I don’t know how the Pulitzer Prize thing works, but this book by Dan Egan was a finalist in 2017. He should have won.

A habit of mine is to try and read “geographically” when I travel, books about the places I’m in. When my family took a trip earlier this month in Northern Minnesota, skirting Lake Superior all the way through Wisconsin and up to Sault Ste. Marie, MI, and then back down around Lake Michigan, I wanted something Great-Lakes related, and this was a perfect fit. [The last time I was up here, by the way, I read The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald (1977) and learned a lot.]

In this book, Egan opens with a thoroughly historical overview of the Great Lakes, these bodies of water that make up much of the Canadian-U.S. border, which he describes as essentially one giant, slow-moving river that empties into the Atlantic. He writes about the first travelers and the lore, but then he gets into the nitty gritty: the biology and ecology of the Lakes and how man’s attempts to control them have had some seriously detrimental effects.

We’ve all heard the term “invasive species” and by now we’ve all met someone who’s sick and tired of checking for zebra mussels on his pleasure craft. But if you delve at any length into this book, your eyes will be opened to the issues at play and what’s really at stake for North America’s fresh-water systems, especially most of us don’t pay attention to what’s jumping from one body of water to the next!

Egan breaks his book down into 3 parts: The Front Door (Chapters 1-4 covering the Great Lakes moving in from the Atlantic), The Back Door (Chapter 5-7 covering the Great Lakes and the waterways they lead from it, including the Mississippi River Basin and beyond), and The Future (Chapter 8-10 covering our options and hopeful solutions). The chapter titles and subtitles give you a taste for the species and issues he investigates:

• Chapter 2. Three Fish: The Story of Lake Trout, Sea Lampreys and Alewives
• Chapter 3. The World’s Greatest Fishing Hole: The Introductions of Coho and Chinook Salmon
• Chapter 4. Noxious Cargo: The invasion of Zebra and Quagga Mussels
• Chapter 5. Continental Undivide: Asian Carp and Chicago’s Backwards River
• Chapter 6. Conquering a Continent: The Mussel Infestation of the West
• Chapter 7. North America’s “Dead” Sea: Toxic Algae and the Threat to Toledo’s Water Supply

You don’t need to be a scientist, biologist, ecologist, ichthyologist, or anything of the sort to understand or appreciate this book. I’m none of these things, yet this book struck a chord. It’s eked its way into a hundred conversations over the past few weeks, and it roils my juices to consider the steps we’ve taken historically as a nation, on the one hand to harm ourselves and on the other to prevent ourselves from reaching a solution. One great quote from the book on this topic comes from Lana Pollack:

“Some of the very same people who deny the reality of climate change being caused by our energy choices are the same people who say, ‘We want you to fix this.’ … So on the one hand they say mankind is too small to impact Mother Nature—that forces nature are much stronger than the impacts of man. Yet they somehow turn around and say, ‘OK, governments: put a plug in—engineer something, dredge something, dig out, blow up, modify.’ They don’t think man is too weak to engineer a fix, but they somehow say we’re not responsible for the cause.” (294)

I’m definitely not pro-Big Government or part of the Green agenda, but I do believe that the government exists to protect its citizenry. It does this with a strong military, affordable healthcare, protection of the unborn, controls on our foods and drugs, and protection of the environment (among other things, I’m sure). The longer I’ve lived on this earth as a follower of Christ, the more I’ve leaned towards environmental conservation as a Christian ethic. For too long we’ve misunderstood what it means to “have dominion over the earth and subdue it.” It’s not an issue of control but care, not abuse but love. In fact, I can see parallels between this God-given environmental responsibility and the marriage relationship. “Wives submit to your husbands…Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church.” Sinful and godless misinterpretation alone reads into these commands false ideas of “control” or “abuse,” and I think it’s no different with how we relate as caretakers of God’s Earth. This book is by no means religious, but its applications certainly can be.

I’m confident this book will make it to my list of top-reads for the year, and it’s one that I can wholeheartedly recommend. A quick search tells me that Dan Egan has written another book, published this year: The Devil’s Element about phosphorus. It might not be on too many peoples’ Wish List, but it’s definitely now on mine.

©2023 E.T.

Read More about The Great Lakes:

• Great Stories of the Great Lakes by Dwight Boyer (1966)
• The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Frederick Stonehouse (1977)
• Distant Fires by Scott Anderson (1990)
• Shipwrecks, Monsters, and Mysteries of the Great Lakes by Ed Butts (2011)
• The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan (2017)