Dan Egan's The Death
and Life of the Great Lakes is a well-researched and written book, but you
can’t come away from it without feeling a kind of crushing depression.
This is especially the case if you have visited a Great Lake. They appear so
monumental in scope; a bastion of open fresh water; an impervious inland sea. But in the two-hundred years of exposure to
people (not Native Americans, but their usurpers) we have altered the lakes in
every conceivable way - and all of it on the debit side.
We use them for drinking water, and the disposal of waste
water. We introduce foreign, invasive
species through our canals and ballast tanks, upending entire ecosystems. Every summer, massive clouds of blue-green algae blanket the water and shore. This massive body of interconnected water is
essentially destroyed.
Sure, Egan calls the book The Death and Life rather than The
Life and Death, because, such a title would be negative, and who wants to read a post-mortem. But really, it is life and then death.
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