Contemporary Authors

• The Death and Life of the Great Lakes W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2017

1. The death and life of the Great Lakes LCCN 2016039546 Type of material Book Personal name Egan, Dan, author. Main title The death and life of the Great Lakes / Dan Egan. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : W.W. Norton & Company, [2017] Description xix, 364 pages : illustations, maps ; 25 cm ISBN 9780393246438 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER QH104.5.G7 E43 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• WKSU - http://wksu.org/post/qa-great-lakes-book-author-dan-egan#stream/0

  A Q&A with Great Lakes Book Author Dan Egan
  By ELIZABETH MILLER / GREAT LAKES TODAY • MAR 31, 2017
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  photo of Dan Egan
  The book's author Dan Egan (pictured) says he became interested in writing a book about the lakes during a fellowship with Columbia University.
  MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL
  Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Dan Egan has covered Great Lakes issues for 15 years. This month, he released his first book, "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes," an in-depth biography of the lakes – from the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway to current issues with harmful algae blooms and invasive species.

  We talked to Egan about the book and his thoughts on the role it can play in 2017.

  Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

  Listen Listening...0:56 A Q&A with the author
  Tell me about your connection to the Great Lakes.
  "I grew up in Green Bay, Wis.,, and spent a lot of time on the water as a kid. Not all of my memories of that water are pleasant, because I was born in 1967. I spent my childhood around the banks of the Fox River, which is a heavily industrialized river running through the heart of Green Bay. That used to upset my parents, not because they thought I was going to drown but because they thought it was too filthy to mess around with. It was kind of like playing at the dump.

  "Just about an hour north of Green Bay, the water was really clean and safe and fishable and swimmable. Both sets of my grandparents had cottages on the Door Peninsula on northern Green Bay. So I took away from my childhood a lot of fond memories of the Great Lakes."

  How did you go from all of this reporting on the Great Lakes to wanting to write a book about the Great Lakes?
  "That’s assuming I wanted to write a book about the Great Lakes. That changed a few years back when I took a leave of absence from the paper to do a fellowship at Columbia University. Part of that program included a book-writing seminar, and writing a book proposal was a part of that. I looked at all these projects I had done for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel over a decade or so -- I would do one big project a year, and they all kind of stacked up like potential chapters. I was just trying to pass a class in putting together this book proposal.

  "There were 16 students in the classroom. I don’t think any of them were from the Great Lakes Basin. There was a lot of discussion about what we were pursuing, and every time I started telling Great Lakes stories, they just became rapt. It was really eye-opening to me, because of what we take for granted here -- the story of the Great Lakes.

  The book is in three parts: The Front Door, The Back Door, and The Future. Could you break those down?
  "This front door/back door theme really did help organize the issues in my mind. The first third of the book is largely talking about how we opened the Great Lakes to the rest of the world. The back door section deals initially with how we opened the back door of the Great Lakes to the rest of the continent -- and that was by punching through the Subcontinental Divide that separates the waters of the Great Lakes from the waters of the Mississippi Basin at Chicago with the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, and the solutions that brought.

  Would you say invasives are the biggest threat facing the Great Lakes?
  "I think so. We’ve learned how to deal with traditional pollution post-Cuyahoga [River]. The Clean Water Act has done a remarkable job of throttling industrial excrements. We can effectively plug a pipe or cap a smoke stack, or at least learn how to reduce the emissions coming out to the point where waters can be returned to a healthy, vibrant state. But invasive species are often referred to as biological pollution. It is pollution, but it doesn't decay or disperse like traditional pollutants. We can’t really get a handle on it because it breeds."

  With all of the news of Trump’s proposed budget cuts (especially to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative), do you think your book serves as a warning for what might happen if the Great Lakes lose funding?
  "It could, but it’s also more than dollars -- or lack of dollars -- that are a threat to the lakes. It’s lack of rules, laws, and regulations. I've heard the president say for every regulation we're going to get rid of two regulations, so if [the administration is] going to emasculate the EPA or if it's going to take the teeth out of the agency, that's a big problem too. This is all a coincidence [Trump’s budget blueprint release] happened around the same week that the book came out.

  "My biggest idea in writing this book was to give people a Great Lakes literacy. To not tell the whole history of the lakes, and not tell every issue facing the lakes, but just to have a survey of what I see as the important, critical issues facing them. If people become aware of what the problems are and what’s causing them, hopefully that will spur them to demand fixes.

  Do you think your book will raise the profile of the Great Lakes nationally?
  "That was the intent -- and that wasn't even really my idea. I didn't have the same vision for the book that the editor, the agent, and the people in New York did. I think that's because they were looking at these issues that I presented in my book proposal with a completely new set of eyes. They were interested, and flabbergasted, and alarmed. just saw it as a very compelling story."

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• Freshwater Society - https://freshwater.org/dan-egan-qa/

  Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, Q&A

  Q Do you have a favorite memory or place on the Great Lakes that motivated you to write your series of columns in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that led to this book?

  A I can’t say a single event motivated me to write about the Great Lakes. I grew up near the banks of the Fox River in Green Bay, a tributary to Lake Michigan. I spent a lot of time in the 1970s goofing around in that filthy river, one of the most industrialized rivers in the country. But only an hour north, I have the fondest memories swimming and fishing off my grandparents’ dock in Door County, beyond the reach of much of the pollution from paper mills down in Green Bay. I went to work as a reporter out West after I graduated from college, and there is no better way to appreciate the Great Lakes than to live in the desert for a decade. When I came back to Wisconsin as a general assignment feature writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, I found myself naturally drawn to issues facing the lakes, and it didn’t take long until that became my “beat” at the newspaper.

  Q Your book is titled “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes.” What can you point to as a turning point that makes you hopeful about the future of the lakes?

  A Look at what is happening on Lake Huron. The salmon fishery has collapsed. The reason is because the alewives have all but disappeared, due largely to the zebra and quagga mussel invasions. Alewives themselves are an invasive species from the Atlantic Ocean. Salmon are a sport fish from the Pacific planted in the lakes to eat the alewives. Now they are both essentially gone, but native species are rebounding. Why? The native fish are eating gobies, another invasive fish that happens to eat zebra and quagga mussels. Salmon don’t typically eat bottom-dwelling gobies, but native species will go wherever the food is. That’s why native species like lake trout, whitefish and walleye are doing remarkably well on Huron. This is encouraging. The same thing appears to be happening now on Lake Michigan.

  Q Can you give an example of successful policy that has applied a scientific solution to improve the quality of the Great Lakes?

  A Requiring oceangoing ships to flush their ballast tanks with saltwater in mid-ocean has gone a long way to stopping freshwater invaders from sneaking into the lakes via ship-steadying ballast tanks. Prior to this requirement in 2006, species were arriving in the lakes at a rate of about once every eight months. Only one new species has been detected in the lakes since. The problem is the best science says this saltwater flushing policy still leaves the door open to new invasions, and that ballast treatment systems using things like UV light and filters are still needed. Until this situation is resolved, nobody should think the problem is solved.

  Q You refer to the Front Door (shipping route from the Atlantic) and Back Door to the Great Lakes (Chicago Sanitary Sewer Canal connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi watershed) as the routes that invasive species have used to enter the Great Lakes. How would closing those “doors” now improve an already damaged ecosystem?

  A Think of that (probably apocryphal) story of the U.S. patent office, how they talked about shutting it down in the late 1900s because everything that needed to be invented had been invented. Same thing with the Great Lakes. They’ve taken a huge hit in the last century because of invasive species, but that doesn’t mean things couldn’t get worse with the next invasion. The Army Corps in 2002, in a report looking at expanding the dimensions of the St. Lawrence Seaway, essentially made the claim that the lakes had already seen all the biological trouble they could expect to see with the arrival of zebra mussels. Very few people at that time had ever heard of the quagga mussel. Today those mussels smother the bottom of the lakes. Who knows what could come next if we don’t shut these doors to new invasions, but it would be foolish to think things could never get worse.

• W W Norton & Company - http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Author.aspx?id=4294992688

  Dan Egan is a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a senior water policy fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Freshwater Sciences. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and he has won the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, John B. Oakes Award, AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award, and J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. A graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, he lives in Milwaukee with his wife and children.

• PRI - https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-05-07/death-and-life-great-lakes

  The death and life of the Great Lakes
  Living on Earth
  May 07, 2017 · 2:45 PM EDT
  Writer Adam Wernick
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  EGAN-Welland_canal_and_skyway.jpg
  The John B. Aird passes through the Welland Canal, the passage along the St. Lawrence Seaway connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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  When the St. Lawrence Seaway opened on April 24, 1959, it created a link from the Great Lakes to the sea along the US-Canadian border — the fulfillment of a dream for the heartland of the continent. It also created an ecological nightmare no one anticipated.

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  This story is based on a radio interview. Listen to the full interview.
  Environmental journalist Dan Egan details the history of the Seaway and the modern problems it created in his new book, "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes."

  “The whole idea behind the St. Lawrence Seaway was, essentially, to carve an American Mediterranean Sea out of the middle of the continent by basically blasting a shipping channel between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean,” Egan explains.

  The Great Lakes collectively span 94,000 square miles, but “they were as isolated as a pond in the middle of the woods,” Egan says, because no ships from the Eastern Seaboard could get to them.

  Its creators hailed the Seaway as a modern miracle. Egan believes that it was obsolete the day it opened.

  “They built it on the cheap. The size of the locks and the channels reflected the size of the world's fleet in the 1930s, not in the late 1950s or early 1960s,” Egan explains. “The Seaway opened in 1959, and the container revolution took off almost simultaneously. That demanded bigger and bigger boats, so the Seaway got squeezed aside.”

  The other problem was ice. “You can't have a world-class shipping corridor that shuts down for three months of the year,” Egan says. “In this world of just-in-time delivery, you need fast, dependable, predictable, perennial deliveries, and you can't do that with a navigation route that is choked by ice.”

  What was left, then, was a kind of “boutique shipping industry,” Egan says. On average today, fewer than two ships per day come into the Great Lakes through the St. Lawrence Seaway during the nine-month shipping season.

  Ships that once came down the Seaway often didn't carry high-value cargo. But they did carry something else: invasive species — from alewives to zebra mussels — that have hitched rides in the ballast tanks of ocean freighters. Zebra and quagga mussels, tiny little mollusks from the Caspian Sea basin, now blanket the bottom of the Great Lakes, Egan says.

  Zebra musselsDocks pulled from Port Credit Marina on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario covered in zebra mussels are shown here. Credit: Gene Wilburn/Flickr
  As the agricultural center of North America flourished and sent increasing pesticide and nutrient runoff from corn and wheat fields into the Great Lakes, the consequences of this new "biological pollution" became clear.

  Look at what happened to Lake Erie in 2014, Egan says: 500,000 people lost their drinking water because of an outbreak of toxic algae called Microcystis, which produces a toxin called microcystin.

  “Microcystin occurs naturally in the Great Lakes, but these mussels basically eat everything but that algae, so the algae has no competition,” Egan explains. “It's a pollutant as toxic, dangerous and problematic as anything that can come out of an industrial pipe or smokestack.”

  As opposed to “traditional” pollution, which can be slowed or stopped by capping a smokestack or plugging a pipe, “this new biological pollution doesn't decay or disperse. It breeds,” Egan says.

