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.
Themes
Balancing Competing Interests in the Great Lakes
There are three primary competing interests among the various parties involved in disputes over the Great Lakes: geopolitical, commercial, and scientific.
Dating back to the time of George Washington, geopolitical interests have always been at play in the desire for a navigable waterway through the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes were not just an optimistic expression of the American Dream to traverse West, but also a political ambition to connect disparate regions of the new country. Creating a shared sense of national identity between regions necessitated creating a streamlined channel for shared goods, services, and recreation. There are also international tensions surrounding the canal due to the shared border around the Great Lakes with Canada; President Eisenhower acknowledged Canada’s power to build its own seaway to allow foreign ships to come close to both countries without the U.S.’s express permission. These geopolitical tensions illustrate the colonizers’ desire for dominion over their natural surroundings to create a sovereign country and the necessity for that sovereign country to be able to defend itself, while simultaneously illustrating the futility of both. Creating the waterway that allowed for national identity and dominance made the U.S. vulnerable to other types of foreign invaders (non-native species)—an interloper much more difficult to identify and suppress.
The desire to plunder the Great Lakes for economic gain has also been a key motivating factor over the centuries. Even the first French explorer to the area, Jacques Cartier, sought to cut through the Great Lakes so that he might conquer the riches of Asia. Later, DeWitt Clinton—mayor of New York—and Jesse Hawley are both motivated to bring forth the Erie canal due to potential profits from increasing shipping of goods and people between the East and the Midwest. Eisenhower rightly worried that too much connection to the Great Lakes region would result in iron ore being shipped out of the area, thus eradicating the steel industry in the Midwest. Eisenhower’s concerns were all too prescient. Economic interests often clash with the ecological preservation of the Great Lakes in the present day. The modern shipping industry is unconcerned about the effects of Asian carp on the Great Lakes and wants to maintain maximum financial profit. It is this same economic motivation that leads the shipping industry to oppose efforts to shut down navigation locks by Chicago in order to prevent carp from infiltrating the body of water.
These competing interests of various industries doom not only the environment, but ironically hinder profits as well. After the much-anticipated Seaway turns out to be somewhat of a bust, one U.S. congressman says:
The railroads didn’t want to see larger-sized locks in the St. Lawrence Seaway that would compete with the railroads, and the East Coast ports didn’t want to see competition from the Great Lakes, and together they combined to limit the size of the Seaway locks (30).
So due to competing interests and attempts by politicians to appease all sides, the locks created many ecological problems while offering very little benefit.
The tension isn’t simply between industries and governments, however. There are also competing interests among the scientists, as shown in the disparate approaches to fish management between Vernon Applegate and Tanner. Applegate wants to eliminate lampreys and prioritize the native trout species in order to strengthen the Lakes’ ability to withstand invasive predators; his ecological approach is rooted in scientific ethics. Tanner wants to introduce salmon to boost tourism, with the side benefit that the salmon eliminate invasive alewives to make the lake more enjoyable for tourism; his approach utilizes ecology to maximize economic benefit for the Great Lakes’ region. Egan writes, “If Vernon Applegate was the Great Lakes’ oncologist who saved them by developing a precision chemotherapy that could be dispersed on an ecosystem scale, Howard Tanner was their plastic surgeon” (74). The question of which benefits outweigh others is difficult to answer.
Juggling the competing interests of environmentalists and commercially-minded scientists puts the government in a bind. Egan states:
With evidence piling up that what is good for native lake trout (no alewives) is bad for salmon (which are alewife-dependent), and vice versa, the states and federal government are trying to strike a dicey balance to keep sportsmen happy and lake trout on the road to recovery (320).
The state—and individuals like Howard Tanner and Wayne Tody—ignore the wisdom of commercial fishermen who have been fishing on the lake for generations out of their own self-interest. Therefore, what may be good for the hobby fisherman—an abundance of chinook salmon—is devastating for the commercial fisherman, who are prohibited from fishing for salmon but cannot find enough native fish to sustain their livelihood. When Tanner prioritizes tourism, he dismisses the preservation of native fish species such as the walleye, which he finds immensely boring to fish, or akin to “bringing in a wet sock” (317). In doing so, he ignores the needs of an entire segment of the Great Lakes’ economy.
All of these competing interests show that people become invested in their perspective of certain issues that have social, ecological, and economic consequences. This blinds them to opposing viewpoints and often leads to shortsighted, ineffective solutions with unintended consequences.
Conquering Nature Versus Adapting to It
In the book’s first chapter, Egan refers to news anchor Walter Cronkite, who is mesmerized by the project to build the St. Lawrence Seaway in the late 1950s. This attitude is not new. French explorers Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet recognize the potential in the Great Lakes in the 1700s. If someone can bridge the continental divide around Chicago and connect the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River, then they will be able to create a passageway across the continent, thus fueling economic opportunity and geopolitical conquests. Centuries later, Americans do just that.
Cronkite feels similarly about the Seaway. He reflects the optimism of the American dream, enabling Americans to feel that nature is there to be molded for man’s needs—not the other way around. This spirit of American expansionism naturally follows from the colonists’ impulse to settle across North America, regardless of the Native Americans they displace or the habitat they destroy. These settlers’ attitudes fit perfectly with Manifest Destiny, which is the idea that Americans have a God-given right to settle and expand their reach across the continent. Given this history, it is ironic that white settlers name the town of Waukesha after a Native American leader, despite the fact that the arrival of the white settlers largely pushes these Native Americans off their homeland.
When Americans come across a place that they cannot easily manage, like the Black Swamp, they became frustrated. Egan writes, “The swamp was not a place where settlers could live in harmony with nature, so it was destined to be a place that they either left to nature, or a place that they took” (213). In the case of the treacherous Swamp, they “took” it and filled it in, though not without immense repercussions for the drinking water of Chicago in the short-term and the ecology of the Great Lakes in the long-term. Many of the other attempts to meddle with the Great Lakes to suit human wants—such as Tanner’s salmon hatcheries—may work in the short-term, but prove disastrous for the economy and ecology of the Great Lakes in the long-term.
The attitude of controlling nature for human ends contrasts with the scientific management principle Egan presents toward the end of the book: adaptive management. Adaptive management does not provide a specific policy guideline—i.e. use poison to kill invasive species or erect electrical barriers in the water—but instead suggests that experts form policies by listening to the changing nature around them and adapting needs to fit those changes. Funnily enough, this is exactly what some fishermen are doing; they begin harvesting fish that they would never have considered before, because that’s all that they can catch at this point. When Egan asks a fisherman how he survives when the fish that they’ve traditionally harvested are gone, the fisherman says simply “we’ve adapted” (307).
Failing to Learn from the Mistakes of the Past
When it comes to the Great Lakes, there is a pattern of behavior humans take. First: Conquer or expand into a new part of the Great Lakes region through dredging, canal-building, filling swamps, etc. Second: Expand the shipping industry, causing invasive species to swarm the Great Lakes. Third: Intervene in the ecology of the lake in response to the invasive species, which may lead to some short-term gain—as in the case of increased tourism due to the Pacific salmon—but also long-term ecological chaos and millions of dollars in economic loss. Fourth: Humans try to fix the mess they made, and the ecological mess turns into a downward spiral of the same mistakes. Through hubris (human arrogance and perception of an unshakeable belief in the ability to control nature), Americans can’t seem to allow the ecology of the region to naturally reach equilibrium on its own while they wait and adapt as necessary.
From the lampreys to Applegate to Peabody and the Asian carp, Egan suggests all are overlooking a much simpler approach to tackling these invasive species, which is to cut them off at the source by preventing their entry into the Great Lakes area in the first place. In all cases, there is a failure to see the bigger picture. The issue is not just about a single fish, but the overall threat that human intervention—through mechanisms like the Seaway and Chicago canal—pose to nature. As a Newsweek reporter puts it, “[t]his is about two artificially connected watersheds that many people argue should never have been connected” (184). The Death and Life of the Great Lakes implies that the U.S. should either fill in the canal system or adapt to the changes ecology rather than try to maintain the status quo with increasingly unnatural means.
