Who Owns the Waters?
The Story of the Great Lakes
1. The Wilderness Next Door
My home on the south side of Chicago is only blocks from one of the largest fresh-water lakes on the planet. It is a wilderness, a depth, only feet away from the grime and chaos of the south side streets.
On a sunny summer afternoon, I walk to the lakefront with my three daughters. We pass by the harbor, where geese and ducks swim and seagulls dive for lunch, past the old men fishing. As we approach the beach, drummers have formed a circle near the shore; icies and Jamaican food are for sale. And there it is, vastness without an apparent end. Lake Michigan. Children flop around in the shallow waters. People lounge lazily on boats. Something changes in my own children, and in me, when we approach the shore, when we finally can feel its immensity, its openness. We can breathe.
It is impossible to write about the Great Lakes “region” without focusing on the waters. Even for those who live farther away from the Lakes, they are the defining feature of the region. And because of this, to imperil them is to imperil us all. Why would we, how could we, neglect or even do harm to something so precious as water? The answer, I think, partly lies in the fact that the Lakes are primarily unseen. We can only see their surface, while most of the Lakes are beneath. Indeed, ours is a civilization that does much better with surfaces than with depths.
I have lived most of my life near the Great Lakes. My first eighteen years were spent in Rochester, NY, just south of Lake Ontario. It was a more subtle and distant relationship to the lake there; for Rochester is a city built on a river. The lake was, for me, only an occasional presence. I often played basketball as a teenager at the lakefront courts, but seldom actually went to its shores. Nonetheless, its presence was felt in other ways. Nearly every day, in Rochester, from November to April, the lake brought the snows that piled up around us. To say that one lives “near” the lake is a construction, a reflection of the Modern desire to draw clear lines where nature sees only flow—the entire region, from Minnesota to New York, is not merely near the Lakes, but in deep relationship with them. We forget this at our own peril.
2. The Moving Waters
The Great Lakes’ origins can be traced to the receding glaciers at the end of the last ice age. As the climate warmed, the Great Lakes formed a vast, fluid system of waters, connected with each other and with the land ecosystems of the Great Lakes basin, but, crucially, isolated from the salt water systems of the ocean.
One could look at the Great Lakes as a wide, slow moving river. Waters flow down from Lake Superior, into Huron and Michigan, then through Erie before passing through Niagara Falls and into Ontario, and finally down the St. Lawrence and into the Atlantic.
The isolation of The Great Lakes, especially above the falls where all the lakes lie other than Ontario, allowed for unique, freshwater aquatic ecologies to emerge, and for multiple endemic species to live and thrive. The particular species of Lake Trout found in the Great Lakes lived in balance with both the aquatic ecosystem and with the human cultures that were native to the region.
The waters, of course, don’t end at the shorelines. For one, a shoreline is never as static as we’d like to pretend and fluctuates rhythmically over time. But the waters also find us in other, subtler ways. Wetlands, like the Great Black Swamp in present day Ohio and Indiana, were rich and diverse ecosystems for millennia, until European invaders decided to fill them in to create room for monocultural farming, mostly corn and soy, selected for their use in the global economy. Whereas the indigenous peoples developed cultures that valued the biodiversity of the wetlands that provided for diverse diets and landscapes, capitalism saw them as an impediment to growing the most profitable crops and to developing the most efficient transportation systems. The waters, nonetheless, continue to seep into the lands near the Lakes, as anyone who has attempted to dig a well or a septic system can attest.
In the coastal areas of Lake Michigan, I took groups of teens from Chicago for years to camp and to build community around the fire and away from the screen. Amid old growth forests of Ash and Oak dating back to the end of the ice ages that created the Lakes themselves, we camped and hiked and shared our stories together. For many of our youth, this was the first time they’d seen a star-filled night away from the ambient light of the city.
And even in the city, the awesome power of the Lakes is unavoidable. We feel it in the winds and in the lake effect snow; we feel it as the Lakes moderate our climate; we feel it with each step closer to the lake as its winds and moisture penetrate us. It flows into us and out of us.
3. “Water Is Life”
Before the arrival of Europeans, a wide range of indigenous peoples occupied the Great Lakes Region. They ate its trout and moved across the land in seasonal patterns based upon the impact of the lakes on the climate. Theirs was a cosmology that was rooted firmly in place. Water was a sacred part of the integrated whole. A good life according to such a worldview was not about manipulating the world in order to make it cohere to an abstract ideal or about maximizing the profitability of a resource like a lake, but about discovering the right relationship within an interconnected web.
Recently, Native People to the west came together at Standing Rock to rise up against the Dakota Access Pipeline—a project that would bring oil through the sacred, native burial grounds and toxify Earth and water. The cry of those indigenous people fighting against the Dakota pipeline has been Mni Woconi: “Water is Life”. Theirs was a fight not merely for clean waters, but also for the recognition that the waters are sacred, and that they cannot be traded as a commodity. For they are a part of us.
4. Invasive Species, Peoples, & Ideas
Since the European peoples conquered the Great Lakes Region, there have been radical shifts in the relationship between human civilization and the Lakes. The Europeans, of course, did not arise in relationship to these local ecologies; rather, they came as outsiders who believed that the region was a blank slate upon which they could impose a worldview and remake a world.
This began with the belief that the human was radically separate from nature. In this cosmology, the indigenous peoples who occupied the lands they encountered were also considered radically separate, a part of nature even as the European was considered to be something closer to the realm of logic and abstraction. It was this belief that allowed for the exploitation of these lands and peoples. Only could subhuman people be enslaved and subjugated; only could “nature”, conceived of as being apart from the human, be exploited and degraded as it was.