  “It doesn't mean that Lake Erie's water is going to be poisonous from here on out every late summer,” Egan says. “There are things we can do. Specifically, we can reduce the amount of phosphorous going into the lake. But the mussels are here, and we're really going to just have to learn to live with them.”

  Invasive species have cost cities around the Great Lakes hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of dollars, and the Midwest does a lot more trade via railways from East Coast harbors than from ships in their own ports. So, why do these lake economies continue to keep their harbors open to the risk of foreign vessels?

  Because, despite its problems, the Seaway and the Great Lakes shipping channel are important navigation corridors, Egan says, and the vast majority of goods are moved by local boats. These boats don’t bring in invasive species.

  Closing off the Seaway to overseas shipping, on the other hand, is an idea that should be on the table, Egan believes. He suggests a cost-benefit analysis that compares the relatively few ships coming up the Seaway to the ecological and economic impacts that invasive species have had, not just on the Great Lakes, but across the continent.

  “When you think of the number of reservoirs and boat ramps and boats out West, and the idea that these people are drawing a line around each water body, doing everything they can to stop a contaminated boat from contaminating the next pond, lake or reservoir, it's almost an impossible task,” Egan says.

  “Then, if you go [back east], across the continent, and you look at the boats that have brought in this trouble, every single one of them has to go through this exquisitely tight pinch point, called the St. Lambert Lock. It's the first lock on the St. Lawrence Seaway, and it's 80 feet wide. If you stop trouble there, you save a continent's worth of trouble.”

  This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

• MPR News - https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/03/13/books-the-death-and-life-of-the-great-lakes

  Exploring the death, and life, of the Great Lakes

  Environment MPR News Staff , Tom Weber · Mar 13, 2017
  Steam rises off Lake Superior
  Steam rises off Lake Superior. MPR | Nate Ryan file
  LISTEN Dan Egan on 'The Death and Life of the Great Lakes'
  49min 40sec
  The Great Lakes are a marvel — an unrivaled natural resource and a stunning landscape that defines the surrounding states.

  But in the middle of the 20th century, they were in trouble. Pollution strangled the beaches, and rivers feeding the lakes were so filled with chemicals they literally caught on fire.

  Then came the Clean Water Act of 1972.

  "In 1972, suddenly industries and cities were being held accountable for what they were putting in our water bodies," reporter Dan Egan told MPR News host Tom Weber. "The improvement was vast and dramatic — and in many ways people thought the problem had largely been solved."

  Not so fast.

  'The Death and Life of the Great Lakes' by Dan Egan
  'The Death and Life of the Great Lakes' by Dan Egan Courtesy of publisher
  As Egan explains in his new book, "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes," the Clean Water Act took steps in battling industrial pollution. But it failed to deal with biological pollution, which today is causing damage at an alarming speed. Invasive species like sea lamprey and zebra mussels have destroyed ecosystems and set the stage for new disasters, like the toxic algae bloom that cut off Toledo, Ohio's drinking water in 2014.

  Because of the lakes' geographic development, they had historically been isolated, Egan explained. The basins were carved by the last of the glaciers, and then filled with glacial water.

  "As the lakes reached their modern level, they were basically sealed off, and what we were left with was very few, relatively speaking, fish species," Egan said. "So when [the lakes] are referred to as 'ecologically naive,' it means they just didn't have a lot of exposure to outside organisms or competition."

  Enter the rise of global commerce, and that naivety was quickly erased.

  As humans transformed the lakes to allow for shipping traffic, they dredged canals and the St. Lawrence Seaway. They made connections where there had been none, and as ships arrived, they carried more than the listed cargo.

  They carried ballast water: reserves of water that could be pumped in or out to steady the ship on ocean waters.

  But "water isn't dead weight. It's anything but," Egan said. "It contains anything a ship may pick up in a port anywhere in the world."

  Ballast water from all over was dumped into the Great Lakes, or into the rivers feeding them. Invasive species arrived, and even as later legislation came that restricted how ballast tanks should be cleaned and monitored, the damage had been done.

  But people can't always see it.

  "There's a lot going on underneath the water is all five Great Lakes that people don't really grasp. And it's understandable, because from the surface they look beautiful," Egan explained. "But that clear water isn't the sign of a healthy lake. Clear isn't clean: It's a sign of lakes getting the life sucked out of them."

  "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes" digs into these problems facing the lakes today, and the impact they will have on future generations. Egan takes readers all the way from the glaciers to the Flint water crisis. But he also present moments of hope, occasions where native species have started to flourish again.

  An early review likened the book to Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," putting forth the idea that understanding problems facing the Great Lakes problem could "change the world."

  For the full interview with Dan Egan on "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes," use the audio player above.

