60 pages • 2 hours read
Dan EganThe Death and Life of the Great Lakes
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Back Door”
Chapter 5 Summary: “Continental Undivide: Asian Carp and Chicago's Backwards River”
The Continental Divide separates the sprawling Mississippi River basin from the Great Lakes. Prior to the arrival of European settlers, this divide usually only appeared as a gently sloping hill or marshy swamp. French explorers Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet realized that there was a two-mile section of the Continental Divide around present-day Chicago. If people bridged this section with a canal, they could create a watery navigation corridor from the Gulf of Mexico directly to Lake Erie through the Mississippi River.
200 years later, a crude manmade channel bridged the Chicago divide, thus creating a direct passage for goods to float between the Eastern Seaboard and the Great Lakes, and the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River—all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Within a decade after the canal’s opening, the city’s population went from less than 5,000 to more than 100,000 people. Ships transported necessities, like grain and lumber, and luxuries, like sugar and whiskey. In the short-term, the canal seemed like a wonderful boon to the city of Chicago, but there were long-term consequences that wouldn’t be understood until well into the 1900s.
Following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which details the harmful effects of the pesticides on the environment, farmers shy away from chemicals and turn to exotic fish—specifically, Asian carp—to clean up fish ponds and weedy rivers. However, one farmer received a batch of Asian carp that does not like to eat weeds; the farmer turned over the fish to the state government. State fishery workers decided to breed the fish and give them to research institutes like Auburn University, which decided to use the carp to clean up water polluted by sewage. Mike Freeze, a former Arkansas Game and Fish chairman, came up with the bizarre carp-based solution. However, federal funding for this program dried up, so fishermen released these fish into the wild. The fishermen found it difficult to breed the fish, so they assumed the fish will not be able to breed in the wild; this is a big mistake.
The carp reproduce in the wild and migrate upriver, getting closer to the Great Lakes every year, though there is no evidence that they are currently in the Great Lakes. These massive, invasive Asian carp—specifically bighead and silver carp—consume immense quantities of plankton thereby decimating the food supply for other—and native—fish species. The silver carp also have a habit of spectacularly leaping out the water, which makes fishing difficult and even somewhat dangerous. While the silver carp are more visible, some fishermen in the Mississippi River basin earn a respectable living by hauling in large quantities of the bighead carp, which hide in the depths of the lake. Due to the immense depth of the Great Lakes, which are hundreds of feet deep, Egan’s sources express fear over the devastation that bighead carp could have on the Great Lakes. One fisherman says, “Good Lord! […] By the time [anyone] knew they had a problem, it’d be too late” (160).
Egan returns to the expansion of the Chicago canal over the Continental Divide in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Chicago was then flushing its sewage into Lake Michigan and horribly polluting its own drinking water. To provide safer drinking water, the city deployed thousands of workers to construct the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which reversed the flow of the Chicago River—and the city’s sewage—into the Mississippi River basin. The canal saves Chicago’s drinking water, though some residents downstream in St. Louis fall ill from typhoid, as their water is now tainted with Chicago’s waste.
As modern science leads to better water treatment, the people of St. Louis suffer fewer illnesses from their drinking water; the water levels in Lake Michigan also drop slightly because the canal diverts billions of gallons of water from the lake each day. However, there are other more troubling long-term consequences resulting from the canal. The exotic species that made their way from the Seaway—the “front door”—into the Great Lakes can now exit out the Chicago canal—the “back door” and cause ecological damage across the nation. With the arrival of the Asian carp, there is also the threat that non-native fish will travel upstream and into the Great Lakes via the canal. About two decades before this book’s publication, Congress allowed for construction of electrical barriers that will supposedly prevent these invasive species from traveling past the canal and into the Great Lakes. Convinced of its success, Congress decided to build a larger, more permanent electric barrier in the 2000s.
Army Corps General John Peabody made it his mission to take on the Asian carp and diminish its threat to the Great Lakes. Although Peabody is gruff, he has fond memories of playing on the lakes as a child. Peabody turned on the electric barrier at one volt, which isn’t really sufficient to stop the carp, but the shipping industry did not want to raise the voltage any higher. Also, to Peabody’s knowledge, there were no Asian carp near the barrier, so the voltage plan made sense. However, just because they cannot find any carp doesn’t mean the carp aren’t already at the barrier.
