

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Apr 15, 2018 Tomislav rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science, politics

I read a library edition of Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lake in kindle format in April 2018. He is a science journalist at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who has covered Great Lakes issues for ten years. I’ve not read any books by Egan before, but because I have lived in one part or another of the Milwaukee area for something like 50 of my 62 years, I almost certainly have read newspaper articles by him. I read the book, because I have an abiding interest in Lake Michigan, in par I read a library edition of Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lake in kindle format in April 2018. He is a science journalist at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who has covered Great Lakes issues for ten years. I’ve not read any books by Egan before, but because I have lived in one part or another of the Milwaukee area for something like 50 of my 62 years, I almost certainly have read newspaper articles by him. I read the book, because I have an abiding interest in Lake Michigan, in particular.

The book gives journalistic coverage of the history, science, and politics of long term biological change in the Laurentian Great Lakes (Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario). Do not set your expectations for objective science reporting, as the writing is clearly intended to persuade the reader. Although I happen to agree with many of the author’s views, outside reading of alternative viewpoints is recommended. The book is topically arranged in an order that I found intuitive and easy to grasp.

Here’s the outline:
Part One: The Front Door
1 Carving A Fourth Seacoast; Dreams of a Seaway
2 Three Fish; The Story of Lake Trout, Sea Lampreys, and Alewives
3 The World’s Great Fishing Hole; The Introduction of Coho and Chinook Salmon
4 Noxious Cargo; The Invasion of Zebra and Quagga Mussels
Part Two: The Back Door
5 Continental Undivide; Asian Carp and Chicago’s Backwards River
6 Conquering a Continent; The Mussel Infestation of the West
7 North America’s Dead Sea; Toxic Algae and the Threat to Toledo’s Water Supply
Part Three: The Future
8 Plugging the Drain; The Never-Ending Threat to Siphon Away Great Lakes Water
9 A Shaking Balancing Act; Climate Change and the Fall and Rise of the Lakes
10 A Great Lake Revival; Charting a Course Toward Integrity, Stability and Balance
There is a LOT of bibliographic material; it makes up almost the final 25% of the page count.

I most appreciated putting the events of past several centuries of human interference with the biological balance of the lakes and surrounding territories into sequence, describing cause and effect. The historical anecdotes made this very interesting reading. With time, succeeding generations each came to see dramatically altered states of the lakes as their own status quo. Within my lifetime, I have seen the sea lamprey invasion, the lake trout demise, the alewife dieback, the salmon introduction, the zebra and quagga mussel invasion, and now the Asian carp invasion. It is a chilling message about human interaction with our environment in general.

I do take issue with chapter 8. I felt it was a topical digression from biology to the politics of a local controversial issue of a drinking water diversion to the City of Waukesha. It is a false equivalency compare a political fight over a 200 year old Georgia state line, to the political fight over a water access boundary defined in 2008 and poorly located. The impact of pumping water 20 miles, and then returning cleaned replacement water, is nothing, when compared to extinction events and unstable lake levels. Unlike the rest of the book, the justification for this position is purely symbolic. In these days of lead-contaminated Flint water, we are not going to make people in Waukesha drink radium-contaminated water, just to make a point.

I do recommend the book. While it fails to achieve the stature of Rachel Carson’s or Aldo Leopold’s works (as some have claimed), it does present a well-organized and comprehensible study of that vast and unique natural system, the Great Lakes. ...more

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