Print Marked Items
Five Alive
Robert Moor
The New York Times Book Review.
(May 28, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: p12(L). From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Full Text:
THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT LAKES By Dan Egan Illustrated. 364 pp. W. W. Norton & Company.
$27.95.
In the oceanic depths of the Great Lakes, life and death swirl like coffee and cream. Growing up on the western shores
of Lake Michigan, I knew this instinctively. The lake provided our drinking water and a place to cool off in the summer,
but it also occasionally coughed up millions of small dead fish called alewives, which littered the shoreline, giving off
an aquarial reek. As long as the town deemed the water's bacteria count low enough, we kids would go swimming or
fishing (though we weren't allowed to eat what we caught). Our moms would sit on towels on the pebbled beach, misted
with sweat, paging through magazines. ''Do you go in?'' they would ask one another, with widened eyes and a half-ironic
cringe. Oh no, it was much too cold, or too polluted, they inevitably replied. Nevertheless, the lake served as the axis
mundi of our little universe; when people gave directions, they were often oriented ''toward the lake'' or ''away from the
lake.'' The name of our town had ''lake'' in it; the town next door did too. Both lay within Lake County. We were lake
people.
And so in retrospect it seems odd that we gave the lake so little attention, afforded it so little care. When it began to
change, radically and alarmingly, few of us even noticed. My sister was the first person I knew who remarked upon it,
some time around 2007. Having just moved back to Chicago from Mexico, she had seen Lake Michigan with fresh eyes.
''Have you noticed how blue the lake is now?'' she asked me one day. I had not. ''It's, like, Caribbean blue,'' she said. The
next time I went down to the lakeside I noticed what she meant. The lake of my childhood had always vacillated
somewhere between a slate blue and the gray found in the seams of an old tennis ball. But suddenly it had taken on a
kind of hyperclarity; it sparkled. The lake was so clean, I read online, that passing airplanes could see shipwrecks
resting on the lake bottom. Thanks to climate change, the lake was approaching Caribbean temperatures, as well; it hit
80 degrees one recent July, when it would normally be in the high 50s. I remember feeling pleased by this change, but
also slightly unsettled, the same way we feel on an unseasonably warm winter's day. It was too good to be good.
And so it came as a revelation to me to read Dan Egan's deeply researched and sharply written ''The Death and Life of
the Great Lakes.'' Dipping into this book was like opening the secret diary of a mercurial and mysterious parent. I
learned that the reason the lake had become so clear was that it had been invaded by a dastardly pair of bivalves -- the
zebra and quagga mussels -- which had hitched a ride on a shipping barge from either the Black or Caspian Seas and
then quietly but ceaselessly colonized the lake. They set about cleaning up the water with hyperactive singlemindedness,
eventually sucking up 90 percent of the lake's phytoplankton. The water is now three times clearer than it
was in the 1980s. But ''this is not the sign of a healthy lake,'' Egan warns. ''It's the sign of a lake having the life sucked
out of it.'' Since the Great Lakes are essentially ''one giant, slow-motion river,'' the mussels have since spread to every
one of the Great Lakes, proliferating ''like cancer cells in a bloodstream.''
Egan goes on to reveal that the mussels are merely the latest in the Great Lakes' long history of radical ecological
mutations. Ever since the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, and accelerating after the opening of the St. Lawrence
Seaway in 1959 -- which allowed large shipping barges to travel from the Atlantic to Chicago -- the lakes have
experienced a parade of evermore villainous invaders. First, came the vampire-like lamprey, which spread across the
lakes with shocking speed in the 1940s, before scientists brought them under control with designer poison. Then in the
1950s came a small bug-eyed fish called the alewife, harmless on its own, but which in the absence of predators,
proliferated wildly. By 1967, they were swarming in schools some 10 miles long. To combat them, fishery scientists
eventually imported half a billion salmon (including genetically modified ''super salmon''), which thrilled sport
fishermen, before the salmon and the alewife populations both, swiftly and more or less in tandem, collapsed.
The salmon-fishing craze, artificial as it was, had one salubrious side effect: It gave rise to a new ecological
consciousness among those who caught and ate fish from the lake. When it was discovered in 1966 that the harmful
pesticide DDT was accumulating in salmon flesh -- a revelation due in part to the heroic reporting of Don L. Johnson at
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the same paper where Egan now works -- Wisconsin and Michigan became the
nation's first states to ban the pesticide. Today, in a stroke of irony, fishermen whose parents and grandparents had
despised the alewife for outcompeting local perch now complain that actions must be taken to preserve the (invasive)
alewife, in order to support the stock of (imported) salmon they grew up catching. This is a classic example of shifting
baselines, an important concept that Egan, in a rare misstep, glosses over as ''a fancy way of saying that kids are getting
cheated out of the lakes their moms and dads loved.''
Thanks to a blind spot in the E.P.A. regulations, which allowed shipping vessels to dump bilge water teeming with tiny
foreign organisms directly into the Great Lakes, in recent years a host of minor monsters has appeared on Midwestern
shores: spiny water fleas, fishhook water fleas, the bloody red shrimp. But none, Egan writes, have been more
destructive than the innocuous-seeming zebra and quagga mussels. The mussels managed to spread so quickly because
they secrete a superglue-like adhesive that can stick to any solid surface, allowing them to cling to the hulls of
speedboats, which then transport them to other lakes all across the continent. Making matters worse, the mussels suck
up practically every speck of life in the water except a toxic form of blue-green algae called microcystis, which, due
largely to a flood of under-regulated agricultural runoff, blossoms like an aqueous atomic bomb each summer. Egan
warns that Lake Erie, which is currently experiencing the worst algal blooms of any Great Lake, and which provides the
drinking water to 11 million people, could soon face ''a natural and public health disaster unlike anything this country
has experienced in modern times.''
The book's final chapters look to the near future, when a combination of climate change, a growing human population
and even scarier invasive species (''monster-sized'' Asian carp, the ''razor-toothed'' snakehead, a strain of toxic
dinoflagellates known as ''cells from hell'') will further destabilize the lakes' already wobbly ecosystem.
In telling what might otherwise be a grim tale, Egan, a two-time Pulitzer finalist, nimbly splices together history,
science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative. The book's title is a nod to Jane
Jacobs, but its ideological and stylistic forebear is plainly ''Silent Spring,'' that ur-classic of red-flag-raising ecojournalism.
Like Rachel Carson, Egan is careful to cloak his argument in terms policy makers understand, focusing
more on financial damage and human health than any intrinsic, but incalculable, deep ecological value. (The damage
caused by Caspian mussels to tourism and industry alone, for example, currently costs Great Lakes communities
roughly $250 million annually.) However, one advantage Egan's book has over Carson's is its approachable style. As a
narrator he tends to glide high above the action, but he frequently swoops down to describe his subjects at eye level, in
order to show how massive structural problems affect individual lives. Rereading ''Silent Spring'' for the first time since
high school, I was struck by how chalky it is, how crammed with scientific studies, how devoid of human drama. In
contrast, Egan's book is bursting with life (and, yes, death).
Like Carson, Egan is most galvanizing when he pairs alarming problems with the concrete and achievable solutions. His
most convincing suggestion is that we should close the seaway to all overseas freighters, those oceangoing ships
nicknamed ''salties,'' which inadvertently smuggle invasive species in their bilge-water tanks. It is a radical-sounding
proposition, which the shipping industry vociferously opposes. But Egan shows that it is surprisingly feasible. It turns
out that all of the foreign oceanic freight currently shipped to the Great Lakes each day could be brought in and out by a
single locomotive. ''If that train delivered as much ecological havoc as the salties have,'' Egan muses, ''it is unlikely the
public would still allow it to be running down the tracks.''
As a protest slogan, ''Halt the Salties!'' might just be punchy enough to work. Unfortunately, actually achieving it would
likely require vigorous action from the E.P.A. and other legislators, which seems unlikely under the current regime.
And, as Egan admits, contaminated bilge water is just one strand in a tangled net of dire problems facing the Great
Lakes. The Trump administration's budget proposal, meanwhile, guts a slew of programs designed to protect water
quality, including the virtual eradication of a $300 million program created under the Obama administration to restore
the Great Lakes ecology. On the campaign trail, Trump promised voters that he would ensure that all Americans had
access to ''crystal clear water.'' But, as Egan's book shows, clarity can be deceiving. What is needed now are legislators,
activists, citizens and writers, like Egan, who have an appreciation for that murkiest, least attractive of qualities:
complexity.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: Great Lakes vampires: Lampreys latch on to a brown trout. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMES L.
AMOS/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Moor, Robert. "Five Alive." The New York Times Book Review, 28 May 2017, p. 12(L). Literature Resource Center,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA493109433&it=r&asid=9d245627cd83e7f36c0d070300272a48.
Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493109433
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
Donna Seaman
Booklist.
113.13 (Mar. 1, 2017): p26. From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes.
By Dan Egan.
Mar. 2017.368p. illus. Norton, $27.95 (9780393246438). 508.77.
For 10 years, Egan, an award-winning reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, covered the Great Lakes. He now
channels his findings about these five inland seas holding 20 percent of the earth's fresh water into a vivid, fascinating,
and alarming chronicle of an epic clash between natural order and human chaos. Egan maps the unique geography that
for millennia kept the Great Lakes in pristine and thriving isolation, a resplendent abundance that didn't inspire
stewardship in the new, colonizing North Americans, but rather dreams of wealth from international shipping. Egan
charts the engineering feats and failures of the Erie and Welland Canals and the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which were too
small to handle the envisioned shipping boom, yet capacious enough to allow seafaring ships to traverse the Great
Lakes, carelessly dumping ballast water, which Egan describes as "mini-oceans" teeming with voracious invasive
species. He precisely and dramatically elucidates the rampages of the sea lamprey, alewife, and zebra and quagga
mussels, as well as the debacle of stocking the Great Lakes with coho salmon, and the ravages of water pollution. The
devastation of the Great Lakes ecosystem delivered severe economic hardships, and new threats are pending, including
the dreaded Asian carp. Egan's in-depth investigation is crucial testimony to the dire consequences of our profligate
abuse of precious earthly resources.--Donna Seaman
Seaman, Donna
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 26+. Literature Resource Center,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA488689439&it=r&asid=25350cf07e3c3c2702cd69b1ee0f97d4.
Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A488689439
Troubled waters
Troubled waters
Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.
BookPage.
(Mar. 2017): p25. From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
The vastness and untamed energy of oceans, seas and lakes both fascinate and frighten us. Two new books explore our
complex relationships with iconic American bodies of water.
In his vivid The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea (Liveright, $29.95, 608 pages, ISBN 9780871408662),
University of Florida historian Jack E. Davis narrates the history of the Gulf of Mexico from its origins in the
Pleistocene epoch and its flourishing aboriginal cultures--still evident in burial and ceremonial mounds. Davis traces
various eras of exploration and conquest by Spanish, British and French explorers, the development of towns on the
Gulf as tourist destinations in the 19 th and early 20th centuries, and oil booms and ecological catastrophes of the late
20th century. Along the way, we meet figures who shaped the history of the Gulf: ethnologist Frank Hamilton Cushing,
who explored the ancient mounds; 16th-century Spanish explorer Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca; and Randy Wayne
White, the fishing guide (and bestselling author) whose promotion of the tarpon lured hundreds of anglers to the Gulf
Coast.
Though Gulf waters once teemed with "crabs, shrimp, and curious jumping fish called the mullet," by the mid-20th
century, the thirst for development had disastrous consequences. In the 1960s, many scientists recommended eradicating
mangroves, which prevent erosion, in order to build condominiums closer to the water. When beaches began to erode,
communities built seawalls, which actually worsened the problem. As Davis demonstrates in this absorbing narrative,
the history of the Gulf teaches us that nature is most generous whenever we respect its sovereignty.
ECOLOGICAL THREATS
The Great Lakes span 94,000 square miles and provide 20 percent of the world's supply of fresh water. Yet, as awardwinning
journalist Dan Egan points out in The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (Norton, $27.95, 384 pages, ISBN
9780393246438), these inland seas face challenges unimaginable when explorer Jean Nicolet first paddled across Lake
Huron in the 17th century. At that time, the Great Lakes were isolated from the Atlantic, unreachable by boat not only
because of their unnavigable shorelines but also because of the challenges of crossing waterfalls. With the construction
of the St. Lawrence Seaway, begun in 1955, ships gained what Egan calls a "front door" to the lakes, turning cities like
Chicago into inland ports.
By the mid-20th century, industrial and municipal pollution created dead zones in the lakes. While the passage of the
Clean Water Act in 1972 prompted some recovery, the law didn't prevent ships from dumping contaminated ballast.
Egan chronicles the ways that such pollution has decimated native fish populations, created toxic algae outbreaks and
introduced the DNA of non-native species into the lakes. In this compelling account, Egan issues a clarion call for re-
imagining the future of the Great Lakes.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Carrigan, Henry L., Jr. "Troubled waters." BookPage, Mar. 2017, p. 25. Literature Resource Center,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483701857&it=r&asid=d6dcb3078cb03fa03fc5e7cb070db7ce.
Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A483701857
Egan, Dan: THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE
Egan, Dan: THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE
GREAT LAKES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2017): From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Egan, Dan THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT LAKES Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 3, 7 ISBN: 978-0-
393-24643-8
An alarming account of the "slow-motion catastrophe" facing the world's largest freshwater system.Based on 13 years of
reporting for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, this exhaustively detailed examination of the Great Lakes reveals the
extent to which this 94,000-square-mile natural resource has been exploited for two centuries. The main culprits have
been "over-fishing, over-polluting, and over-prioritizing navigation," writes Egan, winner of the J. Anthony Lukas
Work-in-Progress Award. Combining scientific details, the stories of researchers investigating ecological crises, and
interviews with people who live and work along the lakes, the author crafts an absorbing narrative of science and human
folly. The St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of locks, canals, and channels leading to the Atlantic Ocean, which allows
"noxious species" from foreign ports to enter the lakes through ballast water dumped by freighters, has been a central
player. Biologically contaminated ballast water is "the worst kind of pollution," writes Egan. "It breeds." As a result,
mussels and other invasive species have been devastating the ecosystem and traveling across the country to wreak harm
in the West. At the same time, farm-fertilizer runoff has helped create "massive seasonal toxic algae blooms that are
turning [Lake] Erie's water into something that seems impossible for a sea of its size: poison." The blooms contain "the
seeds of a natural and public health disaster." While lengthy and often highly technical, Egan's sections on frustrating
attempts to engineer the lakes by introducing predator fish species underscore the complexity of the challenge. The
author also covers the threats posed by climate change and attempts by outsiders to divert lake waters for profit. He
notes that the political will is lacking to reduce farm runoffs. The lakes could "heal on their own," if protected from new
invasions and if the fish and mussels already present "find a new ecological balance." Not light reading but essential for
policymakers--and highly recommended for the 40 million people who rely on the Great Lakes for drinking water.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Egan, Dan: THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT LAKES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. Literature Resource
Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234369&it=r&asid=f70559d0cebfffd77a3903c22ded66fa.
Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234369
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
Publishers Weekly.
264.1 (Jan. 2, 2017): p48. From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
Dan Egan. Norton, $27.95 (384p) ISBN 978-0393-24643-8
Egan, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, effectively calls attention to the inherent fragility of the Great
Lakes in this thought-provoking investigation, providing a modern history of the lakes--Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario,
and Superior--and the problems that have plagued them. He takes readers "beneath the lakes' shimmering surface and
illuminates an ongoing and unparalleled ecological unraveling." Egan starts the discussion by examining the 1950s
construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of locks, canals, and channels connecting the Great Lakes to the
Atlantic Ocean. Supporters had hoped landlocked cities such as Chicago and Cleveland would in time become global
commercial ports rivaling New York City and Tokyo. Subsequent chapters deal with some of the project's unintended
consequences. Nonnative species began showing up in the Great Lakes. Zebra mussels, once found primarily in the
Caspian and Black Sea basins, hitchhiked their way across the Atlantic in the ballast tanks of freighters. Able to fuse
themselves to hard surfaces and grow "in wickedly sharp clusters," zebra mussels can clog pipes, cause significant
damage to boats, and "suck the plankton--the life--out of the waters they invade." Egan highlights a range of issues that
have affected these crucial waterways for decades. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Death and Life of the Great Lakes." Publishers Weekly, 2 Jan. 2017, p. 48. Literature Resource Center,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478696527&it=r&asid=c21a5ae67789fd4c336882a67b77fb89.
Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A478696527
Egan, Dan. The Death and Life of the Great
Egan, Dan. The Death and Life of the Great
Lakes
Robert Eagan
Library Journal.
141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p119. From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Egan, Dan. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. Norton. Mar. 2017.368p. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN
9780393246438. $27.95; ebk. ISBN 9780393246445. SCI
Milwaukee Sentinel Journal's Egan, "beat reporter" on the Great Lakes since 2003, examines the ecological and
economic havoc caused by invasive species and also considers problems such as fluctuating lake levels and future
threats including water diversion schemes. He shows how big engineering, canal building in particular, opened the lakes
to shipping but also swung open the "front" (e.g., the Saint Lawrence Seaway) and "back" (e.g., Chicago Canal system)
doors to nonindigenous aquatic species. Some critters hitchhiked in the ballast tanks of ships; others were carried in by
the currents or swam. Swamp draining and river dredging have played their own pernicious parts in "unstitching a
delicate ecological web more than 10,000 years in the making." Egan offers some bold solutions to slow the damage
(e.g., develop better ballast disinfection systems, close the Saint Lawrence Seaway to ocean freighters, shut the Chicago
Canal) but admits that obstacles such as the shipping lobby and foot-dragging politicians are formidable. Egan skillfully
mixes science, history, and reportage to craft a compelling story. If, as he asserts, "the biggest threat to the Great Lakes
right now is our own ignorance," then this book stands as important, timely mitigation. VERDICT This outstanding
addition to science collections will appeal to general readers.-- Robert Eagan, Windsor P.L., Ont.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Eagan, Robert. "Egan, Dan. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 119+. Literature
Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371298&it=r&asid=435c273710171ffdcbbfe0092ed6c855.
Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472371298

Moor, Robert. "Five Alive." The New York Times Book Review, 28 May 2017, p. 12(L). Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA493109433&it=r. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017. Seaman, Donna. "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 26+. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA488689439&it=r. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017. Carrigan, Henry L., Jr. "Troubled waters." BookPage, Mar. 2017, p. 25. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483701857&it=r. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017. "Egan, Dan: THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT LAKES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234369&it=r. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017. "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes." Publishers Weekly, 2 Jan. 2017, p. 48. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478696527&it=r. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017. Eagan, Robert. "Egan, Dan. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 119+. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371298&it=r. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017.