David Lodge, an invasive species expert, represents a mix of science and politics, as his research suggests what species are most likely to invade the Great Lakes, as well as the approximate $200 million cost of invasive species to the region. Lodge’s research team received a grant to identify invasive species coming to the Great Lakes through DNA testing. This DNA technique is quickly applied to find carp in the canal. To this end, Lodge teamed up with Peabody. Lodge’s team wrote to the Army Corps in 2009 that the DNA testing for carp north of the canal has come back positive.
Various environmental groups and politicians demanded that the Army Corps shut down two navigation locks near Chicago, but the transportation industry balked at the potential cost to business even though less than 1% of cargo shipped in the Chicago region would be affected by shutting down the locks. Peabody decided not to shut down the locks and devised a more extreme plan to take down the fish: poison. The poison worked on many other fish species, but not the carp. The threat of Asian carp becomes so contentious that even the White House got involved. Then, in 2010, an Asian carp was caught above the barrier—six miles from Lake Michigan. The Army Corps downplayed this finding, stating that a human might have manually released the fish in that location.
After some states brought a federal lawsuit forward against the Army Corps, Lodge and Peabody both testified in court. Peabody expressed his dismay that so much of his time in the Army Corps—which would typically be involved in dealing with issues like water resource management—has been occupied with dealing with fish. The judge decided not to force the Army Corps to shut down the locks in question. In 2014, however, the Army Corps released a report detailing how they would permanently fill in the canal and separate the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes, which they estimate will require $18 billion. It's likely the Army Corps overinflated costs to make excuses for not implementing the plan. Most groups think it’s unlikely that the plan will ever go into effect. The Army Corps remains unconvinced that there is a carp invasion.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Conquering a Continent: The Mussel Infestation of the West”
Invasive species from the Great Lakes make their way westward across the U.S., specifically through the Great Lakes “back door”: the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. Researchers express concern about the spread of invasive zebra and quagga mussels because they can attach themselves to any surface and thereby hitch a ride on a boat out of the Great Lakes through the Chicago canal. The canal leads them down the Mississippi River and any connecting rivers and streams. By 1994, the mussels have popped up in far-flung areas like Vermont, Minneapolis, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. These mussels cause problems for swimmers in lakes, who can easily cut their feet on the creatures. The Great Lakes are linked to 12% of the world’s ports, increasing the likelihood that even more invasive species will make their way to the lakes. Strangely, these mussels also crop up in lakes and rivers not connected to the Mississippi. This mysterious phenomenon may be due to the mussels’ ability to survive out of water. These mussels affix themselves to the hulls of boats, which are transported by automobile to bodies of water in other regions. For two decades, however, the mussels are not able to travel further west beyond the Rocky Mountains—until they make their way to Lake Mead near Las Vegas.
Lake Mead is the nation’s largest federal reservoir and receives seven million visitors each year. The manmade lake comes into existence after the construction of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. The government plans to use the river to supply millions of people with electricity, and then suck up every drop of the river through an extensive network of dams. The water from the river supplies water to desert towns like Phoenix and Las Vegas. Quagga mussels, however, are putting a dent in these plans by invading the plumbing system of valves and gates on the Colorado River. The warm waters of Lake Mead offer an ideal environment for the mussels to reproduce. From there, the quagga mussels spread to watery environments in states across the West.
Researchers work on solutions to curtail this so-called “STD of the Sea” (195). One method includes killing the mussels with doses of copper ion; another involves using paint that makes it cumbersome for mussels to adhere to surfaces. However, while researchers may be able to beat back mussels from destroying pipes, it’s much more difficult to tackle them in open water. Treatment methods to reduce the mussel population are already costing the West hundreds of millions of dollars. To combat the mussels’ spread, Western states now consider it a felony to transport a mussel into state waters.
