The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

In the olden times, ships use material like iron bars to serve as ballasts to balance ships in water. However, sailors realized that water serves as a heavy and low-cost ballast. Ships will carry ballast water in tanks, and then discharge the water when it is no longer needed. However, overseas freighters accidentally pick up hitchhikers, particularly invasive species like mussels and alewives, which are then released into the Great Lakes once these ships enter the U.S.

Despite the passage of the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency allows an exemption for ballast water, allowing these ships to continue to discharge water—and potentially invasive species—into the Great Lakes. Instead of installing expensive ballast water treatment systems, one of the easiest solutions to preventing further ecological distress to the Lakes is to ban the entry of overseas freight ships, as only a small number enter the U.S. each year.

The boundary that runs through Chicago and separates the Mississippi River basin from the Great Lakes. The divide is a 1,500-mile distance between eastern Minnesota to western New York, This divide was previously not a pronounced barrier in most areas. When the first European explorers in the area—Father Jacque Marquette and Louis Joliet—came to the Great Lakes, they realized that anyone who could convert the two miles of swampy marshland (the Continental Divide in this area) would be able to create a direct connection between Lake Erie and the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the Mississippi River. Canal-building over the next two centuries ended up destroying the Continental Divide near Chicago. 

In the 1800s, sewage was offloaded from Chicago into the Chicago River, which made its way to Lake Michigan. This water sickened residents and even caused fatalities. The city constructs a canal, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which reverses the natural water flow of the Chicago River away from Lake Michigan and into the Mississippi River basin. It also serves as an expanded canal allowing large ships or barges access to the freshwater body. This canal preserves Chicago’s drinking water, though Missourians downstream are not happy about receiving Chicago’s sewage through the water, especially as rates of the typhoid disease climb in the city of St. Louis. Eventually water treatment methods improve and lead to cleaner water in the Mississippi. The longer-term effect of the canal is that it enables invasive species to travel up or down the Mississippi River and gain entry to the Great Lakes. One such species is Asian carp. The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal is the “back door” that grants invasive species access to the Great Lakes.

Eutrophication occurs when nutrients from human activity, such as sewage or agricultural waste, trickle into a body of water and cause excessive algae blooms, making it impossible for other forms of life to survive. Cultural eutrophication is a sped-up version of the normal eutrophication process, causing immense damage in a relatively short span of time.

Jesse Hawley, an inmate in a debtors’ prison, initially envisions the Erie Canal as a waterway connecting the Hudson River in New York to the Great Lakes. Hawley writes letters to local newspapers regarding this opinion. A major political player, DeWitt Clinton, takes up the cause of championing the Erie Canal’s construction during his time as mayor of the city of New York. Prior leaders like George Washington had dreamed of a navigable waterway connecting the eastern seaboard to the Great Lakes, but Niagara Falls always stood in the way. The Erie Canal breaches this impasse, paving the way for an influx of ships entering the Great Lakes. 

Dating back to America’s early days as a nation, politicians and leaders in commerce dream of building a Fourth Seacoast that would allow them to connect the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes and facilitate the movement of goods and people across the continent. These leaders believe that they are merely fulfilling the destiny laid out before them, as nature already paved most of this path over the course of thousands of years. Americans eventually get their wish for a Fourth Seacoast in the form of the St. Lawrence Seaway, but they also get far more than they bargained for in terms of the transport of exotic species into the Great Lakes.

The Mississippi River drainage basin is a vast area spanning 40% of the continental U.S. or about 1.2 million square miles between Montana, New York, and Texas; the water in this basin flows out of the Mississippi River. In contrast, the Great Lakes basin on the U.S.-Canada border encompasses 300,000 square miles; the water in this basin flows out the St. Lawrence River into the North Atlantic. Following the construction of the canal in Chicago, water from the Great Lakes begins to flow out through the Mississippi River and goes all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Although leaders in government and commerce praise this direct connection to the Gulf of Mexico in terms of boosting transportation and shipping, there are unintended side effects, such as waste from Chicago flowing into cities downstream or the invasion of the Asian carp, which swims upstream toward the Great Lakes. 

This term refers to the nickname for overseas freight ships that make their way into the Great Lakes. Many of the people that Egan interviews believes salties should be barred from entry into the Great Lakes due to their transport of invasive species. 

Egan describes the St. Clair River as a “drain hole for Lake Michigan and Lake Huron on their rush to the ocean” (286). In an effort to improve navigation around the Great Lakes and transportation of goods, the St. Clair River is dredged, which means excavating millions of tons of sand and gravel from the riverbed. However, this dredging contributes to the long-term decline in water levels in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.

This river connects Lake Ontario on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean vis-à-vis the St. Lawrence Seaway. Although humans have tried to tame nature through the St. Lawrence Seaway—the manmade channel allowing overseas freighters access to the Great Lakes—they have instead brought ruin upon the largest body of freshwater in the U.S. through the invasive species they carry in the ballast water of their ships. Egan also gives the Seaway the moniker of the “front door” that grants invasive species access to the Great Lakes. The St. Lawrence Seaway also turns out to be somewhat of a bust when its navigation locks prove to be too small to keep up with the growing size of ships.

Following the burning of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland due to pollution, Congress passes a series of environmental regulations known as the Clean Water Act in 1972. However, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decides to allow an off-book exemption for ballast water coming from ships entering the U.S., as they believe the water poses no threat. Eventually, environmental groups sue the EPA for failing to properly enforce the Clean Water Act, and the EPA agrees to require ships to have water treatment systems. However, the EPA sets a timeline that does not require them to enforce this regulation until 2021.