• The Globe and Mail
  https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/dan-egans-the-death-and-life-of-the-great-lakes-reviewed-troubled-waters/article34263664/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com&
  Word count: 881

  REVIEW
  Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, reviewed: Troubled waters

  Open this photo in gallery: The Globe and Mail
  The Death and Life of the Great Lakes includes harrowing chapters about the many invasive species that have since colonized the Great Lakes, riding in on the hulls of Seaway ships or hiding in their ballast water, from sea lampreys to the insidious zebra mussels.

  TORY ZIMMERMAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
  EVA HOLLAND
  SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
  APRIL 14, 2017
  MARCH 10, 2017
  TITLE The Death and Life of the Great Lakes AUTHOR Dan Egan GENRE Non-fiction PUBLISHER WW Norton PAGES 384 PRICE $36.95
  As a kid growing up in Ottawa, with my family members scattered around Lake Ontario, I can't tell you how many locks and canals I visited: on school field trips, with day camps, on summer road trips, to a rental cottage on Georgian Bay. I can tell you that every one of them bored me equally – I was not a child who was easily impressed by great works of engineering. From what I remember of the plaques and interpretive panels that decorated each site, they were all about the mechanisms, describing how the big slab doors swing open and the water rushes in, raising boats like an elevator.

  None of them mentioned the staggering ecological catastrophe that our grand system of locks and canals has helped to unleash. So I was shocked to read the opening chapter of Dan Egan's alarming and powerful new book, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. Those same dull locks, it turns out, do a lot more than lift pleasure boats up against the downward flow of fresh water seeking the Atlantic. They're also the conduit for a disastrous series of invasions that have remade the lakes' ecosystem.

  Egan is a Milwaukee-based newspaper reporter (and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist) who's been covering the Great Lakes, and the abuse they endure at our hands, for several years. His book begins from a clear premise: that the Great Lakes, a relatively young and vulnerable ecosystem, were protected for centuries by natural barriers – the most notable being Niagara Falls. Nothing, whether fish or mammal or man-made machine, could travel upstream, by water, to the upper lakes. But the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway – the culmination of a long-time effort to create a navigable connection between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, effectively making a "fourth coast" in North America – changed all that. And that's where the trouble began.

  What follows is a series of increasingly harrowing chapters about the many invasive species that have since colonized the Great Lakes, riding in on the hulls of Seaway ships or hiding in their ballast water, from sea lampreys and alewives to the insidious zebra and quagga mussels. Each section of the book builds on the next; each invasion knocks out another piece of the Great Lakes' natural puzzle, enabling the next plague, and so on. In Egan's telling, even well-intentioned attempts to "fix" the lakes tend, inevitably, to backfire. And the consequences are not just ecological: The book documents the billions of dollars spent by Great Lakes ports to keep tenacious mussels from colonizing and blocking their water-intake pipes, and the fears in those same ports that toxic, even deadly, algae blooms could soon poison the water supply for millions of people.

  The book is written from an American perspective, and focused on the American shores of the lakes. But it's relevant to millions of Canadians, too. Egan is a lively writer who tells each grim story through the eyes of local scientists, fishing enthusiasts, nearby farmers and lake-loving beach-goers. What could be a dense treatise on hydrology and fish biology instead becomes an accessible, even gripping narrative about the massive, unforeseen costs of our interventions in the natural world.

  In the final chapters, Egan looks to the future, and to the Great Lakes' critical role as caretaker to 20 per cent of the surface fresh water in an increasingly parched world. He examines the impact that climate change is having, and he talks to researchers who are engineering new, high-tech interventions in an effort to deal with the invasive mussels and other threats to the ecosystem. In the end, he offers a slim ray of hope – that with a few thoughtful measures, the invasions can be stopped and the lakes given a chance to settle into a new ecological balance. (That slim ray got slimmer, though, this past week, when news broke that the Trump administration may cut up to 97 per cent of the funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.)

  The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is an engaging, vitally important work of science journalism. A blurb on its book jacket compares it to Silent Spring, the Rachel Carson classic that turned the tide against indiscriminate pesticide use and eventually helped create the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Here's hoping, for the sake of the Great Lakes and everyone who depends on them, that Egan's new book inspires similarly tangible results.

  Eva Holland is a freelance writer and editor based in Whitehorse.

• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
  http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/wisconsin/2017/05/24/egans-great-lakes-book/341850001/
  Word count: 873

  New York Times Book Review: Egan's Great Lakes book 'deeply researched and sharply written'
  James B. Nelson, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Published 11:37 a.m. CT May 24, 2017 | Updated 7:16 a.m. CT May 25, 2017

  GREAT LAKES AT RISK
  Uncharted Waters: What can be done about low levels in the Great Lakes? | 2:44
  Water levels in the Great Lakes, remarkably stable for generations, are headed out of whack. Can a solution be engineered to prevent more water from being lost through the St. Clair River?
  1 of 6

  GREAT LAKES AT RISK
  Uncharted Waters: What is behind the low levels on the Great Lakes? | 3:59
  Despite man-made tinkering, water levels in the Great Lakes have remained remarkably stable for generations. Now that exquisite balance may be headed out of whack. One culprit is a natural one.
  2 of 6

  GREAT LAKES AT RISK
  The wrong-way river | 2:58
  More than a century after Chicago blasted a hole in the continental divide separating the Great Lakes and Mississippi basins, regional leaders say it's time to plug a waterway that provides a pathway for Great Lakes invasions.
  3 of 6

  GREAT LAKES AT RISK
  A Watershed Moment: Algae blooms and their toxic fallout | 2:38
  Lake Erie was plagued by phosphorus-driven algae outbreaks in the middle of the last century. Now the algae blooms are back, due largely to an increase in a highly-potent form of phosphorus running off farm fields in the lake's western basin.
  4 of 6

  GREAT LAKES AT RISK
  How scientists use DNA to track Asian carp | 2:32
  This motion graphic breaks down the process that scientists use to identify Asian carp DNA in rivers.
  5 of 6

  GREAT LAKES AT RISK
  A Watershed Moment: Video shows fish crossing barrier meant to stop Asian carp | 2:20
  Sam Finney of the U.S. Fish and Widlife Service narrates sonar video that shows fish swimming past the electric fish barrier in Chicago meant to keep Asian carp out of Lake Michigan.
  6 of 6
  Next Video
  Uncharted Waters: What can be done about low levels in the Great Lakes?
  Uncharted Waters: What can be done about low levels in the Great Lakes?
  Uncharted Waters: What is behind the low levels on the Great Lakes?
  Uncharted Waters: What is behind the low levels on the Great Lakes?
  The wrong-way river
  The wrong-way river
  A Watershed Moment: Algae blooms and their toxic fallout
  A Watershed Moment: Algae blooms and their toxic fallout
  How scientists use DNA to track Asian carp
  How scientists use DNA to track Asian carp
  A Watershed Moment: Video shows fish crossing barrier meant to stop Asian carp
  A Watershed Moment: Video shows fish crossing barrier meant to stop Asian carp
  DEATH-LIFE-GREAT-LAKES.jpg
  (Photo: W.W. Norton)
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  Dan Egan's recently published book about the future of the Great Lakes is called "deeply researched and sharply written" by the New York Times Book Review.

  The lengthy review of Egan's book, "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes," will appear in Sunday's Book Review and is online now. Egan is a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.

  Written by author and writer Robert Moor, the review carries the headline "Nor Any Drop to Drink?: Why the Great Lakes Face a Murky Future." It compares Egan's book to Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," which Moor calls a "classic of red-flag-raising eco-journalism."

  Egan "nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative," the review says.

  Dan EganBuy Photo
  Dan Egan (Photo: Mike De Sisti, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
  The book notes that the striking clarity of the Lake Michigan water masks deep trouble facing the Great Lakes, Moor writes.

  "I learned that the reason the lake had become so clear was that it had been invaded by a dastardly pair of bivalves — the zebra and quagga mussels — which had hitched a ride on a shipping barge from either the Black or Caspian Seas and then quietly but ceaselessly colonized the lake," Moor says.

  "The water is now three times clearer than it was in the 1980s. But 'this is not the sign of a healthy lake,' Egan warns. 'It’s the sign of a lake having the life sucked out of it.' "

  Egan won an AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award in 2013, the Oakes Award for environmental journalism in 2006, and has received four National Headliner Awards for environmental and science reporting. He investigated threats to the Great Lakes and the effectiveness of government efforts to protect them during a nine-month O'Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism through the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University.

  "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes" was published earlier this year by W.W. Norton & Co.

  RELATED: Great Lakes coverage

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  RELATED:: Dan Egan's book chronicles how humans messed up 'Great Lakes'

• Agate
  http://www.agatemag.com/2017/05/book-review-the-death-and-life-of-the-great-lakes-by-dan-egan/
  Word count: 1561

  Book Review: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
  MAY 21, 2017 BY STEPHANIE HEMPHILL

  Book cover

  This is a rollicking, eye-popping, scary, sad tour of one of the world’s watery wonders, the Great Lakes. Readers will appreciate the vivid history and sober analysis it offers of the serious threats the lakes face today. From invasive species to water diversion to changing water levels, the author explores each issue in colorful and absorbing detail.

  Dan Egan is a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and has been covering the Great Lakes for years. His anger at failing policies and government inaction is evident in every chapter.

  His main target is the St. Lawrence Seaway, an engineering marvel when it was opened in 1959 with great fanfare by President Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth. (I can remember this, because my great aunt, who lived in Cleveland, gave me a commemorative stamp issued for the occasion.)

  But Egan says the Seaway “never lived up to the hype,” and instead produced a cascade of environmental disasters that have brought the Great Lakes to the brink of the death his title refers to. Ships sailing 2300 miles from the Atlantic Ocean through the system of locks and canals, rivers and lakes to the heart of the continent have carried a biological time bomb. They have deposited the majority of 180-plus non-native species now living in the lakes, and unraveled ten-thousand-year-old ecological webs. The problem is the ballast water used to stabilize the ships: “a system custom-made to deliver invasives,” as Egan puts it. Discharges of ballast water brought from the other side of the world inevitably allowed foreign critters to colonize Great Lakes waters.

  Dan Egan (c) Mike De Sisti
  Dan Egan (c) Mike De Sisti
  Egan wants to close the Seaway to ocean-going ships. I live in Duluth, and I love seeing ships sailing in with huge Danish-built wind generators lashed to their decks, or waiting just outside the port to load up with grain destined for Africa. But Egan points out that 95-percent of the Seaway system’s cargoes—iron ore, coal, cement, salt—are carried on “lakers.” He says “salties,” as the ocean-going ships are called, should be required to unload their cargoes onto trains for the journey from the ocean to the heartland. He suggests the federal government could pay for the added expense, and it would cost less than we currently pay to deal with damaged infrastructure and ecosystems caused by the invaders. Closing the door to future invasions, he suggests, would allow us to concentrate scarce resources on other serious problems such as pollution from fertilizer, unstable water levels, and threats of water diversion.

