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Posts Tagged ‘Great Lakes’

The William G. Mather

Posted in America, Ohio, The Economy, tagged , , , , , , , on September 20, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Take a walk along the Lake Erie shore in downtown Cleveland, between the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Cleveland Browns Stadium, and you will find the William G. Mather docked at the quay, serenely awaiting visitors.

The William G. Mather, which is part of the Great Lakes Science Center, is a floating museum that allows visitors to experience what it was like to be aboard a working Great Lakes freighter.  Sharply painted black, red, and white, the Mather is a huge vessel that towers above the water and is more than two football fields long.  Standing on the dock next to the Mather is like standing next to a vast and oppressive black steel wall.

This was a ship that was made to carry tons and tons of cargo, and its scale dwarfs the size of puny humans.  It was built in 1925 and sailed the waters of the Great Lakes for decades, part of the system of inland water commerce that spurred much of America’s growth.  Enormous ships like the Mather transported iron ore, coal, and other natural resources across the lakes to bustling cities like Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, and Cleveland, where those resources would be smelted in great factories, burned in sprawling furnaces, or otherwise used to power the engines of American industry.

The fleet of lake freighters spawned its own culture — if you ever meet someone who worked on a freighter, be sure to buy them a beer and ask them to tell you about their experiences and the characters they met, and then get ready for a few very enjoyable hours — and provided well-paying, eye-opening summer jobs for generations of young men from the Midwest.  The freighters had their heyday in the mid-1900s, when America was booming.  Now the number of those freighters is sorely diminished, and the freighter culture is sadly diminished as well.

Given the current state of lake freighters, it is perhaps fitting that the most famous of the freighters is known not for its service, but for its sinking.  Of course, that would be the Edmund Fitzgerald.

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When You Fish Upon A Czar

Posted in America, Humor, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Having appointed czars for the auto industry, bank bailouts, pay, energy, and countless other issues, President Obama finally got around to appointing a czar for a really important issue to those of us in the Midwest — namely, preventing the potential invasion of the Great Lakes by the Asian carp.

Nicholas II

It’s not entirely clear what powers the “Carp Czar” will have, although Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, in announcing the czar’s appointment, said he would be in “full attack, full-speed ahead mode.”  (The Senator also helpfully reassured us that the federal government is “not in denial.”)  That’s a good thing, because the Asian carp unquestionably pose a tougher challenge than reinvigorating the moribund U.S. auto industry, reining in greedy executives, or preventing further reckless lending and investing by U.S. bankers.  After all, the Asian carp are cold-blooded creatures that can fly (sort of), eat 40 percent of their weight every day, swim hundreds of miles upstream, knock out boaters and fishermen, and smash through an electronic force field without some much as batting a lidless fish eye.

Ivan the Terrible

So if we are going to get a Carp Czar, let’s make sure that he’s not a prissy, wussy czar like Nicholas II who may fall under the spell of some fishy character like Rasputin.  No, we need a tough, ruthless czar to adequately meet the formidable challenge of the Asian carp.  Someone with the temperament of Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great, willing to lay waste to entire populations of carp, denude the entrance points to the Lakes of all sustenance and aquatic life, and reroute the streams of commerce to keep the invasive fish out of our Great Lakes, would do just fine.

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Ian Malcolm Was (And Is) Right

Posted in America, Ohio, sports, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on June 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

We all remember Dr. Ian Malcolm, the annoyingly egotistical mathematician and chaos theorist from the Jurassic Park books and movies.  Malcolm confidently predicted that, for all of its technology, Jurassic Park was a fundamentally unstable creation that would inevitably fail because “life finds a way.” He was right, of course.

His statement has proven to be equally true as it applies to the relentless advance of the dreaded Asian carp.  An “electric barrier” was created to keep the carp from moving up the Mississippi River and into the Great Lakes.  Now the carp have been caught past the barrier, only six miles from Lake Michigan.  The Great Lakes communities are tremendously concerned that the destructive fish will ruin the sports fishing and recreational boating industries on the Great Lakes, and Members of Congress from the surrounding states have now proposed legislation to permanently separate the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes in order to keep invasive species out.