Officials are particularly vigilant around Lake Powell—a popular boating destination. Officers set up checkpoints and require boats suspected of harboring mussels to be decontaminated, which can take hours. One man whose boat has mussels after it has been decontaminated is charged with a warrant for arrest for transportation of an illegal species. Researchers understand the impossibility of decontaminating every single boat; there is a great likelihood that some mussels will go undetected. Other wild ideas, like draining the lake or introducing some predator—like a mussel-eating Asian carp—are thrown around but not seriously considered. Another biologist estimates that Lake Powell has roughly 15 years before the lake’s fisheries collapse. In 2014, researchers give up the fight to save the lake from the mussels. The mussels now threaten to encroach upon the Pacific Northwest; law enforcement sets up highway checkpoints, though only 12 boats are actually identified as contaminated with mussels in Idaho.
Much like freighters attempting to avoid bringing in invasive species to the Great Lakes by flushing their ballast with saltwater, this effort in the western states is doomed to fail. However, the Great Lakes have an advantage over the Western states because all boats entering the area pass through the first lock on the St. Lawrence Seaway. There are DNA-based schemes that could identify invasive species in ballast tasks based on genetic markers, but this method isn’t foolproof, either. Ships whose ballast tanks don’t meet water salinity requirements must promise not to release ballast water into the Great Lakes. However, the ships that defy this promise receive a $3,000 fine, which is likely not a significant enough deterrent to prevent violations of the regulation. Ballast water treatment systems are not wholly effective; they will likely not be required by law for a few more years. There is only one sure-fire way to prevent invasive species from entering the Great Lakes: Prevent overseas boats from entering this first lock on the Seaway, and the problem of transporting new invasive species into the lakes is eliminated.
Chapter 7 Summary: “North America’s ‘Dead’ Sea: Toxic Algae and the Threat to Toledo’s Water Supply”
In early America, the Great Black Swamp is an inhospitable, marshy region at the edge of Lake Erie whose size shifts depending on the season. Native Americans use its impassibility as a way to evade American soldiers during wars in the late 1700s. Residents eventually figure out that they can subdue the swamp by building drainage ditches.
One historian from the early 1980s writes, “The people here treated the Black Swamp as though it were the enemy […] And they annihilated it” (215). The land on which the Great Black Swamp once stood now serves as one of the most productive farming regions in the world. This drainage system, however, has widespread implications for Lake Erie. The Great Black Swamp filters out rainwater so that by the time it reaches Lake Erie, it is crystal clear. In the absence of the swamp, the waters of Lake Erie are polluted due to human and agricultural waste—especially in recent years as overly zealous use of farm fertilizer creates toxic algae blooms in Lake Eerie.
Lake Erie’s pollution grows so bad that American children’s book author Dr. Seuss even refers to it in his book The Lorax. The reason that Lake Erie suffers from these algae blooms is because of a process called cultural eutrophication, which occurs when a body of water becomes oversaturated with nutrients like human waste or fertilizer runoff. Due to its warm waters, Lake Erie already contains an abundance of nutrients, which is why it is home to 50% of the fish in the Great Lakes. With the addition of nutrients to Lake Erie due to human activity, the eutrophication process speeds up. Cultural eutrophication creates so much life that, when it eventually decays and consumes oxygen, the lake cannot sustain life.
Small amounts of natural phosphorous—known as the “limiting factor”—trickling in from the surrounding land has historically kept the eutrophication process in check. So much phosphorous trickled into the lake in the 1960s that it created vast dead areas due to oxygen decay, leading people to coin the nickname “North America’s Dead Sea” for Lake Erie. In the 1600s a German alchemist—a person who dabbled in medieval forms of chemistry—named Hennig Brand discovered phosphorous. Brand’s discovery is put to devastating effect centuries later when phosphorous incendiary bombs kill tens of thousands of German citizens in Hamburg during World War II. In the decade following the end of the war, phosphorous also seeps into the Great Lakes from another human product: bar soap, which manufacturers douse with phosphorous. More than 12,000 pounds of phosphorous flow into Lake Erie each year in the 1960s due to this common household product, leading to an intense eutrophication process that ages the lake by a shocking 15,000 years.
