Tag Archives: ecology

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

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The Death and Life of the Great LakesThe Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan

The Great Lakes are in my blood. Every summer for as long as I can remember, with only lapses of a few years here and there, I have walked their shores. I am unfamiliar with oceans. These are the only seas I have known, but those coastlines—seemingly endless expanses of sand, water, clouds, towering cottonwoods on the dunes—are my own configuration of the northern shore (to borrow a Lafferty reference). Yet if Dan Egan is correct, we’re missing an ecological catastrophe, or rather a series of catastrophes, playing out beneath their surfaces right now. I recently read The Living Great Lakes by Jerry Dennis, which was a wonderful celebration of the Lakes. In contrast, Egan’s book is a prophecy of the Lakes—not quite a Jeremiad, though I learned of the book from a sign outside a bookstore in St. Joseph, Michigan, saying the author was coming to speak, and I can only hope he is traveling the shores of the lakes talking about his writing with all the fervor of a prophet, and I hope that people are listening.

Because this book needs to be on the desk of every governor of all the states and provinces bounding these waters (and in the hands of everyone who treasures traveling to their shorelines). In the introduction, Egan speaks of seeing old photos of hunters on the Great Plains standing atop piles of buffalo skulls and being amazed today: couldn’t they see what was happening? Didn’t they realize what they were doing? What were they thinking? Egan argues that our grandchildren might well wonder the same thing about us and our lakes.

Egan is a journalist who has been covering the Great Lakes for decades, and this book arose out of the work of that career. What keeps the book from being a grim Jeremiad though or a shrill environmental screed—what makes it a great read as well as a powerful warning—is the journalistic voice Egan brings to telling the historical stories and the personal accounts connected with the picture of unfolding ecological disaster. It makes the medicine go down easier, but it also drives the medicine to the bone.

In a nutshell, Egan illustrates how the Great Lakes have been isolated and protected from invaders for thousands of years, the Niagara Falls providing a natural barrier to invasive species. This was artificial breached by the locks of the Seaway, engineered with the intention of bringing international marine commerce to Great Lakes port cities. Egan shows the ecological catastrophe unleashed by invaders in bilge-water (waves of invasive fish and eventually the zebra and quagga mussels) but also the foolishness: trade promises that never materialized, an average of only two international ships a day and locks that were too small for most of the international cargo fleet the day they opened. Regulating single choke-point could ensure that what has happened to the Lakes doesn’t happen again. Egan’s simple solution is to order the unloading of all international ships at the Seaway onto rail or Great Lakes vessels, something he argues would be incredibly inexpensive compared to the economic damage already wrought by invasive species and the cost of further invaders.

The web of native Great Lakes ecology, Egan outlines, was devastated by invasive species and then pushed ever further off-kilter by stocking them as though they were sport fishing holes with non-native salmon (and the history here is a window into the history of state fisheries). He explains how a single state (Michigan) made unilateral decisions about fish stock that would affect all the lakes. Egan doesn’t place blame but rather tells the history of subsequent boom and collapse and potential rebound. He also explores the “back door” into the Great Lakes, the Chicago Shipping and Sanitary Canal, which opens the door into the Mississippi Basin and thus invasive Asian carp. He explores the spread of mussels to the west, toxic algae blooms fed by fertilizer runoff and loopholes in EPA protections—such as agricultural runoff being considered a “pointless” polluter and thus not regulated and bilge-water not being classified as pollution at all. Finally, he looks at the threats and complexities of thirst for Great Lakes water in an arid landscape.

The story he tells is comprehensive, contextual, and compelling.

And damning.

I’ll be sitting on the beaches of Michigan again this summer, but I won’t be looking at those waters stretching out before me in the same way.

Inheriting Paradise

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Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on GardeningInheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening by Vigen Guroian

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The rain over the past several days has meant the plants in my meager garden have grow wild, chaotic, threatening to slip beyond the control of a weeding hand. It doesn’t help that I’m already a bit of a lazy gardener. It’s important for me to have growing things in the ground– my ground– every season, but I don’t spend time each day in the garden. I kind of let things– cucumbers and tomatoes, mainly– run riot.

