Conscious Choice: Great Lakes in Great Peril

July 1995

Great Lakes in Great Peril

As Congress attempts to roll back the Clean Water Act

by Andrew Savagian

If you have ever lived within shouting distance of a Great Lake, as I did as a child, no one needs to tell you about the wonders of those big, friendly bodies of water. As far as I knew, they were oceans. Indeed, standing on the western shore of Lake Michigan, I saw a slate of blue that went on for miles, with no hint of land peeking out along the eastern horizon.

To me, Lake Michigan was much more than a big pond the glaciers left behind. It was alive, teeming with birds, fish and other fauna. And it was as interactive as any computer game, giving, taking and sharing parts of the earth with wildlife and human beings. The Lake would toy with the weather, making the summers cooler and the winters warmer; sometimes it would snow along the lake front when it wasn’t snowing anywhere else. Fierce storms would throw enormous waves against the docks in the summer, and massive sheets of ice created bizarre sculptures along the shoreline in the winter. The Lake would sink ships daring a trek across its treacherous, two-hundred foot waters, or erode the land and punish those foolish enough to build homes hard along its shore.

These Lakes — Michigan, Superior, Huron, Ontario, and Erie — are called "Great" for many reasons, including their sheer size. The Great Lakes are big, and not just by American standards, with our jumbo-shrimp-super-sized-soda society. These mammoth pearls of deep blue are big on a planetary, eye-popping scale. Astronauts saw them from the moon. Researchers use them as giant sea labs because they mimic ocean tides. Ocean vessels bob around like bathtub toys on their surface, while storms as dangerous and alive as any hurricane or typhoon rage across their surface.

The Great Lakes, the largest bodies of freshwater on earth, hold one-fifth of the world’s fresh water. Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world, reaching down one-quarter of a mile — 1,300 feet — to the bottom. They’ve got more coastline — 10,000 miles — than the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico combined.

The Lakes were formed when the last glaciers melted back to the poles some 10,000 years ago. The retreating ice carved out five huge basins in the North American bedrock. Native Americans have lived along their shores for thousands of years, respecting and admiring the Lakes’ power and beauty. In the 18th Century, early white explorers were stupefied, thinking they had found the Pacific Ocean, much to the confusion and chagrin of their navigators. Calling them "sweet seas," white explorers, trappers and missionaries began settling down along their shores.

As white settlers moved into the Great Lakes area, they began to reap the bounty of the Lakes abundant natural resources. By the late 1800s, white settlements had already altered the original Great Lakes ecosystem. Unfortunately, most of the Native Americans had been driven west, killed or acculturated, and much of the fur trade went west once the beaver became scarce.

This was also the beginning of a long period of extractive exploitation in the region. Lumber barons clearcut the big white pine of the northern regions, iron ore and other mining operations denuded parts of northern Minnesota, central Wisconsin and northern Michigan, and the steel and automotive industries began their operations in the eastern and south-central parts of the Great Lakes Basin. Commercial fishing and shipping industries hit their heydays in the 1940s and‘50s, bringing in huge catches of Great Lakes salmon and whitefish.

One by one, most of these extractive economies collapsed. Once the big timber was gone, lumber merchants moved west to exploit the vast Rocky Mountain and Pacific Northwest forests, while the mining, steel and automotive industries hit their respective lows in the 1960s,‘70s and‘80s.

Drops in the extractive economies also meant trouble for the shipping and related transportation industries. And with the building of canals and locks to hook up the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean, European and ocean organisms began invading the ecosystem. The sea lamprey, introduced through the ballast water of ocean-going vessels, decimated the Great Lakes salmon and whitefish populations, feeding on these fish until few were left for the humans depending on them for their livelihood.

Today, more than 40 million people — 20 percent of the U.S. and 60 percent of the Canadian populations — live within their basins. About 25 million people drink their water. One-quarter of all U.S. industry and nearly all of Canada’s major industries are located within the Great Lakes ecosystem.

And, after four centuries of exploitation, human pollution and development have taken their toll on Great Lakes water quality. By 1970, the Lakes were choked with pollution. Two out of every three wetland acres were destroyed by human development and destruction. Nearly every major Great Lakes harbor, bay, or river had some type of pollution problem. Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire in a now infamous incident, and Lake Erie was declared dead, highlighting the depth of human pollution to the environment. Bald eagles, decimated by DDT and habitat destruction, were a rare site along Great Lakes shorelines. Love Canal, New York, another infamous toxic site, is located near one of nature’s finest wonders, Niagara Falls. In the Fox River/Green Bay watershed in northeastern Wisconsin, decades of dumping have polluted the bottom sediments with heavy metals, PCBs, and other toxins. The watershed is the largest source of PCB pollution into Lake Michigan.

Both Canadian and U.S. governments have attempted to right their pollution wrongs. In 1909, officials signed the boundary waters treaty, establishing rules between the two countries for handling water disputes, trade and so on. In Article V of the treaty, they established a powerful precedent for the future: It is agreed that the boundary waters shall not be polluted on either side to the injury to health or property to the other side.

Unfortunately, neither side acted upon this edict until nearly six decades later. By that time factories, foundries, pulp mills, landfills, and other facilities had laced the Great Lakes water system with a sea of chemicals, including some we’ve become familiar with: DDT, PCBs, dioxin, lead, and mercury.

