by David Dempsey
May 16, 2009

A cliché with fresh significance these days is that when the national economy gets a cold, Michigan gets pneumonia. So when the Great Lakes suffer what author Jeff Alexander calls herpes, the mind reels at what illness Michigan endures. The Great Lakes State pays the highest price of any state for insults to the world’s largest freshwater ecosystem.

In Pandora’s Locks (Michigan State University Press, May 2009), author Alexander cites estimates of damage caused by invasive species to the Great Lakes rivaling that of the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill in the Gulf of Alaska in 1989 (the oil giant ultimately paid $4.6 billion for cleanup and restoration). The difference is not the magnitude of environmental harm, but between an immediate and a slow-motion catastrophe. The phenomenon is like herpes, he says, “because it’s a disease that never went away and was easily spread.” Belatedly but fortunately, governments are finally working to shut off the primary invasion route — the ballast water of oceangoing vessels — and Alexander gives Michigan officials high grades for spurring that.

Alexander, until recently a respected environmental reporter for the Muskegon Chronicle and now with the National Wildlife Federation, skillfully chronicles how the realization of a centuries-old dream of a commercial shipping passage between the Great Lakes and saltwater seas has spawned an invasion of foreign fish, pathogens and other unwanteds that has damaged native fisheries, killed birds, and cost the public billions of dollars to control. In part because it dares to challenges the still widely-held view that the St. Lawrence Seaway has generated enormous economic benefits, his thoroughly researched book is sure to provoke controversy on the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Seaway.

That anniversary remembers a ceremony in which President Dwight Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth II officially christened the Seaway (and its seven locks, six canals and three dams) on June 26, 1959. Days later, 100,000 celebrants turned out to cheer the Seaway’s advent in Duluth, Minnesota.

For the next 30 years, the Seaway was considered by many an unequivocal success, boosting regional commerce by connecting the continent’s heartland with the high seas. But as Alexander notes, Michigan was the first state to get the first serious warning of imminent environmental disaster.

In December 1989 a mob of zebra mussels, whose forebears are thought to have hitchhiked in an oceangoing freighter’s ballast earlier in the decade, clogged the drinking water intake at Monroe, prompting a minor emergency. Invaders — most notably the sea lamprey — had popped up before, but the zebra mussel heralded a new wave of aquatic arrivals. For a time, a new invader was spotted in the Lakes on average every eight months.

The controversy — or scandal — also comes from Alexander’s detailed, unflinching anatomy of how the crisis was permitted to begin and persist. Federal agencies in both Canada and the U.S. failed for political reasons to do their job. Simply stated, in Alexander’s view those agencies and powerful members of Congress have fought more to protect shipping than to protect the Great Lakes.

As the author says: “The EPA and the Coast Guard had the legal authority and moral obligation to address the invasive species problem but neither agency would stand up to the shipping industry and regulate ballast water discharges. Their response to the problem over the past three decades has been shameful.”

Alexander’s writing is as compelling as his conclusion. As in his previous book on the history of the Muskegon River, he doesn’t do his research from an armchair — he gets out to the ports where the invaders arrived and the Michigan beaches that have been plagued by algae outbreaks as an indirect result of the aquatic food chain disruption caused by zebra and quagga mussels. Alexander’s personal touch, passionate curiosity and close-up view of what the non-natives have wrought give the book a singular vividness. It should significantly advance public understanding of the how and why of the underwater disaster of aquatic invasive species in the Great Lakes.

How does he feel about Michigan’s efforts on the issue? He gives the state an “A” for effort. Led by Sen. Patty Birkholz, chair of the Senate’s environmental committee, the state pioneered regulations aimed at cleaning the non-natives out of ballast water.

“Michigan was the first state to stand up to the Coast Guard, the EPA and the shipping industry,” Alexander says. That in turn has inspired other Great Lakes states — most notably Minnesota and Wisconsin — to initiate their own rules and increase momentum for a congressional solution. It’s a lesson of Great Lakes leadership Michigan would do well to emulate often. And Alexander’s book is a profoundly valuable contribution to an emerging non-fiction literature of our amazing Great Lakes.

David Dempsey, a former Michigan environmental advisor and activist, is a Minnesota-based conservationist and the author of several books on the Great Lakes, his latest the coffee table The Waters of Michigan.

(Note: Regular reviewer Jean B. Eggemeyer recently welcomed her second daughter, Anna Elizabeth, to her family and hopes to find time to read again soon.)