The Death and Life of the Great Lakes Quotes

“A normal lake is knowable. A Great Lake can hold all the mysteries of an ocean, and then some.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“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,’ ” she said. “So on the one hand they say mankind is too small to impact Mother Nature—that forces of 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.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“Roughly 97 percent of the globe’s water is saltwater. Of the 3 percent or so that is freshwater, most is locked up in the polar ice caps or trapped so far underground it is inaccessible. And of the sliver left over that exists as surface freshwater readily available for human use, about 20 percent of that—one out of every five gallons available on the planet—can be found in the Great Lakes.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“catching lake trout at that time, which he noted could grow to more than 50 pounds, was a ridiculously laborious process, especially in winter. “The moment the bite is felt the fisherman throws the line over his shoulder, and runs with all his might, in a direct line, till the fish is on the ice,” he reported. The trout weren’t much easier to catch from a boat. Strang described how fishermen let the fish pull the boat, Jaws-style, until it exhausted itself. This was no easy way for a fisherman to make a living. He reported two fishermen working together full-time did well if they caught 800 pounds of trout in a week. Strang was shot in the head in 1856, according to Smith, by two disgruntled followers who had left his church after they refused Strang’s edict that their wives—along with all other women on the island—wear bloomers. The murderers were never charged, and Strang’s tyrannical reign was largely lost to history.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“Sandy beaches still rim the lakes, but if Lake Michigan, for example, were drained it would now be possible to walk almost the entire 100 miles between Wisconsin and Michigan on a bed of trillions upon trillions of filter-feeding quagga mussels.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“an abolitionist who granted blacks full membership to his sect more than a century before mainstream Mormons did. And he became a self-styled naturalist who was among the earliest to attempt to classify the types of lake trout swimming in the waters off his island. In an 1853 report he sketched the life history of a plump trout known as a siscowet, which, because of its white flesh, he said some fishermen (incorrectly, it turned out) speculated may be a “mule”—a cross between lake trout and whitefish. He also made note of the skinnier but larger “Mackinacs” that lived in shallower waters, swam alone except when spawning, and gobbled up everything under the surf, regularly plundering the nets fishermen had set to catch schooling whitefish. “They are a voracious fish of prey, seizing and devouring so far as we can learn, every other kind, even their own,” Strang wrote. “Herring are their constant prey. Whitefish of two pounds weight have been found within the belly of the trout. Small trout”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“Like his rival Brigham Young, Strang took multiple wives, including one who dressed as a man in a black coat and stovepipe hat, called herself Charles Douglas and claimed to be Strang’s “personal assistant.” During his six-year reign Strang survived a naval battle with mainlanders as well as a trip to U.S. District Court in Detroit, where he was accused of counterfeiting, piracy, and interfering with the mail and murder, among other charges. “He talked to that jury and his tongue was like silver. And that jury believed him and said, ‘Not Guilty’ to all charges against him,” Smith recalled. “King James came back to Beaver Island more full of himself than ever, even the U.S. Government couldn’t beat him.” But the man Smith called a “cocky little tyrant” was not all trouble. He had so many followers in his church—up to 12,000 at its peak—that he was able to get elected to the Michigan Assembly in Lansing, where by all accounts he acquitted himself well as a lawmaker. He established a newspaper. He was”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“Utah”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“She told me she fears any such restoration project only offers “false hope” and distracts the public’s attention from what she sees as the real issue—climate change causing the increased evaporation. “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,’ ” she said. “So on the one hand they say mankind is too small to impact Mother Nature—that forces of 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.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“Water crises, beyond the famous California drought, have in recent decades surfaced in places as close to the Great Lakes as the city of Waukesha in the heart of Waukesha County, where once-abundant groundwater supplies have been so depleted and are now so dangerously polluted with naturally occurring radium that the city is under a federal order to find a fresh, safe source for its residents. Water scarcity troubles have popped up east of the lakes in New York City, where politicians once publicly eyed the Great Lakes as a potential salve. And they have emerged south of the lakes in Atlanta, Georgia, where less than a decade ago an extreme dry spell nearly drained the public water supply and left politicians looking north for emergency relief.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“Lake Erie suffered immensely throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries as a receptacle for human, industrial and agricultural wastes. But nothing compares to what is happening today. Those millions of acres of destroyed wetlands, the overapplication of farm fertilizer, an increase in spring deluges and a lakebed smothered with invasive mussels have all conspired to create massive seasonal toxic algae blooms that are turning Erie’s water into something that seems impossible for a sea of its size: poison.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“A thing is right when it tends to promote the integrity, beauty and stability of the biotic community," famed Wisconsin naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote in 1949, which happened to be teh peak of the lamprey invasion. " It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“This is what was happening in the late 1960s, when people started to refer to Lake Erie not as a Great Lake, but as “North America’s Dead Sea.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“cultural eutrophication,”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“Don’t pick the ones that you can beat up easily,” he said. “Pick ones that know all the tricks of life.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“Call it the Caspianization of the Great Lakes.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“Washington believed there was no reason the inland immigrants on that isolated frontier, severed from the 13 seaboard states by the mountain crests of the Appalachians, would maintain allegiance to their new country instead of the settlers allied with Great Britain to the north, or with the Spanish to the south. He wanted a canal extending west from the Mid-Atlantic’s Potomac River, but he recognized that a connection to the West had to be made, one way or the other—and in one place or another.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“HOWARD TANNER WAS NEVER BIG ON THE IDEA OF VALUING NATIVE species simply because they are native. His priority in the 1960s was to convert the lakes from a resource primarily managed as a commercial fishery into a sportsmen’s haven, and native species just didn’t fit his bill—and they still don’t. “I doubt if the charter boat captains can sustain a fishery on lake trout,” he said. He called trolling for native walleye “about the most boring thing you can do.” “Like bringing in a wet sock,” he said.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

“A single Seaway ship can hold up to six million gallons of vessel-steadying ballast water that gets discharged at a port in exchange for cargo. And that water, scientists would learn after it was too late, can be teeming with millions, if not billions, of living organisms.”
― Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes