nks of foreign species are full of loopholes big enough to sail a ship through, and responsibility for regulating ballast water is avoided like the plague.
The Environmental Protection Agency passes the job of protecting the region’s environment to the Coast Guard, an agency whose coziness with the shipping industry is obvious; when Alexander visits the Coast Guard’s regional office in Massena, N.Y., he finds they share a building with the agency that owns and operates the Seaway. Regulator and regulated even hold (and publicize!) an annual “Maritime Community Day,” during which industry representatives can share cocktails and discuss regulation with government officials.
The news media has failed to report that angle of the invasives story, according to Alexander.
“No one has really probed deeply into that relationship between the Coast Guard and the shipping industry,” he said. “The Coast Guard still, to this day, hasn’t even proposed ballast water treatment standards. It just defies reason.”
Alexander is himself something of an exotic species, though of a benign sort. A Los Angeles native, he came to MSU in 1980 and remained in the state, working for papers in Marshall and Kalamazoo, and in the Booth newspaper chain’s Lansing bureau, before taking up the environment beat for the Chronicle.
He made his first foray into book publishing in 2006 with The Muskegon: The Majesty and Tragedy of Michigan’s Rarest River, which was named a Michigan Notable Book by the state’s Department of History, Arts and Libraries.
“The first book is by far the hardest,” he said, but the second was no walk in the park. “I tell people that writing a book is like having a child. It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do, but it’s also the most rewarding. The beauty of it is that it gives you a chance to really write.”
Alexander said it took a drawer-full of essays by some masters of environmental writing to keep him from throwing in the towel.
“There were times when I wanted to chuck the whole thing,” he said. Instead he took solace from an essay in which John McPhee said he never had any confidence when he started writing a book. He also read Annie Dillard, who claimed that a writer should care so deeply for their subject that they’d write a book about it even if nobody would read it.
So why does a transplanted Angeleno care enough about the Great Lakes to spend 18 months writing a book about them?
“I come from L.A., which is basically an irrigated desert,” he said. “When I came here, I just couldn’t believe the size of the lakes. I just think it’s such an incredible gift to live by them.”
Andrew McGlashen is a second-year master’s student in environmental journalism at MSU. This is his third appearance in EJ. Contact him at email@example.com.