I have two shallow raised beds in the backyard. This fall I may add a third. One of them is devoted to different varieties of cucumbers with basil plants holding down the corners. There’s a long trellis I made out of old chicken wire running down the middle. The cucumbers are gathering themselves right now in a slow green boil, like they’re gathering momentum to leap up and over it, as they will soon, burying it in a long leafy wave. I’ve always had good luck with cucumbers.

The second bed is more unruly. Half of it is devoted to a weedy onion patch, though the long fingers of the onions still have a comfortable lead on the grass growing up between them, for now. I dropped onion sets into this side of the garden haphazardly and without plan, so the onions have come up in bedraggled rows. The rest of the bed is split between four large tomato plants that have fountained up as bushes, spilling languid green arms in all directions, and a row of potato plants that I’m not sure what to do with. I’ve never grown potatoes before, and as lovely and thick as they look above the ground, I don’t know what that means beneath the soil.

In one corner of this bed I have an uneasy alliance with a bunch of mint. At one time this mint spread across the back of the house and my wife spent a long afternoon pulling it out of the flower bed where it had thrived for perhaps decades. I have a soft spot in my heart for the plant though, because I pull a leaf to chew every time I walk past the garden and I boil it to make mint tea for my kombucha. I have it walled off in its own corner of the raised bed, though my walls don’t go deep enough to actually do anything to hold it back. That’s just me, pulling out the constant runners that keep creeping into the tomatoes.

You’re supposed to be able to tell something about a man from his garden, and if this is true then my garden says I’m enthusiastic, overly optimistic, and naive. I know there are supposed to be growing things on my land, so I plant them, but I’m never quite sure I have the hang of what to do with them once they go crazy, as they do each season. I like to watch the garden come to life, but I lack artistry. Fortunately, there’s not a lot riding on my gardening. I don’t rely on it to provide a major source of my food. If Vigen Guroian is right though, I do need it to provide food for my soul.

The garden is the oldest analogy. As Guroian points out, man was placed in a garden at creation. Whether or not this is “historical” truth, consider what it means as literary truth. Man begins in some kind of order, as some kind of caretaker in relationship with ordered creation. Wildness and wilderness only come later.

For Guroian, an Armenian Orthodox theologian, gardening is more than a hobby or an ecological mission: it is theology, lived in the context of the soil. The annual death and rebirth of his garden is a reflection of the theological– the cosmological, he would argue– truths exemplified in the liturgical life of the Church. Indeed, in this slender volume the chapters are divided by Christian holidays, with Guroian reflecting on the beauty, significance, and meaning of what’s happening in the garden in time with what’s happening in the liturgical year. The garden is a way of participating with creation itself in worship, in bearing fruit joyfully before God. For Guroian, as he shares his own battle with depression, it’s also a means of healing.

The mirror for all this is the prayers and hymns of the Armenian Orthodox liturgy. Guroian pulls from this throughout the year– as well as scripture and occasional quotes from the Fathers or other writers– to draw the reader into an understanding of the cycles at work unseen beneath the turning of the seasons. This might be a central claim of anyone who gardens: for those of us who have lost touch with the land, the circle of the year turns largely unseen. We skim along the skin of it, but we don’t reach deeply and touch what it means.

For an Orthodox Christian gardener like Guroian, the claim might go deeper: most Christians today are like the non-gardeners, out of touch with the deeper turnings in the liturgical life of the Church. We see Easter and Christmas come and go like non-gardeners see certain fruits and vegetables appear and then disappear (though they don’t even really do that anymore) from the markets. But there’s a deep connection between the two, and Guroian believes– in keeping with mystical Orthodox theologians– that the story of the Church, the entire story of redemption and deification, is written in the soil. He would have you know this when you garden as well as when you sing or speak the liturgy.