  Ballast water exchange

  In the mid-to-late 1990s, the government began requiring ships to exchange ballast water in mid-ocean, filling their tanks with salty water which is thought to kill most freshwater organisms. In 2012 the Coast Guard, followed by the Environmental Protection Agency, set rules for ballast water treatment, including filtration and disinfection. In 2015 an appeals court ruled those standards are not strict enough to protect U.S. waters, but they remain in place while legal battles continue. These requirements have no doubt contributed to the fact that no new aquatic nuisance species have been discovered in the Great Lakes since 2006. [Correction: Thermocyclops crassus was found in the western basin of Lake Erie in samples collected from 2014 through 2016, after appearing in Lake Champlain in 1991.] Egan argues it’s only a matter of time before we find the next one, and it could be even more damaging than zebra and quagga mussels, which clog water intake pipes and other infrastructure, costing cities and industries millions annually.

  Egan’s engrossing description of the arrival and impacts of the most destructive of these invaders provides a persuasive reminder that everything in nature is interconnected. When early European explorers (we might call them the first invaders) beheld the Great Lakes, the shining waters were teeming with fish. As late as the 1940s, the inland seas yielded 100 million pounds of fish to commercial harvesters each year.

  Sea lamprey

  The first major disruptor made its presence felt in the mid-1930s. The blood-sucking sea lamprey had swum into the Great Lakes through shipping canals built in the 19th century and preyed on trout, whitefish, herring, and other native fish. The annual commercial trout harvest on Lake Michigan plummeted from nearly 6.5 million pounds to zero by 1954.

  Sea lamprey. Photo courtesy T. Lawrence, Great Lakes Fishery Commission.
  Sea lamprey. Photo courtesy T. Lawrence, Great Lakes Fishery Commission.
  Egan tells a dramatic story of the discovery of a poison specifically targeted at sea lampreys. A singularly dedicated World War II veteran named Vernon Applegate spent his years as a graduate student at the University of Michigan living alongside lamprey-infested rivers to study their life cycle. He learned that they spend five years as tiny worms buried in the mud, then suddenly emerge and swim in hordes downstream to the lakes. That time they spend in rivers makes them vulnerable to death by poisoning. At a remote lab in a converted Coast Guard station on the tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula, Applegate and his crew methodically tested industrial chemicals—as many as 50 a day—to find a compound that would kill lamprey but not other fish. They found a chemical that worked, and fisheries managers quickly brought the invader under control. But the native lake trout population had crashed, and fisheries managers weren’t sure it could be revived.

  Alewife explosion

  The next arrival to disrupt the ecosystem was the alewife. Incredibly productive, alewives exploded in population just as trout and other big fish were declining due to overharvest and lamprey predation. In three years (1962-65) alewives went from 17 percent of the fish population in Lake Michigan to 90 percent. Then in 1967 millions upon millions of these small fish washed up dead on Chicago beaches, smothering 30 miles of shoreline in “rotting fish goo.” They weren’t dying from a poison, or toxic bacteria; as a salt water species trying to live in fresh water, the alewives were under constant physical stress, with kidney and thyroid problems. The final blow came from sudden swings in water temperature unlike any in the ocean. Their bodies just couldn’t handle the multiple challenges.

  Salmon for sport

  Meanwhile, the deliberate introduction of another species set the stage for further disruption. In the mid-1960s, Michigan’s Department of Conservation (now DNR) decided to give up on the native lake trout and introduce a new predator fish that would be more fun for anglers to catch. Howard Tanner was brought in from Colorado to make it happen. In the West, Tanner had seen conservation departments stock rivers in artificial pools created by dams, “essentially, a blank canvas for a biologist to construct an ecosystem from scratch,” explains Egan. And Tanner got used to planting fish. When he returned to Michigan, he saw the big alewife population as ideal food for Pacific salmon, and he saw the Great Lakes as a place to promote recreation rather than as a source of fish protein for the human population. He got some eggs from a hatchery in Oregon, raised them to finger size, and then planted them into the Platte River near Traverse City. The experiment was wildly successful, quickly generating a powerful sport fishing industry, with charter fishing operations, boat builders, and entire lakeside communities cashing in. It was all in direct contradiction to federal policy at the time, which was to rebuild the populations of trout and other native species.

  Wildlife managers stocked salmon for thirty years, and the species was also great at reproducing naturally. But the system proved unsustainable. By the early 2000s, invasive zebra and quagga mussels arrived on the scene, gobbling up the plankton that formerly fed the alewives, whose decline hit the salmon hard, and the pyramid collapsed.

  Egan tells equally intriguing stories about the exotic mussels and other more recent invasive introductions, such as the round goby, first found in the Great Lakes in 1990. He also has chapters about Asian carp, the spread of pests from the Great Lakes to lakes in the western U.S., what toxic algae can do to city water supplies, the threat of water diversion, and the impacts of climate change.

  One odd sign of hope is an almost unbelievable development, the evolution of a new food web. Native fish are starting to eat the invaders. Native whitefish once depended on bottom-dwelling shrimp-like organisms, which vanished with the arrival of zebra and quagga mussels. Now fishermen are catching whitefish with invasive mussels and round gobies in their stomachs. The whitefish seem to be changing their diet to include this novel food. Perhaps the Great Lakes are more resilient than history would suggest, but Egan argues it’s up to us to give them a chance.

  The book offers a wealth of well-researched information presented in an engrossing narrative of history, science, and enough politics to suggest how improbable it is that Egan’s proposal to close the lakes to ocean-going ships will ever happen.

• Red Dirt Report
  http://www.reddirtreport.com/rustys-reads/book-review-death-and-life-great-lakes-dan-egan
  Word count: 632

  BOOK REVIEW: 'The Death and Life of the Great Lakes' by Dan Egan

  W.W. Norton & Co.
  "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes" by Dan Egan
  Help support Red Dirt Report
  ANDREW W. GRIFFIN | MAY 4, 2017
  CATEGORY: RUSTY'S READS
  RUSTY'S SCORE
  4.5
  4.5 Rustys
  BOOK REVIEW: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan (W.W. Norton & Co.) 2017

  In the early 1980’s, while on a fishing excursion out on the open waters of Lake Michigan, my grandfather hooked a coho salmon (a fish originally from the Pacific Northwest and introduced to the Great Lakes in the mid-20th century) and wriggling from the side of the fish was a nasty, eel-looking creature. What I was looking at was a sea lamprey – an invasive pest that had made its way into the Great Lakes ecosystem some time in the mid-19th century.

  By that time, 1982-83 or so, the Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario) were cleaner than they had been in decades, but there were still problems, from rising waters (they hit a peak a few years later and are now receding) to the introduction of the zebra mussel and quagga mussel in the late 1980's, along with other invasive species that came either through the Erie Canal or through the St. Lawrence Seaway, that connects oceangoing ships - "salties" - with the freshwater Great Lakes. It's when these ships release their broth of seawater from their ballast that the trouble begins, and leads to problems like the quagga mussel, for instance.

  Well, award-winning journalist Dan Egan, with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has just published a well-researched book about the problems facing these five, freshwater “inland seas” and efforts being made to prevent further damage to native species in the lakes – and the entire ecosystem.

  Over more than 300 pages, Egan tells us the story of the "modern" Great Lakes, essentially since Europeans began settling along their shores, in three parts - "The Front Door," "The Back Door" and "The Future." What we get is a history lesson, one in which man's desire to "control nature" runs amok. Between canals and seaways and introducing new species into the delicately balanced ecosystem, problems occur. Rampant pollution in shallow Lake Erie has led to algae blooms, which have subsided in recent decades but seem to be returning. The Asian carp seems to be on the cusp of coming up the Chicago River and into Lake Michigan any year now and climate change is a reality that is having a devastating effect on the lake levels and on the people who live on their coasts.

  I spent many summers on the shores of Lake Michigan when I was growing up - and still get up there from time-to-time. They are enormous and blue and very cold, for the most part. The United States and Canada are very fortunate to share these bodies of water that are the envy of the rest of the world. If only we made protecting them more of a priority.

  The Great Lakes are beautiful and incredibly important to the jobs and lives of the people living there and the plant and animal life in and around the lakes. Egan's book is a very important read for all who care about the lakes and the role they play in this watery balancing act.

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• The Columbus Dispatch
  http://www.dispatch.com/entertainmentlife/20170416/book-review-the-death-and-life-of-great-lakes-makes-convincing-case
  Word count: 836

  Book review: ‘The Death and Life of the Great Lakes’ makes convincing case

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  “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes” (Norton, 384 pages, $27.95) by Dan Egan
  By Margaret Quamme
  Posted Apr 16, 2017 at 5:26 AM
  The Great Lakes are in trouble, and not for the first time. In “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes,” journalist Dan Egan traces the history of human intervention in the lakes.

  Egan has been writing about the Great Lakes for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel since 2003. His knowledge, both deep and wide, comes through on every page, and his clear writing turns what could be confusing or tedious material into a riveting story.

  The world’s largest freshwater system has long been used, and often abused, for transportation and recreation. Life has been sucked out of it and, in one way or another, restored.

  Egan makes a convincing case that the latest assault on the lakes is the most dangerous one yet, suggesting that “an ongoing and unparalleled ecological unraveling of what is arguably North America’s most precious natural resource” has been caused by the introduction of invasive species such as zebra and quagga mussels.

  Back in the 19th century, species such as the sea lamprey and alewife got into the lakes through the opening of canals that allowed them to make their way up from the ocean to what until then had been a relatively isolated ecosystem. They made quick work of native species, such as the lake trout.

  “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes” (Norton, 384 pages, $27.95) by Dan Egan

  More recently, species such as zebra mussels have been introduced through what Egan sees as a loophole in the Clean Water Act. It allows freighters to dump ballast water into the lakes, thus introducing “the most potent pollutant there is: DNA.”

  The author argues that overseas freighters are such a small portion of the transportation system on the Lakes that they could easily be replaced by already-existing railroads, which would limit the possibility of another invasive species attacking the Great Lakes.

  Egan looks, with affection and a cool eye, at the attempts to remake the lakes after the lamprey and alewife invasions by introducing salmon from the Northwest, which worked until it didn’t, and at more recent attempts to rebalance the ecology using native species.

  This crisp, entertaining lesson on geography, history and science should be enlightening for anyone intrigued by this inland sea.

  margaretquamme@hotmail.com

• Nature
  http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v543/n7646/full/543488a.html?foxtrotcallback=true
  Word count: 954

  NATURE | BOOKS AND ARTS
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  Environmental sciences: Troubled waters on the Great Lakes

  Anna M. Michalak
  Nature 543, 488–489 (23 March 2017) doi:10.1038/543488a
  Published online 22 March 2017
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  Anna M. Michalak on the taming and invasion of Earth's largest fresh-water system.

  The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
  Dan Egan W. W. Norton: 2017.
  ISBN: 9780393246438
  Buy this book: US UK Japan

  Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC
  The Great Lakes on the US–Canadian border are under intense pressure.

