They don’t get public attention like the Grand Canyon. Unlike Yosemite, their vistas are not depicted in the ethereal black and white of photographs by Ansel Adams. Unlike Yellowstone, they aren’t in a vast national park. Despite this, they dominate the geography of America like no other geological formation save the Rocky Mountains. This much-overlooked natural wonder is the Great Lakes. Taken together, Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario comprise an immense and varied ecosystem and contain the largest quantity of fresh water anywhere in the world.

Their size alone is awe-inspiring. Lake Superior is larger in area than the state of South Carolina. With a maximum depth of 1,333 feet, Superior contains enough fresh water to cover the entire landmass of North and South America with a foot of water. And that’s just Superior. Combined, the lakes contain 6 quadrillion gallons of water, enough says Wisconsin Natural Resources, a magazine published by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, “to cover the lower 48 states to a depth of 9.5 feet.” That’s a lot of water. Yet even though these lakes contain immense amounts of fresh water, they are having problems with declining water levels. With lakes of this size, that’s a very large problem.

The problem with water levels in the Great Lakes, though, is just one environmental problem. But the existence of this problem is largely unknown outside the Great Lakes region. There are other, similar problems around the country — and, in fact, around the world. Unlike glamour causes like the much over-hyped issue of global warming,* these regional concerns continue to go unnoticed. While these problems may not find themselves featured any time soon as the central apocalyptic plot device in a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, they are real nonetheless and, though this may surprise some, have often been exacerbated by shortsighted government intervention in the environment.

Shrinking Lakes

Mary McKay used to own waterfront property on the azure blue waters of Lake Superior. She hasn’t moved, but Superior’s waves no longer lap the edge of her lawn as they once did. “When we first bought the house, we had to put breakwalls in because the water was coming on the lawn and washing it away,” McKay told the Sault Star of Sault St. Marie, Ontario. Now, even her boat dock is landlocked, sitting high and dry as much as 100 feet from the water’s edge.

The drop in water levels all around the Great Lakes basin is widespread. In northern Wisconsin, even inland lakes and flowages have seen their levels drop an unprecedented amount, victims of a moderate drought that has kept lakes and rivers at low levels over the past few years. Water levels on some of the Great Lakes themselves, however, may be suffering for other reasons. Lakes Michigan and Huron are a case in point.

Those two lakes are really the lobes of one big lake that may be draining as a result of dredging activities in the 1960s. Water levels on the Great Lakes have a long-recognized natural fluctuation, but in the late 1990s some property owners began to suspect that Michigan-Huron was not recovering from low levels like it normally would. They began to research the situation. Writing for the Georgian Bay Association (GBA) — a Canadian group representing property owners living on the shores of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay — retired engineer Bill Bialkowski recalled: “Back around 2000, GBA’s environment chair Mary Muter was watching wetlands drying up and headed off for the St. Clair River [which drains Lake Huron into Lake St. Clair on the way to Lake Erie] to have a look. What she saw alarmed her. She took pictures. She drew trend lines through water level graphs and took them to meetings, where she sounded the alarm.” When presented with GBA’s conclusion that increased St. Clair River flows were abnormally lowering lake levels, skeptics at Environment Canada tried to assure the group the change in water levels was due to changes in the amount of water available in the lake basins, caused by the acknowledged drought affecting the upper Great Lakes.

GBA, not satisfied by the official explanation, pressed on and financed a study of lake drainage by the respected engineering and consulting firm Baird and Associates Coastal Engineers. The Baird study, led by Dr. Rob Nairn, reached an alarming conclusion. The study found, reported the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, that “a 1962 Army Corps of Engineers dredging project, done in conjunction with St. Lawrence Seaway construction, essentially pulled the plug on Lakes Michigan and Huron, sending an average of nearly 1 billion gallons a day out to sea.”

In 1962, the Army Corps of Engineers knew that the dredging project would cause a lowering of the lakes by about 16 inches, but the Baird study found that, because of ongoing erosion, flows have increased since, leading to a more serious drainage problem. “That is not something that should happen,” Rob Nairn said in 2005 according the Journal-Sentinel report. “We’ve got something alarming going on here.”

The situation has continued to worsen, according to Bialkowski. “Shortly after 2000 or so, erosion in the St. Clair River accelerated significantly, just as Rob Nairn suspected, and the slope now looks more like three centimetres per year.” To put this into perspective, Bialkowski notes: “GBA has been using the number 845 million gallons per day to put the one centimetre per year decline in easily understood terms. Well, a loss of three centimetres per year translates into 2.5 billion gallons per day.”