In 1972, the U.S. and Canada sign an agreement to slash phosphorous runoff into Lake Erie by half. The lake recovers in such dramatic fashion that Dr. Seuss even agrees to remove the reference to the lake in his book. However, sizeable algae blooms begin to reappear at the end of the twentieth century; the lake returns to eutrophication levels comparable to the 1960s. A type of pseudo-algae known as microcystis poses medical issues— such as vomiting and diarrhea—for humans who swim in lake water tainted with it. Microcystis thrives in Lake Erie in recent years, posing a critical threat to water supplies of neighboring cities like Toledo in Ohio.
Biologist Tom Bridgeman at the University of Toledo grew up swimming in Lake Erie, but he can’t run the risk of letting his children play in a body of toxic algae. The biologist notes that although farmers are not releasing higher levels of phosphorous into Lake Erie than they were in the 1960s, they are releasing different kinds of more powerful phosphorous due to changing agricultural practices. This phosphorous contributes to the growth of microcystis. Mussels thrive on microcystis, leading to a reduction in other kinds of less toxic algae, but an increase in microcystis. Officials erect warning signs on Lake Erie beaches, which effectively ward away most swimmers.
Bridgeman doesn’t necessarily blame the farmers for releasing phosphorous into the lake, because they’re merely coexisting within the existing legal system that allows them to do this; the Clean Water Act does not address runoff from farms. The biologist believes the problem to tackle is the Maumee River feeding into Lake Erie, which is rife with phosphorous. The biologist concludes that a major city’s water supply may need to be contaminated before the government is willing to act; Lake Erie, for instance, provides 11 million people with drinking water.
One of the aforementioned farmers doesn’t think farmers are solely to blame. Another farmer, Steve Loeffler, says that he plants radishes to absorb phosphorous, but these radish plants are a small portion of Loeffler’s crops. Most of the phosphorous in the Maumee River traces back to farm runoff. The administrator of Toledo’s water treatment facility breaks down the treatment process. Just three days after the interview, microcystic algae invades Toledo’s drinking water supply; the people of Toledo must rely upon bottled water and baby formula shipped into the city. Although the water treatment department eventually clears up the problem, the incident serves as a warning sign of what could come from leaving the situation in Lake Erie as it is currently. Devastating effects can happen from leaving this problem untreated, such as when Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River erupts into flames due to the amount of pollutants in its waters.
However, there is little political will among legislators to fix the problem, even though scientists offer a solution: Cut the phosphorous runoff by 40%. There are economic repercussions to this approach in multiple industries from agriculture to the gasoline business. Meanwhile, Toledo must merely wait and treat the polluted water.
Part 2 Analysis
Through the title of Chapter 5 (“Continental Undivide”), Egan offers a fun way to signify that through both effort and negligence humans manage to bring the effect of their pollutants across the country. Not only does this title effectively tell the reader what is to come in this chapter, but it also demonstrates Egan’s sense of humor. Egan also deploys humor to illustrate the serious nature of the threats posed by tainted drinking water. Most may see a shark as more menacing than a polluted river, but it’s really the opposite, because water affects everyday lives: “[…] great white sharks, after all, don’t threaten children in their own bathrooms” (225). Egan smartly cites a deadpan newspaper headline that reads, “Water in the Chicago River Now Resembles Liquid,” which underscores the ludicrousness and severity of the waste treatment problem in Chicago during the late 1800s (161).
In this section, the invasive species expert David Lodge exemplifies the uneasy mix between science and politics. Science and politics can frequently be at odds; as has been seen in the national debate about smoking bans and climate change; but when the ecology of the Great Lakes has become so politicized, marrying the two is necessary. Otherwise, politicians and figures like Peabody are ill-equipped to make decisions about the Great Lakes without understanding its ecology: “But Lodge came to figure the stress of publicly defending his work in the media and to policy-makers was the price for doing science that mattered” (169). If scientists and government leaders don’t map out the long-term consequences, most people will continue to live their lives as they always have, unaware of the danger just down the road—unaware that government is not protecting them from possible industrial harm. A good example is just how many Americans take it for granted that they will always have access to clean drinking water. They don’t realize how precarious their drinking water is due to the threat of invasive species like mussels. Toledo, Ohio serves as a wake-up call for many Americans.