  The Great Lakes that straddle the border of Canada and the United States hold one-fifth of Earth's surface fresh water, and cover almost 250,000 square kilometres — an area larger than the United Kingdom. They are home to 3,500 species of plant and animal, including more than 170 species of fish. Some 30 million people live in their watershed. Their scale and natural beauty are inspiring, yet for hundreds of years they have also been viewed as a resource to be conquered. Now, a perfect storm of invasive species, pollution, climate change and other pressures is playing out in the region.

  In his engaging The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, journalist Dan Egan traces the lakes' history, from the arrival of the first Europeans, such as French explorer Jean Nicolet — who in 1634 set out on Lake Michigan in a birch-bark canoe, looking for a passage to Asia — to the present. Egan's focus is on invasive species that tagged along as humans re-plumbed the Great Lakes to serve their needs. Starting with the parasitic sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus), which had spread across the Great Lakes by the 1930s, these have dramatically altered the lake system and devastated native populations. Egan tells a tale of human ambition, ingenuity and hubris. He also speaks of redemption and opportunity.

  The Great Lakes had a central role in the industrialization of the continent, and have thus seen massive engineering projects with two primary goals: to open up the North American interior to shipping, and to dispose of its sewage. These, Egan shrewdly dubs the front and back doors.

  The completion of the first canal and locks goes back to 1781, culminating in 1959 with the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. As seagoing vessels made their way deeper into the Great Lakes, they brought with them freshwater species from around the world, especially in ballast waters used to stabilize ships. Along with the lampreys, the protagonists of Egan's story are alewives (a type of herring, Alosa pseudoharengus) and zebra and quagga mussels (Dreissena polymorpha and Dreissena bugensis), which have successively upended the food web and overtaken the ecosystem.

  The management responses to these invasions parallel the broader history of environmental-restoration efforts. A selective poison was developed to control lampreys in the 1950s, after fisheries collapsed in Lake Michigan, Lake Huron and Lake Superior. Non-native coho and Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch and Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, respectively) were introduced to tackle alewives, starting in the 1960s. The dual mussel infestation that began in the late 1980s continues but, in a fascinating twist, native whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) seem to be evolving to feed on the mussels and on another non-native fish, the mussel-eating round goby (Neogobius melanostomus). Biologists are now exploring other ways to take advantage of native predators to tackle invasives. This shift towards leveraging the strength and complexity of natural systems is a recurring theme in environmental restoration.

  The construction of the “back door” that links the Great Lakes to the Mississippi watershed — which drains 40% of the continental United States — was completed in 1848. This safeguarded the water supply for Chicago, Illinois, by sending sewage down the Mississippi River rather than into Lake Michigan. With it, the Great Lakes have become vulnerable to yet more invasive species, most notably the Asian carp that have overrun the Mississippi watershed.

  We are still far from a solution, as Egan shows. Record-shattering extremes have abounded over the past decade across the Great Lakes, ranging from record low water levels immediately followed by record high ice cover and rises in lake levels, to massive 'dead zones' of hypoxia — low oxygen — and harmful algal blooms. One bloom shut down the water supply in Toledo, Ohio, for two days in 2014.

  Egan weaves solid quantitative scientific information into a narrative rich with tales of individuals who have spearheaded engineering projects, witnessed their consequences or studied their implications. This leaves the reader with a trove of knowledge, told like a great story rather than an academic lecture. I did wish for a few maps, pictures or diagrams to illustrate key ideas and to introduce the invasive protagonists. A deeper exploration of parallels with the expansion of non-native species in other parts of the world would also have been welcome, and links to water quality, fluctuating lake levels and climate change felt a bit tangential in places. Overall, however, the book is an impeccably researched portrayal of a fascinating story.

  The path ahead is perhaps best illustrated by two quotes that Egan cites. In 1995, Ismail Serageldin, then World Bank vice-president, opined that “the wars of this century have been fought over oil, and the wars of the next century will be on water”. The US naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote in the 1940s that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community”. This book is a reminder that human communities are part of the broader biotic community; it enjoins us to choose Leopold's vision, for the Great Lakes and beyond.

• Chicago News
  http://www.mychinews.com/books/book-review-the-death-and-life-of-the-great-lakes
  Word count: 2402

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  Book Review: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
  The gem that makes Chicago sparkle is our lake which many would call a crystal clear blue ocean on a beautiful sunny day. It is a vast sea of fresh water that wraps along our pristine shoreline.

  But how many of us know about our lake and what makes it precious, what changes it has experienced or the challenges it faces. This is one of the five Great Lakes that we drink from, sail on, swim in and gaze in wonder whether we are driving, riding or walking along it.

  The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan is the perfect book to answer all those questions and more about a mystical aquatic wonder right under our noses.

  “A Great Lake can swallow freighters almost three times the length of a football field; the lakes’ bottoms are littered with an estimated 6,000 shipwrecks, many of which have never been found,” Egan writes. “This would never happen on a normal lake, because a normal lake is knowable. A Great Lake can hold all the mysteries of an ocean, and then some.”

  The Great Lakes is the largest source of fresh surface water in the world accounting for 20 percent of the world’s fresh water yet it has been under threat after it was opened up via the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean – where instead of becoming a bustling international seaport, invasive saltwater species invaded our Great Lakes like a virus destroying our native fish and plant population.

  The zebra and quagga mussels from the Caspian Sea hitched a ride on the freighters, and with no worthy adversaries, turned our Great Lakes into some of the clearest freshwater on the planet. “This nearly vodka-clear water is not the sign of a healthy lake,” Egan writes, “it’s the sign of one in which the bottom of the food web is collapsing.”

  Egan is a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist who worked over a decade on this book covering the Great Lakes for the newspaper and researching extensively on the subject. He is also a masterful storyteller who sucks you into the book, telling a series of tales about the wonders of our Great Lakes and the people on the firing line.

  He begins with the story of the construction project called the St. Lawrence Seaway that would connect the Atlantic Ocean to the Midwest and allow giant freighters to steam from the East Coast into the five massive freshwater inland seas. Except, the dream project completed in 1959 “in some respects borders on a nightmare.”

  The locks were never wide enough to allow a constant flow of massive ships and today cargo typically accounts for about 5 percent or less of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway shipping industry. A congressman told Egan that they built the canal too small because the railroads didn’t want to see larger-sized locks in the St. Lawrence Seaway that would compete with them and so they worked with the East Coast ports who also didn’t need the competition to limit the size of the Seaway locks. Worse still, a single Seaway ship can hold up to six million gallons of vessel-steadying ballast water that gets discharged at a port in exchange for cargo. That water contains millions, if not billions, of living organisms that would contain invasive species detrimental to the Great Lakes ecology.

  The Great Lakes is home to wonderous species such as the giant sturgeon which can live more than 100 years and grow to seven feet and giant trout that can grow to “wolf-sized 70 pounds.” They had no natural predators and thus sustained a vibrant fishing industry. In the 1940s about 100 million pounds of Great Lakes fish were being harvested each year, but then suddenly the lake trout as well as white fish vanished due to an invasive species called the lamprey that was like a vampire sucking the life out of the native fish species. The lamprey looks like a giant oversized tadpole and somehow managed to survive four of the earth’s five mass extinctions. Thanks to the newly constructed seaway this saltwater razor-toothed predator was like Columbus and his crew invading the Americas feeding on the native population which had lived peacefully for thousands of years. The fish, like the Indians, were suddenly threatened with extinction.

  Egan’s story about the lamprey and how it was finally destroyed was like reading an exciting mystery detective novel. He tells the story of biologist Vernon Applegate who should have a statute erected along the Great Lakes shores for the work he did to learn everything about this little-known creature and eventually eradicate our precious freshwaters of this vile vampire and restore our beloved lake trout.

  The next invasive Atlantic specie known as the Cockroach-of-the-Inland-Seas was the alewives which could only be turned into cat food or liquid fertilizer. In 1967 three of the five Great Lakes – Michigan, Huron, and Ontario – were overrun by the rapidly reproducing species. Egan tells the story of Howard Tanner, who introduced Coho and Chinook Salmon into the Great Lakes to feast on the alewives. This salmon imported from the Pacific Northwest would be declared off-limits to commercial fishermen and grocery shoppers but open to fishing sportsmen, “a program that would prove to be a boon for tourism but also, ultimately, an obstacle in efforts to restore some semblance of natural order to the lakes in the decades after the lamprey infestation.”

  However, in the late 1980s and early 1990s the salmon crashed because they began breeding at unsustainable numbers and there were simply too many Chinook mouths and not enough alewife tails. Alewife numbers started to plummet around 2003. The alewives also ran out of food due to an unexpected plummet in plankton tied to the surge of yet another invasive species – the exotic mussels on the lake bottom. “People might think of Lake Michigan as an inland sea full of fish,” Egan writes. “It’s more accurate to think of it as an exotic mussel bed sprawling across thousands of square miles.”

  Egan writes that governmental regulation of our waters is crucial. In the early 1970s two-thirds of America’s lakes, rivers and coastal waters were unsafe for fishing or swimming, but in 2014 that number had been slashed in half thanks to the Clean Water Act. The overall cost to cities and power companies trying to keep pipes mussel-free over the last 25 years is $1.5 billion while ballast invasions damage to fisheries and other recreational activities is about $200 million annually. In 2008 the US Seaway operators began requiring all Great Lakes-bound overseas vessels to flush their ballast tanks with mid-ocean saltwater and no new exotic organisms have been found in the Great Lakes since.

  In Part II of the book entitled “Back Door” Egan writes how Lake Michigan was opened up to the Gulf of Mexico via construction of the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal, which allows Chicago’s sewage to run down the Mississippi River. The canal opened the door to the feared Asian carp which has decimated the southern United States, and sent the zebra and quagga mussels out into the vast network of American’s tributaries, unleashing ecological havoc. So far the battle to keep the carp out of Lake Michigan via an electric barrier has been successful, but this feared invasive fish has been sighted on the Chicago River only a block away from the lakeshore. “The problem is bighead and silver carp don’t just invade ecosystems. They conquer them. They don’t gobble up their competition. They starve it out by stripping away the plankton upon which every other fish species directly or indirectly depends. Bighead carp can grow larger than 100 pounds and each day consume up to 20 pounds of plankton. Bighead and silver carp have so squeezed aside native species that the Asian carp biomass in some stretches of rivers in the Mississippi basin is thought to be more than 90 percent – the same dire situation that an alewife-plagued Lake Michigan suffered in the 1960s.”

  Egan then details the mussel infestation in the West via the superhighway – the Sanitary and Ship Canal – Chicago accidentally built for the invasive species to fan out across North America, which will cost the West hundreds of millions of dollars. Some Western states even made it illegal to transport these exotic mussels across state lines. “In many ways Midwesterners have learned to live with the scourge,” Egan writes. “They’ve grown accustomed to higher utility bills and to wearing shoes while swimming. They’ve become numb to buying exotic farm-raised tilapia and salmon instead of local lake fish at grocery stores and restaurants.”

  The last part of the book is focused on the nitty gritty water business where states battle over demarcation lines for access to the fresh lakes water, what needs to be done to prevent the massive outbreaks of toxic algae stemming from the over-application of farm fertilizer and the increasing fluctuations in water levels.

