MSU alumnus Jeff Alexander's newest book, Pandora's Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway, will be released in June. Photograph courtesy of the Michigan State University Press.
A new book reveals the dirty side of an engineering marvel
By Andrew McGlashen
There are brief moments of gothic ghastliness in Jeff Alexander’s new book: Eel-like sea lampreys repeatedly strike and latch onto a teenage girl trying to swim across a choppy Lake Ontario at night. A 50-foot-wide band of dead fish lines a 40-mile stretch of Lake Michigan’s shore. Loons poisoned with botulism can’t hold their heads out of the water, and drown.
But while those images might give readers the willies, the book’s larger tale of the federal government’s failure to keep invasive species out of the Great Lakes will make them downright sick.
Michigan State University Press will publish Pandora’s Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway in June, marking the 50th anniversary of the Seaway’s dedication.
Alexander, an MSU alumnus and former environment reporter for the Muskegon Chronicle, said when he decided to write a book explaining how invasive species entered the lakes and played havoc with their ecosystems, his hunch was that the global shipping industry was most to blame.
“But my research turned my whole hypothesis on its head,” he said in a phone interview.
When the Seaway opened, it allowed oceangoing ships to travel 2,340 miles inland from the Atlantic to Duluth, Minn., and other freshwater ports by passing through a series of locks, canals and dams. It meant freighters could haul Minnesota grain, Upper Michigan iron and Rust Belt autos eastward at a fraction of the cost to move them by train.
But while Alexander clearly appreciates its magnitude and ingenuity, Pandora’s Locks is no rhapsody to the Seaway. As he writes in its preface, the book tells “the story of how ineffectual regulatory agencies, ignorant politicians, and an intransigent shipping industry allowed the insidious byproducts of ocean shipping to eviscerate and reconfigure the world’s largest freshwater ecosystem.”
Residents of the Great Lakes region have been bombarded in recent years with reports of harmful invasive species entering the lakes. Zebra mussels, alewives, sea lampreys, round gobies — though most of us never see these pests, their names are familiar. They swim or slither into newspapers one at a time, with apparently little in common.
In Pandora’s Locks, though, we see how the lakes’ many invaders — there are at least 183 — are each notes in the same sad song. We learn how one species can make conditions ripe for other menaces. For instance, the zebra and quagga mussels that were discovered in the lakes in the 1980s have caused recent bird die-offs, and caused massive algae blooms that clogged the intake pipes used for cooling nuclear power plants, forcing emergency shutdowns. By devastating predator species like lake trout, lampreys caused an explosion of alewives in the early 1960s. It’s all related, Alexander said, and it’s all troubling.
And the allusion to Pandora’s box is apt, for like the evils unleashed in the Greek myth, exotics that take hold in the lakes will likely never be contained.
“Once invasive species are here, they’re usually here to stay,” Alexander said. “The worst actors, like zebra mussels and quagga mussels — there’s nothing we can do to control those.”
In a flourish of cruel irony on this portrait of biological disaster, we learn engineers failed to account for the increasing size of freighters, and built the Seaway to outdated dimensions. This costly goof meant most oceangoing ships were soon too large to fit through the locks and canals, limiting traffic mostly to trade between freshwater ports. “The Seaway was essentially obsolete the day it opened,” Alexander writes.
But the book’s sharpest sting lies in its depiction of governmental negligence.
It’s no secret that many invasive species enter the lakes through the ballast water used to stabilize ships. Yet, as we see in the book, the laws meant to rid ballast ta