Sadly, the isolation of the Americas left their people and species particularly vulnerable to invasive species and germs. Millions of native people died in their encounter with diseases for which they had no immunity. In addition to this human invasion, there was an invasion of species capable of bringing cataclysmic destruction to the Lakes’ ecosystems.
This invasion began with the gun, but it really was perpetrated primarily by bankers and engineers, not soldiers. For it was the chase for money in opening up a “fourth coast” linking the northern industrial cities to the oceans that led to this invasion. It was the absurd calculus of capitalism—the notion that the Lakes were mere conduits for products and capital rather than life itself—that blinded us to the dangers of opening up the Great Lakes to invasive species. Yes, it was greed. But it was also the hubris of the engineer, the belief that humans could remake a system that had evolved over millennia and that there would be no consequences.
And of course there were consequences.
Opening of two canals, first the Erie Canal in New York and later and more significantly the Welland Canal in Canada, allowed for ships to pass from the Atlantic into the upper lakes, those above the Niagara Falls. This was supposed to create an economic boom for the Great Lakes Region. But instead, it simply allowed for a variety of invasive species to enter into the Lakes’ ecosystems, all but destroying them. The Quagga mussel, for example, has devastated the Lakes. The Lake Trout are almost eradicated.
In addition, the city of Chicago, in reversing the flow of the Chicago River and connecting it to the Mississippi River basin, linked the Lakes to still more invasive species, including, most recently, the Asian Carp, a predator that threatens to further decimate native species.
Today, the Lakes are barely supporting life and are caught in cycles of devastation. The balance is thrown off. Each decision to “save” the Lakes risks an even more destructive side effect. And underlying any attempt to restore the balance lies the bottom line, a civilization that puts profit over life.
5. Who Owns the Waters?
On a hot summer day on the south side of Chicago in 1919, a group of Black teenagers heads to the coolest place one might go in the sweltering city. Many of the teenagers’ families have recently come from the South, fleeing Jim Crow and seeking opportunity in the industries that had been more recently opened to them during the Great War.
Chicago is not the Jim Crow South, but it is still segregated. Black people are only permitted to live in an overcrowded section on the south side called “The Black Belt.” But there is promise in the north—not only of economic opportunity, but perhaps also of dignity and equality.
The lakefront is segregated, too. But water, unlike the Euclidian grid of Chicago’s streets, is fluid. The teens, floating on a raft, drift into a “white” area of the beach. Whites begin throwing rocks at the teens; one of the teens, Eugene Williams, is struck by a rock and drowns.
What follows is among the worst massacres in US history.
The 1919 Race Riot in Chicago was the product of many factors: the rising racial tensions in a postwar climate that pitted newly arrived Blacks against soldiers returning from war; the ongoing fight between working-class Whites—still unresolved, I might add—and Blacks who would expect to be treated as their equals. But a seldom-mentioned factor in the story is the role played by Lake Michigan, and the ongoing question of its ownership. For it was the lake that exposed the absurdity of segregation. And it was the hubris of the notion that one group could own and control its waters that was the initial spark to the violence.
6. The Future of Fresh Water
The great paradox of what is known as “The Great Lakes Region” is that it is defined by its ecology and its abundance of fresh water, but it is associated mostly with its industrialism. Its cities, from Rochester to Buffalo to Detroit to Cleveland to Chicago to Milwaukee, are collectively referred to as the rust-belt. We think not of the vast, blue Lakes, but of the industries that pollute them. Indeed, it was originally Lake Erie that served as the model for the polluted waters in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax.
While our lakes are certainly cleaner than they were in the days before the Clean Water Act, they are still under threat. Agricultural runoff, less obvious—and also less regulated—than factories is a leading polluter of the Lakes today.
Moreover, there is the long-term impact of climate change on the lakes. While we may act as though the Lakes are so vast that they could never disappear, they have indeed shrunk in recent decades. With higher temperatures comes less ice in winter and greater evaporation in summer. Surely no one could have imagined the Aral Sea or Lake Chad vanishing fifty years ago, so perhaps we should not be so confident about The Great Lakes permanence.
And a still greater threat is the desire for water in drier regions. In fact, this is perhaps among the great ecological, justice, and geo-political questions in the age of a warming and drying planet: We continue to pollute our fresh waters even as they become scarcer and populations—especially in dryer regions—grow. It has been suggested that the great wars in the coming years will be over water. And as for the Great Lakes: Atlanta is thirsty; the farms of the depleted Ogallala Aquifer are thirsty; the cities of the southwestern deserts are thirsty. We are a thirsty species, and water is once again becoming our greatest resource. Perhaps it always was; perhaps it was only a delusion that other resources—oil, for example—are more precious.
But perhaps this very language—resource—is the problem. The destruction of the Great Lakes really began with the notion that they were a resource rather than something sacred.
To rediscover the right language, let us listen to the Lakes, learn from them. Most of the Lakes’ substance is underneath. By ignoring their depths, we fail to see them. By failing to see the depth of our world, we see only things as resources and products. We also must draw from the soils around the Lakes, for they are as much a part of the lakes as the waters themselves. From the word humus—soil—we get the word humility. The hubris of those who thought they could remake the Lakes for profit has nearly destroyed them. What is required now will obviously involve a lot of work in order to restore what’s been destroyed. But unless that work comes with the recognition that there can always be unforeseen consequences to human actions unless we possess the humility to recognize what we do not know, we’ll repeat the errors of the past.
The questions I ask, as I watch my children at 63rd Street beach, are these: Will they be able to take their children swimming in these waters? Will they even have clean water to drink? To answer these questions, we must learn from the people who knew the Lakes better than the engineer, the fisherman, or even the scientist ever could: We must remember that the waters are sacred.