Water Woes

Low water on the lakes means big hits to businesses that rely on the lakes for marine transport. In Superior, the Wenonah ferry can no longer carry passengers from Grand Portage in the northeastern tip of Minnesota to Isle Royale. Commercial shippers hauling commodities like grain, coal, and iron ore are also suffering. Typically, up to 125 million tons of cargo are carried on the Great Lakes each year, but ships this year have to leave some cargo in port or risk shipwreck by scraping bottom. “At the end of last season, with waters particularly low on Lake Superior, ships lost about 8,000 tons per trip — about 11 percent of their carrying capacity,” reported shipping industry journal Chief Engineer. For January, the Lake Carriers’ Association reported that “with draft severely limited by plummeting water levels … coal shipments fell dramatically.” The January coal transport figures for the lakes were down 35 percent from just one year previously.

That has a severe impact on manufacturing. As James H.I. Weakley, president of the Lake Carriers’ Association, told the House Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development in February, “Marine transportation in the Great Lakes … makes manufacturing in America possible. The region accounts for 70 percent of the nation’s steelmaking capacity, 70 percent of our automobile production and 55 percent of all heavy manufacturing. When these vital industries suffer increased transportation costs or shortfalls in deliveries … the nation’s economic heartbeat is weakened.”

In his testimony, Weakley put the economic consequences of low lake levels in perspective. Referring to the 8,000 tons left on the dock each trip, Weakley noted: “Those 8,000 tons of iron ore not carried could have produced steel for 6,000 automobiles. Those 8,000 tons of coal not carried could have produced electricity to power the Greater Detroit Area for 3 hours. Those 8,000 tons of limestone not carried could have been used to build 24 homes. Remember, that’s 6,000 automobiles, 3 hours of power, and 24 homes per trip.”

Low levels in the Great Lakes become more worrisome when combined with data from other parts of the United States. In the plains states, the Ogallala aquifer, which underlies eight states, is running dry. The Ogallala is an immense underground water source — some say as large as Lake Huron. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “approximately 27 percent of the irrigated land in the United States is in the High Plains and about 30 percent of the ground water used for irrigation in the U.S. is pumped from the High Plains [Ogallala] aquifer. Irrigation withdrawals in 2000 were 17 billion gallons per day. In 2000, 1.9 million people were supplied by ground water from the High Plains aquifer with total public-supply withdrawals of 315 million gallons per day.” The High Plains feeds America and the world. The Ogallala, one of the largest aquifers in the world, makes that possible.

While the aquifer was once believed to be inexhaustible, high levels of pumping have meant that water levels in the aquifer are dropping. The decreases started soon after large-scale pumping from the aquifer began after 1940. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “By 1980, water levels in the High Plains aquifer in parts of southwestern Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas had declined more than 100 feet.” In recent years, water levels in the aquifer have continued to decline.

What happens when the water runs out? First, a switch to less water-intensive crops, but the final stage might be desertification. That’s already a serious and growing problem around the world, but one that is not as familiar to Americans. Still, it is becoming a problem in parts of the United States. According to Popular Science, “more than 30 percent of the land west of the Mississippi River shows signs of desertification.”

What happens if that number increases? Some undoubtedly will look to the Great Lakes. “If you step back and look at the globe, this is a unique resource,” Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources official Bruce Baker said of the Great Lakes. “There are tremendous demands around the world for clean, fresh water. And it’s pretty obvious where a lot of that water is.” With lake levels dropping already, that water may not be enough.

Invasive Species

Another problem having a serious impact on the Great Lakes is the arrival of invasive species. But that is a problem that affects much more than just the Great Lakes. The newest tradition in Bath, Illinois, on the waters of the Illinois River is the Redneck Fishing Tournament, and it colorfully illustrates the extent of the problem. Unlike most fishing tournaments that require a tackle box full of lures and bass boats equipped with the latest fishing technology, the Redneck Fishing Tournament requires safety glasses and hard hats because the quarry — Asian carp — fling themselves out of the water with wild abandon whenever they are pestered by a passing outboard motor. Video from last year’s tournament shown on the CBS Evening News shows dozens of carp leaping in unison several feet out of the water as boats pass by with “anglers” trying to catch the flying fish in nets. It’s a dangerous sport: at least one participant ended up with a broken nose and a black eye — courtesy of a fish that has no business being in the river in the first place.

The bighead and silver Asian carp are not native to the United States. They were introduced by accident when careless state fish and game officials, some armed with federal funds, experimented with using the exotic fish to control weeds and for other purposes. The fish consume prodigious quantities of plankton — the same plankton that many native species depend upon — while growing sometimes to as much as 100 pounds. And they are prolific reproducers. Just one female bighead carp can carry up to 5 million eggs. That means big trouble when there are no natural predators to keep the carp population in check. The big worry is they might get into Lake Michigan and then the rest of the Great Lakes, wreaking havoc on one of the world’s most important sport and commercial fisheries. “It’s difficult to underestimate the potential impact of these critters in the Great Lakes, once you see what’s happened to the rivers,” warned Great Lakes Fishery Commission biologist John Dettmers.