When the governments finally did act in the 1970s, they did a fairly good job. The Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act were the first attempts at reining in those destructive human acts. The laws protected areas that weren’t already polluted, protected the habitat of species already endangered, like the bald eagle, and put watchdogs on industries and actions that degraded the nation’s water quality.

In 1978, the two governments signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, a document that added to the protections of federal law and gave Great Lakes advocates a special reason to cheer. In Article II lies a very important statement about Great Lakes toxins and water quality: The discharge of any or all persistent toxic substances [is to] be virtually eliminated.

Federal and state officials, as well as Great Lakes environmentalists, took this wording literally. Activists lobbied and pushed for clean up and protection of their Lakes, and resource officials established programs to fund, monitor, clean up and protect the Great Lakes Basin from further degradation.

By the mid-1980s other government bodies stepped up the pressure. The International Joint Commission (IJC), created from the original 1909 treaty, became the Lakes’ watchdog for ecosystem health and water quality. The commissioners, three from Canada and three from the U.S., met publicly every two years to give their recommendations to the governments for taking care of the Great Lakes. The IJC’s suggestions in the last ten years have been nothing short of extraordinary: phasing out the use of chlorine by industry, establishing Lake Superior as a pollution free zone, and stopping the diversion of Great Lakes water for "out-of-Basin" uses.

In 1995, there are definitive signs that 25 years of hard work has paid off. Deadly chemicals like DDT, lead and PCBs have, for the most part, been phased out of production; ships must now exchange ballast water before they enter the Great Lakes system; and bald eagles now have a chance to repopulate areas in which they use to thrive. Lake Erie, once "dead," is alive again.

Although there has been some progress and improvement in Great Lakes water quality there is still a very long way to go to make the Great Lakes great again. Remnants of those once-booming industries still exist in the Basin, dumping their wastes into the environment. Fish from the Lakes still comes with a toxic warning label; the Environmental Protection Agency notes that most of the nation’s 1,000 fish-eating advisories are located in the Great Lakes region. The Fox River/Green Bay area is still polluted; the watershed has the biggest concentration of paper and pulp mills in the nation.

Pollution from agricultural operations and other sources contributes to the waste stream. In 1993, 104 people died and 400,000 became ill when the parasite cryptosporidium infested the drinking water of Milwaukee residents. Beaches continue to close due to fecal matter and waste in the Lakes. And we continue to lose 200,000 acres of wetlands every year to housing and commercial developments.

The lampreys remain, wreaking havoc on the Great Lakes fishery. State natural resource officials use chemicals and other means to control the flesh-sucking organisms, but their eradication remains elusive. Now the lamprey has been joined by the zebra mussel, a European invader that scientists feel may completely destroy the commercial and recreational fishing industries in 10 years.

These are difficult problems. But U.S. clean water activists and advocates doing battle over the future of Great Lakes water quality must now face down a tougher foe — their own Congress. In mid-May, the Newt Gingrich-controlled House did an about face and gutted the Clean Water Act, passing Pennsylvanian Republican Bud Shuster’s bill, H.R. 961. According to environmentalists working on Capitol Hill, the bill was practically, and in some sections literally, written by industry lobbyists.

Bill Wenzel, Midwest Field Organizer for the Clean Water Network, believes that Shuster’s bill will cause major problems for Wisconsin and Illinois residents. "Plain and simple, industry and agribusiness wrote this bill. All the hard work states and local governments have done to zone and protect their neighborhoods will be dismantled, and because of the Contract there won’t be anything local officials can do about it," said Wenzel.

While the list of representatives voting against what was labeled "Shuster’s Dirty Water Bill" actually included 34 Republicans, it still passed with some nasty provisions. More loopholes now exist for industry to discharge toxins, new exemptions were created for cities trying to evade sewage treatment requirements, and what little wetlands protection the Act provided was erased from existence.

President Clinton has vowed to veto Shuster’s bill, and there may be enough opposition in the House to defeat any override attempts. While Senate Republicans have stated their intention to rewrite much of the legislative mess created by Newt and company, environmentalists remain wary. The Contract With America, nicknamed the Contract ON America by opponents, continues to hold sway with most in the GOP. And, for those who’ve read it, the Contract leaves a lot for the haves, little for the have nots, and absolutely nothing for the environment.

Wenzel points out that the Contract ends up gutting most of the laws communities rely on to protect their health and environment. "Basically the Contract takes away a community’s right to breath clean air and protect its drinking water," said Wenzel.

Around the Great Lakes Basin, this Congress may spell disaster for water quality. In September, the International Joint Commission will hold its biennial meeting in Duluth, Minnesota, at the headwaters of the Great Lakes. There is a sense of urgency surrounding this meeting, a sense that critical action needs to occur. For even though the Lakes have bounced backed from 400 years of human pollution and exploitation, they still comprise a fragile ecosystem. One wonders how much more damage these big, friendly bodies of water can take.

Andrew Savagian is the Great Lakes Media Coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Madison, Wisconsin, office. To let your legislator know what you think about protecting the Great Lakes or about the Contract with America, call the Capitol switchboard, 202-225-3121. For more information about Great Lakes water quality or about attending the IJC’s biennial meeting, which is open to the public (and free), please contact Citizens For Zero Discharge, 218-722-2421, the Sierra Club Great Lakes office, 608-257-4994, or Bill Wenzel at the Clean Water Network office, 608-258-3054.

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