Pearl's Reviews > The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

In, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, the author demonstrates why a book is not always the right medium for a writer's content. This book does not contribute anything new to the overarching conversation of natural resource management on the Great Lakes nor does Egan successfully give the reader any momentum for future actions. What the book does do is provide the history of the Great Lakes and related waterways almost exclusively from the white, American, male perspective. I can’t tell if the author didn’t think pre-colonial history of the lake was important or if he thought that since the creation of the lake basin white men were the most significant destructive force on the area- so he’d start there. The structure and style of this narrative lends itself far more to a documentary series or movie than a book. Even an anthology of the author's journalistic pieces on the topic would have been better than trying to assert that this book is any kind of comprehensive assessment of the issues presented, which I believe it thinks it is.

For anyone who has lived in a Great Lakes city for most of their life and has had any participation in learning of their home, this book will be mostly uninsightful. You will also wonder if Chicago is the only city that makes the news out of every city on the lakes. Selfishly, I also wished for more Lake Superior content as most of the book focused on the Lower 4 Lakes, the Chicago Sanitary Canal and River, and the St. Lawrence River/Seaway. The book also had entire chapters dedicated just to sea lamprey and quagga mussels but didn’t even mention invasive plant species.

Disappointingly the book leaves out any traditional ecological knowledge from the region's tribal nations. The book never addresses the social harm of invasive species' historical naming conventions (the “Asian carp” has not been referred to as such in Minnesota since 2014 when it was officially redesignated the Invasive Carp. Other Great Lakes states have similar initiatives.) As previously noted, the book also does not have a specific argument beyond, invasive species changing the local and expanded ecology and that's probably bad. The book barely even commits to its decision that introduced species harm ecosystems as it seems to support the continued stocking of certain fish species. The author also has nothing profound to say about the cycle of human intervention causing new problems, even when attempting to solve old ones when this is the most clear takeaway from the stories the author reports. Personally, this entire book reads like the author has no personal opinion on the situation and is simply regurgitating the interviews and research he has saved from his previous work in journalism.

It would be wrong to say this book has no value. I do think it could serve as a good primer to how shipping has affected the Great Lakes ecology, but this book tries to fit too much into too small of a book. This leads the reader having to shift through hard too detailed explanations of sea lamprey breeding while never learning of the peril of endangered wild rice plants. Had the author focused solely on the Chicago area, the St. Lawrence Seaway, or stuck only to the impact of aquatic invasive species- cutting out much of the economics and engineering of the shipping industry, the book could have been much more comprehensive while keeping the digestible length.

less than 2/5 stars