Teach Me About the Great Lakes - The Newsletter, February 2024
Welcome back to TMATGL The Newsletter, which is now being released for an unprecedented second month in a row. As a reminder, this is a personal project even though it overlaps with some of what I do in my job. But: all errors, omissions, and opinions are entirely my own.
In this issue, we’ll start with a quick blurb about recent episodes, then talk Lakies, introduce a new newsletter section, and end with a feedback request. Let’s get to it!
Recent episodes
We’ve had a couple of interesting conversations in January and February, which I think are worth checking out. First, as we discussed last month, we chatted with Mike Shriberg of the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR) about a recent paper that he wrote on fostering a 21st-century stewardship in the Great Lakes. I blurbed this episode in January, but if you missed it, here’s a link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/2d3e4093. I’ll also embed the audio-only YouTube video (what a world!) right here:
Since that episode, I’ve been reflecting on the relationship between time, place, and stewardship and how they ultimately should overlap. I don’t have any particular conclusions, but I’ve been reflecting.
Our first (and only, due to time constraints) February episode was the 2023 Lakie awards. We like to release this in December, but the scheduling gods were against us, so here it is, better late than never. Check out the episode here or see below for a link to a spoiler-filled list of winners.
Coming in March, Renie Miles and I speak with Peter Annin of Ashland College. Peter is the author of The Great Lakes Water Wars, which I gave an in-depth summary and review of in last month’s newsletter. I enjoyed this conversation a lot; look for it in your podcast apps on the week of March 4th.
Finally, February is an Ask Dr. Fish month. This month, Carolyn, Titus, and Katie tackled your fish questions, science questions, and life questions and report back on the February Ask Dr. Fish Challenge: Try a new fish dish. I’m still editing the podcast episode, so look for that in March. If you’re impatient, you can watch the YouTube video here:
Lakie Award Winners!
As a reminder, the goal of the Lakies is not to be the ultimate arbiters of quality, but to celebrate some great work that’s being done. Because of the make-up of our professional networks, we end up getting a lot of nominations from the Great Lakes Sea Grant programs, but we try to balance the winners between Sea Grant and non-Sea Grant programs. It’s really fun and gratifying to look through all of this amazing work, and we’ll be featuring Lakie award nominees throughout the year, assuming I remember.
For a complete list of winners from this and past years, click here.
What I’ve learned about the Great Lakes - An occasional series
In this new series, I’ll do a somewhat deeper dive on something I’ve learned about the Great Lakes over the course of doing the show. This month: the reversal of the Chicago River, which is the biggest Great Lakes deal that I’m not sure that many people know about. The short version is just that: in the early 20th century, they actually reversed the flow of the Chicago River, which had originally flowed through Chicago and into Lake Michigan, and made it flow into the Des Plaines river and, ultimately, the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico.
To understand this, you have to understand a geographic quirk about Chicago: it sits astride the St. Lawrence River Divide, which separates the Great Lakes and Mississippi River. Water that falls on the east side of the divide flows into the Great Lakes, water to the west flows into the Mississippi. The closeness of these two drainage basins is something that people had been exploiting for centuries: at high water levels, people could travel from the Des Plaines River (which was part of the Mississippi River drainage system) into the Chicago River (part of the Great Lakes basin) through Chicago Portage. When water levels were lower, they could make a more arduous, but still feasible, land trip between the two.
The Chicago Portage was a major reason that this area was strategically important, and my understanding is that it played an important role in the development of Chicago as a world-class city, but that’s I still have a lot to learn about the details of why this was.
Regardless, though, Chicago was founded there and started to grow into a regional, and eventually national and international, powerhouse. As Chicago grew, it relied on Lake Michigan for many things, two of which are kind of in opposition: Chicago gets drinking water from the lake while simultaneously dumping their sewage into the Chicago River, where it flowed into the lake, as well.
This is not ideal. While the source-of-drinking-water part of Lake Michigan was pretty far from the dumping-grounds-for-sewage part, they were close enough that it was conceivable that they might come into contact. Gross, illness-inducing contact. I don’t know a lot about drinking water, but I do know that you don’t want it filled with LITERAL POOP. Or figurative poop, honestly.
So the people of Chicago decided to do something about it. Since cleaner sewage technology wasn’t available at the time (and Chicago’s approach to cleaning sewage is still somewhat lax), the newly created Sanitary District of Chicago decided to take a more manual approach: reversing the Chicago River so that the sewage would flow down to the Mississippi rather than up to Lake Michigan, making it someone else’s problem.
Chicago River at the 12th St bridge (now Roosevelt Road), sometime between 1890 and 1910. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Looks clean to me!
Reversing the river was a goal that took a while to achieve. Chicago had been diverting a good portion of the Chicago River flow into the Illinois and Michigan Canal as far back as 1848. In 1871, they deepened that canal in an attempt to reverse the entire river, but that reversal failed less than a year later.