Invasive species have long been a serious threat to the environment in North America. In fact, though it is hardly remembered today, one of the costliest and most serious environmental disasters of all time came as the result of a non-native species run amok in America’s forests.

At the turn of the century, one of the most common trees found in the forests east of the Mississippi was the American chestnut. Often called the redwood of the east, the American chestnut could tower as high as 150 feet above the ground. Meanwhile, lumber from the chestnut was prized for its beauty and durability and its nuts were a valuable staple food. “The tree was a staple of Eastern life,” wrote Forest Service official Gina Childs in Wisconsin Natural Resources magazine in 2002. “Turn of the 20th century recipes commonly included chestnut meats in their list of ingredients. Eastern farmers found harvesting chestnut fruit profitable and sent trainloads of chestnuts to Philadelphia and New York City to be roasted and sold by street vendors during the holiday season. At a time when money was scarce, the nuts sold for as much as five to eight dollars a bushel!”

At the time, as many as one of every four trees in an eastern forest was a chestnut. Then came a tiny invader. At the turn of the century, Asian chestnut trees were imported into the United States, bringing with them the fungus Cryphonectria parasitica. The Asian trees carried immunity to the fungus, but no such immunity was present in the stately American chestnut and the fungus spread like wildfire through the forest. “Within 50 years, the fungus commonly known as chestnut blight spread throughout the entire range of chestnut, and destroyed almost all of the majestic stands of this glorious tree,” wrote Childs. According to Dr. William MacDonald, professor of forest pathology at West Virginia University, the loss of the American chestnut was “the single greatest catastrophe known in recorded North American forest history.”

At present, crossbreeding — often performed by private scientists and organizations — with Asian varieties has resulted in a limited restoration of American chestnuts, proving that science can repair environmental problems if given time. But though this is a success story to a degree, the new American-Asian crosses still lack the vigor and size characteristics of the original native trees. Work, however, continues. The American Chestnut Foundation hopes that its breeding program will achieve complete success within another 30 to 50 years. If successful, it will mean that efforts to save and restore chestnut populations will have taken as much as 130 to 150 years.

Today, invasive species continue to represent a substantial threat to the environment. Hundreds of exotic alien species have been carried into the Great Lakes by oceangoing freighters that dump untreated bilge water into the lakes. Among the invaders have been zebra and quagga mussels from the Caspian Sea, filter feeders that upset the natural food chains of the lakes and clog water intake pipes with their prolific reproductive capacity. Now, it is thought, the invaders include the dreaded VHS (viral hemorrhagic septicemia) fish virus that indiscriminately makes many native species of fish — including valuable sport fish like walleye, bass, musky, trout and salmon — bleed to death.

The economic damage caused by invasive species can be immense. In the Great Lakes, zebra mussels alone have “cost about $5 billion in damages to power companies, boaters and the fishing and tourism industries,” reported the Wall Street Journal on July 5.

Other Environmental Issues

Water levels and shortages and invasive species are but a few of innumerable threats to the environment. Others abound. One serious problem is shoreline and wetlands development. Wetlands and shoreline areas are important habitats for many species of plant and animal life and play a critical role in ensuring water quality, but, absent some other incentive, they are not usually considered good areas on which to build. But a federal program insuring property owners in flood-prone areas against flood damage has encouraged the development of wetland and coastal areas that would otherwise be undesirable.

As the Federal Emergency Management Agency itself points out, “EVERY citizen needs to fully understand that standard homeowners policies do not cover damage from flooding.” Under such conditions, if only private sector insurance products were available, property owners, being risk averse, would not often build in flood-prone locations. But the availability of federal flood insurance removes a substantial element of the risk of building in low-lying and coastal areas, leading to development of important wetland environments and putting at risk billions of dollars in property. Through its flood insurance programs, wrote the Cato Institute’s Sheldon Richman in 1994, the government “promises to insure residents against the damage they cause. Whether it does so by providing disaster relief after the fact or by offering formal insurance is of little import. In either case, the government underprices the risk of living in flood and hurricane areas and thereby encourages people to take risks. As a result, more lives and property are in harm’s way.”

There are, of course, many other environmental problems both here in the United States and worldwide worthy of genuine concern — as well as others that are wholly exaggerated. But while it is not true of all environmental problems, there is one thing that many of them have in common. And that is that, when government gets involved — as in the case of the Great Lakes or the introduction of invasive species or the removal of risks related to building in flood zones — the problems often become much worse.

* Find more about global warming online at: http://www.jbs.org/node/2879 [0]