The Great Lake Sturgeon

Future Management and Stewardship of Lake Sturgeon

n 173 NANCY AUER Future Management and Stewardship of Lake Sturgeon Aldo Leopold is considered to have been one of the earliest conservation activists in the United States and is well known for his best-selling A Sand County Almanac, which calls for all humans to live with a “land ethic.” Doing so requires that we consider ourselves and all other organisms as valuable and integral partners within an ecosystem community (Leopold 1966). Because he worked for the U.S. Forest Service and wrote of a “land ethic,” we often think of Leopold’s focus mostly in terms of terrestrial systems. What few know is that some of his first employment obligations concerned aquatic systems and fish (Leopold 1918). His ethic included the aquatic systems within management areas. His initial position after graduating from Yale was with the U.S. Forest Service in Arizona and New Mexico, where he produced a Game and Fish Handbook (1915) calling on foresters to help maintain and support rare wildlife and not just popular game species. He championed the strategy that native fish species should be protected and preferred when considering stocking waters in national forests (Leopold 1918). Leopold’s “land ethic” resonated with environmentalists, contributing to the growth of preservation and management programs for parks, reserves, and forests 174 n Nancy Auer over the last 100 years, yet a similar focus and concern for our aquatic ecosystems was much slower to develop. All of us can see more and more of the world’s natural wild lands being developed for housing, industry, and agriculture as our human population grows, but we are less inclined to realize the extent to which our freshwater resources and the organisms that live in those ecosystems are becoming depleted, polluted, or overexploited, unless there is some drastic outcome of our actions. Examples include the oil and debris spills in the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, which often caught fire in the 1950s and 1960s (Scott 2009) and the large die-offs of the invasive fish—the alewife—in the Great Lakes during the late 1960s (Anon. 1967). The Clean Water Act of 1972 sprang from the deplorable conditions of many lakes and rivers in the 1960s and the need to regulate discharges from industry and municipal sources. The result has been an improvement in water clarity and condition, especially for drinking, but attention seemed to remain focused on water as a resource and not as an integral part of an ecosystem with associated organisms. As human populations grow around the world, the demand for clean freshwater also grows. Since 2000, much has been written about safety and availability of freshwater resources, and slowly emphasis has been placed on freshwater and marine natural resources. Only within the last 10 to 15 years has the idea of a water ethic been championed (Postel 1997; National Catholic Rural Life Conference 2003), and in March 2008 a conference was held in Santa Clara, California, titled Common Grounds, Common Water: Toward A Water Ethic (proceedings found at http:// www.internationalwaterlaw.org/bibliography/Ethics/). As humans slowly connect the importance of water with that of life, that of both their own and plants and animals, we become more aware of what Leopold was suggesting almost 100 years ago—we need to protect all life-forms native to each ecosystem. These organisms have distinct roles within ecosystems that allow them to function and support life best. In the Great Lakes Basin ecosystem, invasive and introduced species such as the zebra and quagga mussels, sea lamprey, and round goby are creating ecological, economic, and industrial havoc, clogging water intakes, and disrupting fish food webs. Sustainability has become an important term as population growth, demand for resources, climate change, and continued pollution make us all aware of the delicate balance of all of our natural resources. A resource is sustainable if the manner in which we live on earth today allows us to meet our present need of that resource without destroying the ability of future generations to also have sufficient supply and experience of that resource (Garcia and Grainger 1997). In the past, we’ve often dealt with individual species in small regions but now realize the need to adapt a large ecosystem sustainability strategy. Stewardship of Lake Sturgeon n 175 In the chapters that have preceded, we have learned that the native and unique lake sturgeon has begun to rebound in some regions...