For all that I agree with Guroian’s message here, I was disappointed with the book. It’s a slender volume that despite the richness of his prose and borrowed texts felt woodenly didactic. The cosmic significance of gardening was spelled out writ large, but what was lacking was the specificity that makes such sweeping analogies and metaphors truly powerful. I learned the significance of gardening, but what of the significance of tomatoes? What of cucumbers or mulch? What of the back bent in labor? They’re all here but passed over, unexplored. I was hoping for something more along the lines of Chet Raymo’s Soul of the Night; whereas Raymo’s theological claims are far vaguer, his treatment of natural (in this case astronomical) phenomena are compelling, concrete, and sublime. For all the truth Guroian is touching here, the execution came off a bit too trite.

Tree, A Life Story

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Tree: A Life StoryTree: A Life Story by David Suzuki

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is an idea that if you know something well enough—if you spend some time learning about it and seeing all of its internal and external connections—you cannot help but loving it. I’m not entirely sure this is true, though I’d like to believe it is. I think it is an important aspect of environmentalism and likely the reason why so many scientists become conservationists: sometimes it is only by careful and deliberate study that the inherent value of an organism or system becomes apparent.

I also think this is the point of good nature writing: making the reader take a long look at something. Really study it. Get to know deeply. By doing so, rational analysis becomes something more: it becomes a form of art, of contemplation, maybe even a form of worship. It certainly can become a form of excellent literature and, in the case of this book, an opportunity for combining knowledge, connection, and empathy.

Trees fascinate me. They are ubiquitous and prosaic, and yet they’re also ancient, silent, and somehow unknowable. Have you ever stopped and simply considered how large they are? How a single specimen can tower over your home physically and cast its sheltering shade over your entire life temporally? And yet, how much do most of us really know about them? What’s going on inside the bark and beneath the soil? What unseen networks do they play a role within?

I write about trees. I titled my first collection of short stories after them. And for a long time I’ve been looking for a book that captures what they are and more importantly teaches me things about them that I didn’t know. This book, by David Suzuki and Wayne Grady, went a long way toward filling that tree-shaped hole in my head I’ve been walking around with. Grady, a Canadian science writer, and Suzuki, a zoologist, academic, and environmentalist, team up to do something that at first blush appears fairly simple: they want to write the life story of a single tree, in particular a Douglas-fir growing outside a British Columbian cabin retreat.

Of course it’s not that simple. Trying to focus on one aspect of nature—let alone a single tree—is like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole. Grady and Suzuki use the life cycle of a single Douglas-fir, from germination to death, as a lens to explore trees in general, the zoology and botany of British Columbia, and the importance of forests throughout the world. Yet the single tree itself functions effectively as a unifying thread throughout the book, and of course along the way we get a wealth of information about the evolution, reproduction, growth, morphology, taxonomy, and mystery of trees.

Tree, A Life Story is a wealth of information, yet it is consistently readable and compelling. As with any good nature book, we learn the object itself and we also learn the impossibility of seeing the object alone or isolated. We get a glimpse of the essential connectivity of trees with each other, with wildlife and fungi, and with other plants. What was most surprising to me—apart from the new facts I picked up, like the fact that scientists are still not quite sure they have a handle on how trees pull water and nutrients up hundreds of feet into the air from roots to canopy—was the way the tree itself became a character of this story. With trees, the authors explain, there is no definite moment of death. A tree’s life is in many ways a long dying. But reading the final acts of this particular tree’s life, I found myself—in a twist on much conservationist writing that witnesses to the loss of entire species or habitats—mourning an individual. Trees are monuments, they’re like rooted ships sailing not through space but through time. And we so often only see still images of their lives. To see the whole story spelled out from beginning to end was quite wonderful and surprisingly moving.

Trees still fascinate me. After reading this book I know them a little better. I also know (as with so much) that to truly understand them I’d need to devote a career to their study. But every little bit helps. Now maybe I love them a little better as well.