Let’s hope that any action gets taken in time, but I think Ian Malcolm would point out that six miles is not a very long distance.  He might predict that if a fish was caught only six miles away, there is a good chance that other members of that species have already traversed the six-mile distance — and if they haven’t, they could jump, crawl, sprint, or be carried past whatever barrier is erected in their path.  Asian carp, he might suggest, will somehow find a way.

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The Fear And Fury Of Fierce Flying Fish

Posted in America, Ohio, sports, tagged , , , , , , , on December 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

They’ve tried just about everything to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, and still the carp continue their inexorable movement toward some of the largest fresh water bodies in the world.   The carp were apparently — and stupidly — introduced into our ecosystem decades ago, when someone thought that their willingness to eat algae and waste products made them perfectly suited to help keep sewage lagoons in the South clean.  The fish somehow escaped their captivity, as living beings typically do, made their way to the Mississippi River, and since then having been moving steadily northward despite man’s best efforts to stop them. 

It reminds me of the old commercial about “ring around the collar.”  The embarrassed, exhausted housewife pushes back locks of her hair as the announcer intones:  “You’ve tried scrubbing them out!  You’ve tried soaking them out!”  With the Asian carp, they’ve tried establishing an electrical barrier to keep them from getting from the Mississippi River into the Great Lakes.   When that apparently didn’t work — they found Asian carp DNA on the other side of the barrier — they poisoned miles of the potential entrance way in hopes of killing any hardy Asian carp that might have crossed the barrier.  Somehow I doubt that has worked, either.

Why do people care?  Because Asian carp are an invasive species, for one, and the Great Lakes’ experience with other invasive species, like the zebra mussel, has not been a happy one.  For another, the carp can grow to gigantic sizes, and there is reason to fear that the carp will consume so much plankton that native fish species, like Lake Erie perch and walleye, will starve.  If that happens, it will kill off not only the native fish species, but also the multi-million-dollar sport fishing industry on the Great Lakes.  And finally, people care because the Asian carp are some kind of weird, hyper-aggressive superfish that is perfectly willing to fling itself out of the water and hurl itself toward the fisherman or boater, like a bolt from the deep.  (Check out the YouTube video I’ve posted below if you don’t believe me, and it is just one of many.)  There are stories about the fish knocking people senseless, breaking jaws, and generally wreaking havoc on boats and their occupants.  What recreational boater is going to want to go for a leisurely cruise on Lake Erie if their idyllic trip requires them to navigate through a plague-like curtain of massive, leaping fish?

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Water Wealth

Posted in Environment, World, tagged , , , , , on August 19, 2009 | 1 Comment »

This story about dropping water table levels in India, apparently due to excessive groundwater pumping, just reaffirms what I think will become an increasingly obvious fact: one of the greatest attributes of the American Midwest is an abundance of water. According to the U.S. EPA, the Great Lakes hold more than one-fifth of the world’s supply of fresh water, and the only bigger source — the polar ice caps — aren’t exactly accessible. In addition to the water stored in the Great Lakes, the Midwest is home to large rivers, like the Ohio and the Father of Waters itself, the mighty Mississippi. Our winters aren’t exactly filled with brilliant blue skies, but they do feature lots of rain, and snow, and sleet, and freezing rain, and other forms of bone-chilling precipitation that cause us to cinch our overcoats tighter and mutter under our breath.

The Great Lakes, shown from space

The Great Lakes, shown from space

The question for the Midwest is how to maximize this resource and put it to best use. To their credit, the state governments of the eight Great Lakes states, including Ohio, have been proactive on the issue. They have entered into the Great Lakes Compact, which provides for management of the fresh water in the lakes and, for the most part, bans diversion of the waters to locations outside the Great Lakes basin. The Great Lakes States therefore have said to the world, if you want our water, you’ll need to come to the American Midwest to get it. I think people ultimately will do just that.

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