Permanently reversing the river would take a classic feat of late 19th/early 20th-century engineering, the same spirit that helped people dig the Erie Canal in the late 1810s and would help them dig the Panama Canal in the late 1910s. The plan was to dig a canal connecting the Chicago River to the Des Plaines River, which would allow the water to flow from Lake Michigan and, eventually, into the Mississippi River. Main channel construction began began on September 3, 1892 and was plagued by the usual assortment of labor disputes, armed mobs “crazed with liquor”, the summoning of the National Guard, et cetera.
Eventually, Isham Randolph was appointed chief engineer of the Sanitary District of Chicago, and he came in to professionalize the construction and resolve some of the ongoing, um, issues.
The final steps were completed in a hurry in January of 1900, as the Drainage trustees were worried that the courts would put an injunction on the reversal at the request of the Missouri Attorney General (see Peter Annin’s The Great Lakes Water Wars for details). In an successful attempt to outrun the judicial cavalry, the initial parts of the canal opened on January 2nd. Complete reversal of the river was achieved several weeks later. As the New York Times put it contemporaneously, “The ceremonies marking the consummation of the great enterprise were brief and marked with something like undignified haste”. Undignified or otherwise, the dam was lowered at 11:16 AM on January 17th, and the course of water in this country was forever changed.
Water flows over Bear Trap Dam in Lockport, IL, in 1908. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The effects of the reversal of the Chicago River were wide-ranging and are still being felt today. On a personal level, Isham Randolph would lend his expertise as a consultant on the digging of the Panama Canal, a canal that, as I write this, is currently slowing down international commerce thanks to climate-change-induced drought. Many of the techniques used to dig the Sanitary and Ship Canal would be used to dig in Panama, as well.
Furthermore, the reversal of the river served as a ~2 billion gallon-per-day withdrawal of lake water that permanently lowered the level of Lakes Michigan and Huron by about 2 inches, a fact that amazes, terrifies, and underlies more than the century of water withdrawal debates that Annin discusses in The Great Lakes Water Wars and in TMATGL 93.
Perhaps most important of all, connecting the Chicago River Des Plaines River also connects it to to the Mississippi River, which means that the Great Lakes are also connected to the Mississippi River. This has has opened up a new, potentially devastating pathway for the spread of invasive species. The most notable of these is the zebra mussel, which has spread from the Great Lakes to most of the major rivers in the Mississippi River thanks to barge traffic. The round goby has spread, as well, and has been found in the Illinois River south of the electric barriers and which will which likely move down to the Mississippi River over time. Even if these species would have spread, and it is likely that at least the mussels would have, the canal greatly accelerated the process.
Those invasives are traveling from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. But fish can swim upstream, too, and that’s exactly what carp have done. The bighead, silver, and grass carps have slowly (in human terms…quite rapidly in geologic terms) made their way up the Mississippi and into the Illinois and there is grave concern that they might escape the control systems in the Sanitary and Ship Canal and enter the Great Lakes through the Chicago River. This, for many people, is the nightmare scenario: carp have the ability to reshape ecosystems and many scientists who study the issue (though not all scientists who study the issue) believe that they would transform the ecosystem if introduced into the Great Lakes.
Reversing the Chicago River is ultimately an act of control, of humanity’s attempts to dominate nature, and as such is very much a product of its time. Paraphrasing Frank Sabatka in the The Wire, we used to build stuff in this country and, at the turn of the 20th century, a lot of what we built was nature control structures. But that is a product of a different era and, we are increasingly realizing, is often a misguided approach. In fact, there is a movement now to reverse the reversal, so to speak, which would cost billions of dollars and take years, but would lessen, though not eliminate, the chance of the spread of invasive carp into the Great Lakes (which itself might be a multi-billion dollar ecological mess). In addition, it would come with significant sewage treatment upgrades in the Chicago area, which still dumps teated, but not disinfected, sewage into the Sanitary and Ship Canal dozens of times per year.
Is reversing the reversal the right thing to do? The initial reversal has had many unforeseen consequences. Would there be other consequences of undoing it? Probably, but there are costs of inaction, as well. Still, I’m inclined to think that in the long run, it’s probably the right move. I don’t think we can prevent invasive carp from moving into the lakes in the long run, but we can work to slow them down. In addition, I generally fall on the side of working with nature, rather than against, it, and think that the era of attempting to dominate nature with control structures is ending for good reasons. However, even if reconnecting the Chicago River to the Great Lakes is the right move, there’s a bigger question. Reversing the river was a tremendous act of political, corporate, and societal will. Is that sort of cooperation even possible any more?
Listener request - Winter Traditions
Winter is, hopefully, ending, and it’d be nice to celebrate this transition over the next couple of months. First up, winter traditions. What are some winter traditions that you observe? Are there things that you want to be sure to do when it is cold? What are they? For me, it’s being sure to sled with the kids while we can (which is very few days in the snow-light West Lafayette) and while they’re still into it. We also, in late winter, tap the maple trees in our back yard, which is a little incongruous in suburbia, but it’s fun anyway.
How about you? Send an email to teachmeaboutthegreatlakes@gmail.com and we might feature it on the show or in the newsletter.
Anyway, that’s it for this month. Thanks for reading, and keep Greating those Lakes!