Pandora's Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway

22/ SEAWAY HERETICS

311 311 The shipping industry has evaded controls which would have come long ago in another context. Ask yourselves this question: If there were an oil or chemical spill on the Great Lakes that caused even a fraction of the harm caused by exotics, how would federal regulators and Congress have responded? —Aaron Schlehuber, attorney for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, 2001 22 SEAWAY HERETICS T he workday was in its first hour when my office telephone rang, delivering what would prove to be one of the most disturbing twists in the sordid tale of Great Lakes invasive species. I hadn’t finished uttering the requisite one-word telephone greeting when the caller’s staccato words burst into my ear. “Hey, it’s Gary. You gotta get over here. Hurry. You won’t believe your eyes.” I didn’t need caller identification to know, within a nanosecond of taking the call, that the person on the other end was Gary Fahnenstiel. The senior ecologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory was one of the most animated, outspoken, and zealous scientists in his field. He was also one of the most distinguished of Great Lakes researchers, an expert on how the lakes’ ecosystems functioned and responded to natural and human-induced 312 C H A P T E R 2 2 312 changes. For him, studying the lakes was more than a paycheck, more than a career. It was a calling. He was passionate about protecting the lakes he had come to know and love as a child growing up in Saginaw, Michigan, and as a burgeoning scientist who earned all of his degrees—a bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD—at Michigan universities. His expertise could have taken him anywhere in the world, but he chose to remain in Michigan, near the lakes. “All I ever wanted to be was a Great Lakes scientist. I’m living my dream,” he said.1 The lakes were in his blood. He was consumed by their beauty, majesty, and tragedy. On days when the weather was favorable, Fahnenstiel was known to drive a small boat across Muskegon Lake to his office on the Lake Michigan shoreline. Many of his summer vacations were spent cruising Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay, with his wife and two sons, in a 35-foot cabin cruiser. His ideal vacation was laying claim to one of Georgian Bay’s 30,000 islands and spending several days fishing, swimming, and reflecting on Lake Huron’s beauty, tranquility, and awesome power. Huron, like the other four Great Lakes, was so large it altered weather patterns and was known to swallow ships when gales whipped it into a frothing menace. Fahnenstiel’s research took him to all five Great Lakes and often entailed being on the lakes in bone-chilling cold, rolling with waves that caused more than a few sailors to puke. That didn’t matter. Fahnenstiel couldn’t get enough of the lakes. Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario—all were part of him. And he was resolute about protecting them. Fahnenstiel’s zeal for safeguarding the lakes, and outrage over the damage caused by invasive species, prompted him to call me that morning in 2004. He wanted it known that zebra mussels, the scourge of power plants and municipal water facilities around the Great Lakes, had created a potentially deadly new phenomenon on inland lakes—toxic algae blooms. Some of the algae blooms released naturally occurring, but potentially deadly, compounds that were 100 times more toxic than cyanide. The rise of mussel-fueled algae blooms, on the heels of myriad other ecological problems that invasive species caused, fueled a white-hot rage in Fahnenstiel. He wondered how government agencies in the United States and Canada could allow ocean vessels to continue operating on the lakes in light of all the ecological damage their ballast water discharges had caused. Fahnenstiel’s righteous indignation soon made him a lightning rod for controversy. The day after Christmas 2004, in the 45th year of the St. Lawrence Seaway’s celebrated history, Fahnenstiel went public with 313 S E A W AY H E R E T I C S 313 a demand that was immediately denounced as heresy. The time had come, he told newspapers in Wisconsin and Michigan, to ban ocean freighters from the Great Lakes...