The introduction of invasive species comingles with the algae blooms in the Great Lakes in a remarkable manner. Farmers insist that everyone, including cities like Detroit that could be contributing to phosphorous runoff, must “do their part” (234) to stop the release. However, they ironically underplay their role in causing the problem in the first place. They make excuses as to why the farm phosphorous cannot be the sole cause, such as the fact that fertilizer containing phosphorous is expensive, instead of acknowledging their effects upon a deeply interconnected system. These individuals exploit a shared natural resource for their own self-interest while ignoring their responsibility for protecting this resource.
Another issue at hand is how different sectors—science, commerce, and government—are at odds with each other, further preventing action and enabling the tragedy of the commons. It would be better to raise the voltage on the electric barriers to completely prevent entry of the carp past the Chicago canal, but the shipping industry won’t stand for it. Likewise, when scientists and government desire a shutdown of portions of the Chicago canal to minimize the damage of Asian carp entering the area, leaders in the transportation industry protest, citing the negative impact of such a move on their profits—and those of the industries who require their services. Like any industry in a capitalist system, the shipping industry seeking to maximize profit, however minimal, does not always align with the public good. The Army Corps, including John Peabody, favors the interests of the shipping industry since the Corps' main job is to move ships around the country. Their corporate self-interests make them deny scientific evidence, such as Lodge’s DNA testing, to fit their own needs.
This section also underscores humans’ inability to predict the future and the need to prioritize short-term gain over long-term interests. Egan says of the fishermen who first release the Asian carp into the river system:
It all seemed innocuous at the time—the fish were so difficult to breed under even precise hatchery conditions that nobody thought there was any chance that the carp would be able to breed on their own in the wild. This was a blunder of the highest order (156).
Humans believe they know everything about their environment, and yet they are continually surprised to find that they are actually quite ignorant. They demonstrate an inability to think ahead. So even when humans devise solutions, they are reactionary, looking to mitigate the effects of the immediate crisis rather than solving the underlying issue. Egan makes this short-term versus long-term thinking clear when he describes the electric barriers to the carp as a stop-gap “Band-Aid” measure, though Congress decides to make it a permanent one (165). By the time most policymakers realize that the invasive species threat requires a change in behavior and a minor disruption to industries, it will be too late.
Egan sprinkles in literary techniques—primarily simile and metaphor—to delineate abstract scientific concepts for a layperson. For example, he keenly demonstrates how mussels spread across the U.S.; they attach to boats and “ride them like elevators up and down the Mississippi River” (189). He also refers to the Great Black Swamp as “Lake Erie’s kidney” so the reader can better understand how the swamp functions as an essential “filtering system” (216) for the lake.
Egan employs other techniques of the craft—such as listing areas in order of increasing size—to denote scale. For example, he writes at the beginning of Chapter 7, “As there are lakes, and then there are the Great Lakes, there are swamps, and then there was the Great Black Swamp” (212). The repetition of phrases like “there are” adds a lyrical quality to this quotation that helps better lodge ideas in the reader’s mind. Egan also uses comparisons to illuminate the massive size of the key geographic features in this chapter. For instance, he notes that the Mississippi River basin covers a 1.2 million-square mile expanse the size of India—a large country—for readers to truly understand how what goes on in the Great Lakes can impact a much larger region.
The more specific the data in any journalistic work, the more grounded and authentic the reporting will feel to the reader. The reader may never have seen a bighead carp, but when Egan tells them that a fisherman catches 15,000 pounds of carp in 25 minutes, we know that this is an unusually large haul; yet, this is a regular catch for this fisherman. These figures indicate to the reader that the bighead carp is reproducing rapidly and thriving in these conditions, much to the pleasure of fishermen and the dismay of biologists.
Egan also utilizes details of the setting to emphasize what a treacherous place the Great Black Swamp once was to American settlers:
In the dank air that hung above the sheets of bathtub-flat water swarmed hordes of biting flies big as bumblebees and malaria-carrying mosquitoes that so routinely brought the fatal “shakes” to the few who settled on the swamp’s edge […] (213).
