Lake Michigan — altered forever
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Posted on July 1, 2008
Filed Under Ecological hope, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Regular visitors know that I live now in Milwaukee and was fortunate enough to find an inexpensive little flat right at the lake shore. Half a block from my house is a park and a marina. 
It is a gift to be here, to be able walk down to the lake in the evenings, say, when the fox come out to watch the humans watching them with such delight.
One evening recently I was on my cell with my niece, the one who lives in Chicago who took that photo of the magnificent rainbow over Lincoln Park. I was talking about the storm to the south that was so beautiful in the glow of the setting sun as the anvil form took shape and spread out. And she talked about the storm she was watching over the lake to the north –
and then we realized we were watching the same storm. That was so cool!!
But every day I visit the lake, I am aware that this is not the lake of my youth. This lake has been so fouled with the ballast of ocean ships, has been so abused with efforts to engineer this magificent fresh water system, has had so much pollution poured into it by dirty industries expecially along its southern shore, etc., etc., that it no longer has the integrity of the ecosystem that sustained it since the Ice Age and the receding glaciers that created it.
Invasive species have destroyed Lake Michigan’s ecosystem. The language is precise. Invasive species are not threatening it; they have already destroyed it.
So I just want to share with you — with no small amount of poignancy and grief, and with so much love and affection for this part of the world — this very fine bit of reporting by Dale Egan in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It’s a two-part series that appeared on the front page Sunday and Monday. The articles are long, but I hope you will read them.
The cladophora algae bloom that sweeps over the lake each year, 
caused by the invasive quagga mussels that have a spectacular ability to reproduce and multiply, have completely destroyed an already compromised lake bio-system. The stench sends people running from the beaches (a smell akin to raw sewage).
“The beach speaks for itself,” was the screaming headline one day. Indeed it does.
In just six years, those filter feeders have gone from a curiosity to a cancer, smothering the lake bottom in a manner the zebra mussel never came close to doing and
forever changing the way energy flows through Lake Michigan.
Asked how the lake could recover to something resembling its natural state, UWM senior scientist and quagga mussel expert Russell Cuhel responds:
“It can’t. It’s a new lake.”
To read these articles:
The first article, The beach speaks for itself
The second, Ecological problem, economic distress
Related videos:
Underwater tour of Lake Michigan and the quagga mussel invasion. Incredible!!
The green gunk - the algae bloom on shore
So, I want to ask you a favor. One of the priorities of lake advocates right now is to halt the invasion of these species. There are now more than 185 invasive species that have entered the lake. This body of water can recover a new balance, different from the one we knew, but a balance nonetheless, if we give it a chance. While federal authorities are trying to argue that this can be done by flushing out ballast, these articles show that this is not true.
We can stop it by stopping ocean shipping through the St. Lawrence Seaway. As you can read here, this is the least costly thing to do and shipping is not that significant a contributor to our local economies.
Also, the state of Pennsylvania is the last state to vote on the Great Lakes Compact. When it does so, the compact will go to Congress where it must be passed, and then signed by the president (a new one next year) in order to become law.
So I ask you, for the sake of our lakes, to ask your members of Congress to support these initiatives.
Technorati Tags: cladophora bloom, Lake Michigan pollution, quagga mussels, invasive species, Dale Egan
Photo credit:
Quagga mussels coat floor of Lake Michigan, Upwellings Online Edition, Sea Grant Michigan, University of Michigan
cladophora muck, Great Lakes Water Institute, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
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Dear Magaret,
The entire universe changes towards the better and to near perfection, changes are bound to happen and do happen even in the future. It would have been avoided if necessary care is taken before we have started this exploitation of man, materials and also ecology. This all because of no foresight before we started it. Better late than never, even now some strong measures can be taken to rectify/slowdown the before inevitable changes occur. If we have faith in much more can and ourselves this can be achieved be achieved for putting back the human race on the track of changes towards the perfection. I believe in the principles of nothing is perfect in this UNIVERSE but there is some degree of perfection, that has to found out and realized by each and everybody. You all may be knowing the well known that from the laws of mechanics “there is no perpetual motion machine in this world” it can not be made also. And also the “entropy of the system ever increases” but if we go the first one there should be a system whose entropy may be decreasing. That’s where the philosophy of the mechanics stuck for a long period. Similarly as per Einstein’s proposal E=MC2 and the theory of relativity it is also possible to reverse the process, that when we get energy by converting the mass which is moving with the velocity of light, only we have to find the ways and means. From my general observations of the nature the chlorophyll converts the light in to mass and makes the chemical compounds in trees and plants and also in some sea creatures, which are essential for the life to continue on this earth. Some of these specially oils if they are lighted up slowly gets converted back to its basic constituents by reversing the mechanism. The problem arise only when they are burnt faster, because of which the present imbalance and degradation of ecology and environment. Even some of these reactions occur in the life forms also internally, especially in human’s chlorophyll like Blood vessels do that. Where as entire body converts the light and sound waves into useful form of energy for these mechanisms to function in the human body by various organic structure called hormones/steroids and others. When these energies are stored in particular region and released at various glands/and organs the process of metabolism triggered and also by changing the already formed tissues and organs continuously. These all the functions are not in the control of any human being only we can alter them by some drugs or food or materials. Now let me know who is under the control of whom? And who is the boss of the world? Nobody.