One of the reasons that the people in this book fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors is that humans often exhibit tunnel vision; they focus on short-term goals and solutions to mediate crises. All of people who intervened in the Great Lakes rather than allowing for adaptive management had something to profit, whether it be money, fame, or career advancement. Because there isn’t anything to gain from non-intervention, Americans continue to manipulate the environment and create more problems.
The Tragedy of the Commons in an Interconnected Ecosystem
As his salmon hatchery gets underway on the Great Lakes, biologist Howard Tanner thinks of his uncertain plan: “I’m going to be either a hero or a bum” (91). However, it isn’t that simple. In the tragedy of the commons, everybody is a hero and everybody is a villain. Individuals consume or exploit a shared common good—in this case, a natural resource like the Great Lakes—for their own self-interest: financial gain, scientific experimentation, and expanding geopolitical conquest of North America. Operating independently, these individuals squander this shared resource because no one feels a collective responsibility to protect it.
The problem of tragedy of the commons highlights the need for government regulation to force actors to curtail bad behavior impacting a common good. Lake Erie, populated by massive “dead zones” tracing back to phosphorous runoff from nearby farms is one such example. Without any government oversight, farmers and local water treatment facilities might take short-term steps—such as planting radishes to absorb phosphorous or buy additional treatment equipment—but they won’t tackle the underlying issue of phosphorous, because their livelihood and the nation’s agriculture depends upon it.
However, in an interconnected system, one regulation can have ripple effects elsewhere. Egan interviews a scientist who notes that gasoline contains corn-based ethanol, so reducing phosphorous runoff—and thus, fertilizer—could reduce production of corn. One can imagine the uproar that would occur if gas prices were to increase dramatically due to phosphorous regulations. Yet, the failure to act—to assume collective responsibility for protecting the environment—leaves cities like Toledo waiting to react to crises instead of being proactive in solving the problem. Egan likens the water treatment facility operators in Toledo to a “fireman on a bridge waiting for a river to ignite” (244).
Tragedy of the commons is exacerbated on the Great Lakes, because this isn’t just a problem of one small isolated lake. These lakes are a massive, complex ecosystem fueling fishing ventures and supplying drinking water to many American towns and cities. Because of the canals built over the past two centuries, what goes on in the Great Lakes has impacts on other parts of the country, too, as Egan demonstrates through the mussel invasion of the western states. The Great Lakes form an interconnected ecosystem wherein even the slightest change can cause massive ripple effects along the food chain, affecting even humans.
The invasive zebra and quagga mussels serve as a good starting point to examine how different parts of this system affect each other. The invasion of mussels in the Great Lakes affects drinking supply of nearby residents and the boating industry. It also affects the health of the lake’s ecosystem, which has implications for the local economy and tourism. The rapidly reproducing mussels lead to a decimation of phytoplankton, which precipitates a decline in the alewives feeding on the plankton. The alewives already suffer from die-offs due to the growth in the salmon population.
Salmon fisheries dependent on the alewife population also plummet in numbers. If salmon fisheries are affected, then tourism and commercial fishing takes a serious hit, which affects the revenue of tourist towns on the Great Lakes. Egan demonstrates that everything in this food chain and this Great Lakes ecosystem-slash-economy is connected; moving one piece causes another to topple, but in ways that are hard to predict. Not even the talented biologist Howard Tanner could foresee how his salmon fisheries would unintentionally harm alewives or how an unexpected intruder like the mussel could further jeopardize his grand vision for the Great Lakes.
Overseas freighters—bringing in the invasive species to the Great Lakes—constitute only 5% or less of the tons of goods shipped into the Great Lakes, so halting their presence is not as much of an economic loss as those in the shipping industry might think. Egan suggests that it is not prudent to put the interests of a niche part of the shipping industry above the costly ecological devastation of the Great Lakes. It will cost more money in the long run to deal with the effects of these non-native species than to cut them off at the outset. However, the interests of the shipping industry are at odds with the interests of scientists and the residents of the Great Lakes, leading to somewhat of a political impasse. It is not a matter of lack of scientific ability, but a lack of political will that drives the issues affecting the Great Lakes.