In this way, modern U.S. capitalist readers can empathize experientially with the impulse to eradicate the swamp in favor of agricultural production and “progress,” until they are reminded of the scientific necessity of the ecosystem. This mirrors the need for emotionally-based politics to marry science. Moreover, Egan demonstrates the breadth of his research, using historical records to illuminate what happened in the past rather than just relying secondary sources. For example, he quotes a settler who attempted to traverse the Great Black Swamp in 1838: “Every few rods someone may be seen prying out a piece of wreck of some wagon or other vehicle. Many horses have been killed and some men seriously injured on this road” (214).
Egan offers descriptions of important character traits of the people he interviews. For example, Egan characterizes General Peabody as a brusque man with “a penchant for quoting war movie dialogue […] But he was also once a little boy who relished hot summer days at Lake Erie’s Nickel Plate Park beach in Huron, Ohio” (166). This presents the book’s characters in an evenhanded way, so that even when Peabody makes foolish blunders, he remains a sympathetic figure. He is a flawed human with good intentions, caught between his personal goals and his allegiance to the Army Corps’ agenda.
Although Egan mostly writes in third-person point of view, he occasionally digresses into first-person when the occasion is appropriate. One such occasion occurs when he’s speaking to prosecutor Kent Burggraaf about the Utah law making transporting an illegal species—like a mussel on a boat—a felony. Ironically, Egan then realizes he is carrying a long-dead mussel specimen that had been gifted to him by a researcher: “I had little doubt that I was in danger of getting arrested myself had I revealed to him the contents of the backpack that was sitting next to his desk” (203). He points out here the futility of attempting to “put the genie back in the bottle.” Zebra mussel infestations don’t occur from ill-intent; instead, since they have been introduced into the ecosystem, they are simply following their natural course, and this makes politic attempts to control them ineffective.
There is a strong undercurrent of irony running throughout the book. One of the greatest examples of this lies in how the very element that humans need to sustain life can also destroy it. There is such a concept as too much of a good thing. An example is the eutrophication of Lake Erie, when an abundance of phosphorous—present in the cells of living organisms—dooms the aquatic species of Lake Erie: “No, the smeariness Seuss bemoaned at that moment was that of a lake choking on an overdose of nutrients that are as fundamental to life as sunlight itself” (217). In this way, human’s lack of temperance dooms their own and others’ life sources.
As a journalist, Egan flits from one interview subject to the next. One day, he’ll interview a biologist worrying about farmers’ agricultural runoff into Lake Erie. In the next scene, he’ll interview one of those very same farmers. Although Egan holds back his own opinions about the best solutions to the Great Lakes’ problems, he seeks a variety of viewpoints to a very complex problem, which give the book a sense of egalitarianism in identifying the problem; no matter which side of the political spectrum the reader falls under, they are all urged to participate in the solution. This book therefore has mass appeal and is a more effective call to social action than a partisan piece of literature.
Egan also quotes an official who compares the poisoning of invasive carp species to cancer treatment; Egan picks this quotation to illustrate the mindset of officials who believe poisoning the Asian carp is the right approach: “Nobody wants to go through chemo, but you do it to protect the good cells from being overridden by the bad cells. That’s what this is” (176). However, through his research and arguments Egan also implies that it would be better to prevent the cancer in the first place—by shutting down navigation locks allowing boats into the Great Lakes through the Chicago canal—rather than merely treating it once it has infected a body of water.
Finally, Egan illustrates just how much humans repeat the mistakes of the past without even realizing that they’re falling into the same patterns. For example, Egan speaks to the head of the Bureau of Reclamation, which runs the Hoover Dam. This director contemplates bringing in an invasive species like Asian carp to tackle the mussel problem, despite the massive headache that Asian carp and other invasive species are causing in the Mississippi and the Great Lakes basin. Another biologist also hopes to procure a fish that can prey on the mussels and serve as prey for the striped bass, which are popular among sports fishermen. Many hoped that Tanner and Tody’s efforts to introduce Pacific salmon into the Great Lakes would have a similar effect on invasive alewives and boost the tourism industry. Tanner and Tody’s project was unsustainable, and it caused a massive die-off of not only the alewives, but also the salmon population itself.