  The end of the book isn’t as exciting as the beginning and middle, but it is filled with important information people living in Chicago and anywhere near the Great Lakes should know. Only three percent of the water on our planet is fresh water, and of that, most is locked up in polar ice caps or trapped too far underground. Our Great Lakes which were carved up during the last ice age constantly drain out to the Atlantic, and constantly refill with precipitation and runoff from the rivers that feed them. Surveys show three-quarters of Americans don’t know where their water comes from (I hope that’s not the case here!) and Chicago draws about two billion gallons of water from Lake Michigan every day.

  Is there hope for the future of our Great Lakes? Much to biologists’ amazement, the lake’s native fish species surged immediately after the alewives disappeared. And today lake trout are again successfully breeding in the wild. Egan writes that the “front door” to Greak Lakes invasions can be shut by forcing ships sailing up the Seaway, only 455 overseas ships sailed in 2015, to transfer their cargo to local ships or railroad lines.

  Egan writes that the question of should our Great Lakes be managed to maximize sport fishing, commercial fishing or just resuscitate any and all native species is perhaps best answered by Wisconsin naturalist Aldo Leopard who wrote in 1949: “A thing is right when it tends to promote the integrity, beauty and stability of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

  I think this is the perfect book to take to the beach, enjoy this summer and know a little more about the Great Lake we’re about to jump into.

  Jim.V@mychinews.com

  By Jim Vail

  POSTED IN:
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• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/can-the-great-lakes-be-saved/#!
  Word count: 1748

  Can the Great Lakes Be Saved?
  By Vicky Albritton, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

  134 0 3

  MARCH 26, 2017

  ABOUT A YEAR AGO, we moved to a small community nestled in the Indiana Dunes, a heavily forested landscape of dramatic sand dunes that extends along the southern edge of Lake Michigan. A few miles east is Cowles Bog — the wetland that inspired Henry Chandler Cowles to launch the science of ecology. His work also sparked a movement to save the dunes from wholesale industrial development, though anyone who visits now will quickly notice the constant hum of steel mills, the acres of power lines marring stretches of highway, and the great cooling tower of the power plant in Michigan City, Indiana.
  Sandwiched between these icons of industry is a magnificent state park that provides crucial habitat to 352 bird species, including owls, loons, kestrels, and sandhill cranes. It is also home to creatures like deer, foxes, wild turkeys, and frogs. The beach glints with glacier-age rocks and Paleozoic fossils, all washed clean by cool sparkling waters. Now and then beachgoers may kick aside clumps of tiny mussel shells, unaware what tragedy they signify: the Great Lakes are in danger.
  The health of the Great Lakes is the subject of a fascinating and brilliant new book by award-winning journalist Dan Egan, reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He catalogs the history and ecology of the lakes — from creation to present day — revealing how human hands have altered, and ultimately threatened, these expansive waters. Egan describes how the creation of the Saint Lawrence Seaway resulted in “an environmental scourge whose scope and costs are spreading by the day.” This is particularly alarming given recent reports that the White House has called “for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative to be cut from $300 million a year to about $10 million.”
  Egan’s story begins in prehistory, with the geological formation of the Great Lakes and the birth of rich new ecosystems after the end of the last Ice Age. When the links between the lakes and the ocean dried up about 2,500 years ago, this vast aquatic region became as isolated “as a one-acre pond in the middle of a forest.” Fish could pass downstream through the Niagara Falls, but species could no longer enter from the ocean. The native food chain included phytoplankton, zooplankton, sticklebacks, emerald shiner, perch, walleye, and the magnificent lake trout, which “evolved over millions of years to survive the frigid, relatively sterile glacier-fed rivers.”
  Today’s route from the Atlantic to the interior lakes was blasted, dredged, and dammed in various waves of work beginning as far back as 1781, continuing through the 19th century with the Welland canals and the Erie Canal, and culminating in the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959. Slowly but surely, exotic species began to invade the lakes. By 1949, sea lampreys had decimated the lakes’ native trout population. Alewives and spiny water fleas abounded. Some invaders hitched a ride in the ballast water of overseas cargo ships. Perhaps the most pervasive and dangerous of these invaders are the tiny exotic zebra and quagga mussels. If Lake Michigan was drained, it would “be possible to walk almost the entire 100 miles between Wisconsin and Michigan on a bed of trillions upon trillions of […] quagga mussels.” By consuming prodigious amounts of plankton, the invasive mussels leave the water “vodka clear”; Cladophora thrives in the increased sunlight and then dies, consuming all the oxygen; botulism strikes in such conditions; mussels absorb the toxins; small fish eat the mussels, winding up on shore where they are easy fodder for birds, who are then poisoned.
  The great irony is that the Seaway never fulfilled its commercial promise. In the 1950s, the United States spent $133.8 million and Canada spent $336.5 million working on the Seaway; the countries spent another $600 million to build a related dam. But by the time it was opened, the new, larger ships could not make it through the locks. Now, only around 450 overseas ships come through each year. Worse, the cost of controlling invasive species is escalating. Keeping underwater industrial pipes clear and free of quagga mussels has cost $1.5 billion over the past 25 years. Managing ecological damage caused by ballast invasions has cost $200 million per year, while fines for illegal ballast dumping are just $3,000. Egan argues persuasively for closing the Seaway — even though it could cost as much as $55 million. It would by no means vanquish other threats to the lakes from contaminated bait buckets and pleasure boats, industrial pollution, and drier regions clamoring for access to Great Lakes water, but it would certainly help. Egan refers to the Seaway as the Great Lakes’ “front door”; closing it would keep out infested overseas cargo ships once and for all.
  Egan’s narrative often moves like a thriller, with scientists trying to understand strange new phenomena and then racing against time to bring them under control. Take, for example, the story of how researchers in the 1960s ordered carp from Asia to control weeds in farm ponds and irrigation ditches without the use of chemicals. At the time, one biologist notes ruefully, “this was right.” The catastrophe struck later when a few people discarded a batch of fish that had been ordered accidentally — bighead and silver carp — into streams and ditches, where their numbers grew rapidly. Soon there was a large-scale invasion threatening Lake Michigan. Egan also gives a gripping account of an Army Corps General’s last stand against the carp using a high-tech underwater electric barrier in the Chicago canal, while a scientist likened the genetic evidence of carp already in Lake Michigan to fingerprints at a “murder scene.” Later we learn about the “biological bombshell” developed by an Australian laboratory: by adding genetically engineered carp that cannot produce female offspring, they hoped the fish would eventually “breed themselves to oblivion.” Unfortunately, for ethical and ecological reasons, this method is probably unusable.
  The eutrophication of Lake Erie is yet another story of unintended consequences and botched attempts at ecological management. Shallow, warm Lake Erie is especially vulnerable to this phenomenon — the process by which fertilizer runoff delivers an overdose of nutrients, stimulating algae growth that in turn consumes oxygen to such a degree that it suffocates other aquatic life. Around 1800, Lake Erie received about 3,000 tons of phosphorus per year from natural sources. In the 1960s, this amount had multiplied to an astounding 24,000 tons annually. Between World War I and the 1960s, algae in the lake increased six-fold. After a public outcry, stringent regulation effectively curbed phosphorus use in the 1970s. But then new algae slicks surfaced in the mid-1990s. This second coming included large amounts of deadly microcystis, a form of bacteria that can cause lethal liver damage if swallowed; not even boiling the water kills it. Ironically, the infestation seems to be linked to sustainable agriculture. Fertilizer pebbles are now deposited on untilled land to avoid soil erosion. But when rain dislodges the pebbles before they are absorbed into the soil, they deliver a potent punch of phosphorus into the lake. Egan warns that microcystis could easily taint the water supply of major cities around the Great Lakes.
  As bad as phosphorus runoff is for the health of the region, at least it is a threat that can be remedied locally. Climate change is a very different beast: only collective action across the planet can curb greenhouse gas emissions effectively. Egan’s account of climate change focuses on the rise and fall of water levels in the Great Lakes. For the past 4,000 years, the level has been relatively stable. In records dating back to the 19th century, we can track long-term, gradual fluctuations of about three feet from high to low water. But then in 1998–’99, water levels in Lake Michigan and Huron suddenly fell three feet. This drop was not followed by the usual rhythmic rebound, but stayed low for the next 15 years. Indeed, in 2013 the lake levels fell further to six and a half feet below the average of the previous high water mark. Water temperature seemed to be the culprit. Warmer water reduces winter ice cover, which in turn allows more heat to be absorbed by the lake; the warmer the water, the higher the rate of evaporation, not just in the summer but also in the fall and winter. Yet after 2013, water levels in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron surged back four feet. Record-breaking rain and snow from the polar vortex lay behind the shift. Climate change is destabilizing the hydrologic regime of the Great Lakes. In the future, lake levels may swing dramatically by as much as eight to 10 feet, with severe social consequences. For more than a century, economic developers in the Great Lakes have taken stable lake levels for granted. Cities, industries, suburbs, and major transportation networks all follow the modern coastline.
  How will we handle an increasingly unpredictable natural world? Should we engage in massive engineering projects to control the lakes’ water levels as some suggest? Egan interviews one biologist who notes that humans can change nature, but not always control it — as happened with the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Perhaps we should simply close the Seaway as Egan suggests, and restore the lakes to some previous level of health. Deciding which stage of the past offers a fitting baseline, however, would be tricky; clearly we cannot return the lakes to their pristine preindustrial state. We could also choose to do less rather than more. There are promising signs of ecological recovery, with native fish stocks evolving on their own to eat invasive goby fish. Egan himself has already begun sharing his passion for fishing with his young son. The key to the future of the Great Lakes may lie in the concept of “adaptive management” — that is, learning to live with uncertain fluctuations and being “strategic in your decisions on how to cope.” This is a humble path, but one not lacking in hope and pleasure.
  ¤
  Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson recently co-authored Green Victorians: the Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District (Chicago, 2016). Vicky’s work has appeared in a variety of media, including The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies Today and Kritik, and the Chicago Book Review. Fredrik teaches environmental history at the University of Chicago. He is also the author of Enlightenment’s Frontier: the Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven, 2013). They currently live in Ogden Dunes, Indiana.

• The Brooklyn Rail
  http://brooklynrail.org/2017/07/books/Dan-Egans-The-Death-and-Life-of-the-Great-Lakes
  Word count: 1581

  Dan Egan's The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
  by Weston Cutter
  Dan Egan
  The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
  (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017)

  I’m as anti-pun as the next guy, so forgive me: I was sucked in by the sea lampreys.

  I started Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes with the same admixture of dread and enthusiasm I feel staring any book on the environment. We’re of course well into destroying the world as we presently understand and live in it, and we’ve got a fair shot of making the whole damn place uninhabitable for our species (life itself will go on; our bipedal + noodly one mightn’t), but in the same way a harrowing fight with one’s spouse can snap one to attention and realize how vital the partnership is, how worth taking more serious and tender care of, there’s a way in which contemporary environmental books, at least for me, make me suddenly more attentive to what we need now to be doing, what ameliorative actions we might presently take.

  And so you buckle in on getting one of these contemporary environmental books, hoping there’s enough fascinating stuff to distract from the catastrophe we're continually wreaking regarding the environment. I suppose one upside of living in (but perhaps not through) the anthropocene is that there are really spectacular books to help (some of) us as we try to understand what’s happening. You’ve likely got your list of such books; my two biggies are Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction (2014) and William Stolzenburg’s Where The Wild Things Were (2008), which, together, present a terrifying and illuminating picture about not just the natural environment and how it’s shifting but about humans, as animals, as part of the food chain, part of the animal kingdom. That last aspect—that we’re animals—is a fact I’d argue’s too often lost on us; we think because we’ve got cargo shorts and tire-pressure-sensing valves on cars that we’re different from the lower-down beasts, but we’re emphatically not, at all. In lots of ways (Kolbert does a sensational job of making this clear), our works and methods are simply what any beasts would be given our special gifts (top five human gifts: omnivorousness, endurance, ability to withstand temperature fluctuations, opposable thumbs, language). Anyway—you should read those two books as well.

  But today's obligation is to come clean and admit that my duo of biggies is now a trio. Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is somehow a missing piece I didn’t even know I’ve been hankering for. To be totally upfront: I'm from Minnesota, and I've got a massive chip on my shoulder about the Great Lakes (given my great state’s bordered by the biggest of em), and so conceivably some chunk of my appreciation for Egan’s stunner’s simple home-state boosterism.

  However, my own biases notwithstanding, what Egan’s done here is written a brutal, beautiful take on the last 150-ish years of industrial development regarding the Great Lakes—brutal because of how stupidly, how shortsightedly it’s now clear we’ve been acting, beautiful because, almost (I think) without intending, Egan’s offered a portrait of humans and human engineering that’d make you want to cheer if you weren’t forced to reckon with how monumental the problems our engineering engineers.

  So, to get to the sea lampreys, let’s go all the way back to the building of the dams in New York, those that allowed the Great Lakes to suddenly cease being “one giant, slow-motion river flowing west-to-east, with each lake dumping like a bucket into the next until all the water is gathered in the St Lawrence River and tumbles seaward.” (13). That giant river was, as Egan makes clear, a closed system, meaning the ecosystem that developed there was both perfectly unique and balanced: over tens of thousands of years, an ecosystem was able to strike a balance, with various species of fish filling different roles. (Now’s a fair time to note that, yes, lots of other places were closed/unique/balanced before humans came along changing them, but there are no examples of larger or more diverse food chains; the Great Lakes were and are so big it’s hard to even compare them to other bodies of water).

  And why were the Great Lakes so cut off? Because “[t]he four ‘upper’ lakes—Erie, Huron, Michigan and Superior—lie some 600 feet above the level of the ocean, which made them unreachable from the Atlantic by boat.” (7) So the water flowed one way, preventing foreign elements accessing them, and they were just way the hell up, making it damn near impossible for foreign elements to get in.

  But then we built dams, and here’s the only downside of Egan’s book (though it’s not even really fair to call it a downside). The first dams, which connected Lake Ontario to the Atlantic, were navigational dams (meaning they used gravity, opening and closing chambers to allow water to flow in or out and allowing boats to rise; you should look this stuff up on your own if you don’t already know it; the same mechanics apply in all the 29 locks+dams on the Mississippi, and my reason for handling them briefly here has to do with my own familiarity with the Upper and Lower St Anthony Locks on the Mississipi, locks I spent my early 20s moving continuously through), and these locks/dams allowed boats to come from the Atlantic into the pristine ecosystem of the Great Lakes.

  Badness ensues, as you can probably already guess. Among the badness was the sea lamprey, which is a disgusting little transluscent creature whose whole life depends on latching onto a host fish with a big ring of painfully sharp teeth and parasiting it to death. The sea lamprey already existed in something of a stasis in its native habitat—the Atlantic Ocean—but, in hitching a ride on some boat up into the Great Lakes, it was able to find a whole new ballgame to conquer, and conquer it did. Specifically, the sea lamprey destroyed the trout population of the great lakes, which, by itself, sound like no big deal, until you realize that the Great Lake trout were something like apex predators, critical lynchpins in a foodchain that’d been judiciously balanced, naturally, over centuries. The lampreys destroyed all that.

  This is where things get biblical: the sea lampreys begat the alewives, the alewives begat the salmon, and, in each of these begettings, Egan shows how the delicate and vital balance struck early on in the Great Lakes is compromised, fractured, destroyed. This review’s not even covering a quarter of the salient, gruesome detail—wait till the full story on how Chicago re-routed a sewage-infested stream, or about how the zebra mussels found a way into the Lakes. But the point is that Egan’s done a horrific, incredible job sketching how it is we’ve ended up with Great Lakes which, a century ago, provided enough fish for everyone in the vicinity but which now regularly only produce toxic algea blooms (believe it or not, it’s the mussels fault for that).

  And while Egan offers story after story that makes you almost dizzy at the idiocy of the folks making the decisions, it’s hard not to read the entirety of The Death and Life of the Great Lakes as an almost unbearably sad story about not even hubris, but notions of progress. Those guys that built the first dams? They certainly didn’t have it in mind to destroy one of the most interesting, vital ecosystems in existence. The Big Baddie in the book is ballast water—H2O taken on by ocean-faring vessels, H2O which is used to literally balance the ships and which, by a trick of legislation, isn’t required to be sanitized, meaning boats enter the Great Lakes waterways with all sorts of tiny freeloaders—quagga mussels, sea lampreys, etc.—in their holds. The ballast water issue’s been done for an obvious reason: by not dictating that boats need to fully decontaminate their ballast holds, industry is promoted. And this point’s small, but worth acknowledging: Egan’s right to be furious and hurt about this, but there’s something amazing about the ingenuity involved in building all this stuff in the first place. Are the costs greater than the rewards? Egan’ll likely convince you that, yes, the costs are too high. I agree with him. Yet even knowing that, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes isn’t just sorrowful to read for how much we’ve destroyed an ecosystem, but for a larger, scarier notion, the one that dictates that humans, through their inventiveness and ingenuity, are almost guaranteed to fuck up the old orders, even when we don’t even really want to.

  Egan’s is a hell of a book. You should read it if you care about the planet at all, and, of course, if you don’t, you shouldn’t bother reading to begin with.

• The Manitoulin Expositor
  http://www.manitoulin.ca/2017/04/05/dan-egans-death-life-great-lakes-reviewed/
  Word count: 1081

  Columns
  Dan Egan’s ‘The Death and Life of the Great Lakes’ reviewed
  By Expositor Staff - April 5, 2017
  Share on Facebook Tweet on Twitter
  Book review by Jim Nies

  It’s a grim but gripping story—the new book ‘Death and Life of the Great Lakes,’ by Dan Egan, a longtime reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Mr. Egan, whose beat has been Lake Michigan and the other four big lakes connected to it, has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his Great Lakes reporting.

  Two hundred years ago the Great Lakes were an astonishing ecological paradise, vast inland seas comprising more than 20 percent of Earth’s fresh water. They were home to a balanced web of life, fine-tuned over ten or more thousand years, that included sturgeon, pike, musky, perch, bass, whitefish, and lake trout. But, for all their beauty and bounty, the Great Lakes were ecologically naïve, meaning that they had evolved, since the retreat of the glaciers, in isolation from the rest of the world’s aquatic environments.

  The first people to settle around the Great Lakes lived in harmony with the natural bounty. But then came European settlement and the view that the Lakes were primarily an exploitable economic resource—apparently limitless fishery, advantageous industrial site, convenient sewer, and watery highway into the heart of a continent.

  The map of North America “practically taunted the Unites States and Canada” to try connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes. First, in 1825, came the Erie Canal, connecting the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Then in 1829 the Welland Canal, which was built to bypass Niagara Falls. Then, in 1959, the complete St. Lawrence Seaway. All were touted as engineering and economic marvels, sure to bring unprecedented riches to the heartland. Both ended up costing the Great Lakes, and eventually the whole continent, dearly.

  Mr. Egan calls the Canal and the Seaway the “Front Door,” a door that has let in some truly obnoxious invaders—among them the sea lamprey and the alewife.

  In the 1890s the annual commercial lake trout haul on Lake Michigan was more than 8 million pounds, with similar amounts coming out of Lakes Huron and Superior. In the 1940s the annual harvest of trout and whitefish across the Lakes was somewhere around 100 million pounds. Then, with the arrival of the lamprey, native fish populations crashed. By 1960 the whitefish harvest on Lake Michigan was less than 25,000 pounds and the trout harvest was zero.

  With lake trout gone, the invading river herring, or alewife, was free to reproduce, and by 1965 it comprised about 90 percent of the fish mass in Lake Michigan. In July 1967, 30 miles of Illinois shoreline around Chicago was inundated with billions of rotting alewife carcasses, and cleanup required bulldozers and hundreds of million dollars. The whole thing stank.

  What happened next is fascinating—and therein lies more of Mr. Egan’s tale—about what happened to and is still happening with the lamprey and the alewife, and about the lake trout and whitefish. On top of that, there’s the whole up-and-down saga of non-native coho and chinook salmon, and how they got here and what has happened since.

  Mr. Egan also tells the story of two other invaders, the appalling zebra and quagga mussels, who hitched a ride into the Great Lakes in ocean-going freighter ballast water—creating an extraordinarily expensive and ongoing disaster.

  Once he finishes the “Front Door” Mr. Egan takes a look at the “Back Door,” the Chicago Sanitary and Ship canal, opened in 1900 to flush the city’s sewage down to the Mississippi and to provide a navigable waterway between the Great Lakes and the continental interior. This back door presents a number of problems; among them a 1.5 billion gallon a day diversion from the Great Lakes, a path for all the invaders who came in the front door to head out to the western half of North America, and a potential entry point for perhaps the most obnoxious invader of all, the Asian carp.

  ‘The Death and Life of the Great Lakes’ also explores two other crucial Great Lakes issues—toxic algae blooms and fluctuating water levels. Lake Erie is North America’s “dead” sea. The thirst for Great Lakes water is great and growing. Dredging combined with erosion in the St. Clair River has opened a huge Michigan/Huron drain.

  In some ways ‘The Death and Life of the Great Lakes’ reads like a crime thriller. It’s a story of greed, shortsightedness, incompetence, and “a deficiency of government.” But good things have happened, too. Mr. Egan documents scientific breakthroughs and environmental heroes, “stutter steps [forward} and stumbles backward.”

  It may be possible to restore the Great Lakes to some kind of ecological balance and to protect them from myriad threats. But the future remains uncertain. Untreated ballast water can still make it into the Lakes bringing with it the potential for dangerous additions to the already present 186 invasive species. Asian carp are knocking hard on the “back door,” and the Trump administration has slowed if not stopped efforts to strengthen defenses. The St. Clair River continues to roar. Waukesha is the first diversion under the Great Lakes Compact.

  Our idea of the Great Lakes does seem to be changing, however—we seem to be moving from a mindset of exploitation to one of restoration and preservation. Mr. Egan says: a “12 year-old, you see, is perhaps the best hope the lakes have to recover from two centuries of over-fishing, over-polluting, and over-prioritizing navigation: almost every person I’ve ever talked to who cares anything about the lakes and the rivers that feed them does so because they have a childhood story about catching the fish that swim in them.”

  Those of us who live on or visit the largest freshwater island in the world certainly have many such stories. And we will almost certainly find ‘The Death and Life of The Great Lakes’ a great read.

  Title: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

  Author: Dan Egan

  Publisher: WW Norton

  Pages 364

  Price $36.95

  EDITOR’S NOTE: Jim Nies resides in Wisconsin and Manitoulin and is a passionate defender of the Great Lakes on both sides of the border.

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