North Shore: A Natural History of Minnesota’s Superior Coast by Chel Anderson, Adelheid Fischer (review)

Chel Anderson and Adelheid Fischer believe “that an advanced ecological education is important not simply for scientists but also for the general public” (2). With impressive research, clear, enjoyable writing, beautiful photography, and attractive illustrations, they have provided that education for a slice of Minnesota’s rocky Lake Superior shore.

A book about ecosystems presents a challenge of organization, since the authors’ impulse is to reveal the connectivity of it all, but the book’s demand is to divide the landscape into digestible, coherent sections. Anderson and Fischer have done well to organize the work around the idea of the watershed, the land area whose waters drain into Lake Superior on Minnesota’s North Shore. The book’s three mainland sections descend from the “Headwaters” area, where the North Shore’s streams and rivers begin, to the “Highlands” of glacial moraines and bedrock ridges paralleling the lakeshore, to the “Nearshore,” the coastal terrace and shoreline of Lake Superior. The remaining two sections plumb the depths of Superior’s waters, and examine the North Shore’s islands, most notably Isle Royale. Finally, the book closes with a sobering epilogue, “The Wild Card of Climate Change,” which concisely explains the global climate science story, recognizes its uncertainties, and describes specific changes to expect for the book’s watershed-based sections.

Though North Shore’s sections are well conceived, another aspect of the book’s organization is off-putting. Each section begins with a long overview of its distinctive habitats and relationships. These are followed by in-depth examinations of individual species, ecosystem processes, and historic land uses. The problem is that these in-depth profiles sometimes include such close repetition of ideas and language from the long overview as to induce déjà vu, a worrisome proposition in the course of reading a six-hundred-page book. But this issue only arises in a cover-to-cover reading. As the authors advise, depending on one’s proclivities or time constraints, he or she may choose to read only the long overviews, or begin closer to the soil (or, in Superior’s depths) with earthworms, salamanders, migratory birds, lake trout, or amphipods and diatoms.

The most striking tension in North Shore is between the region as a last great intact ecosystem, and a landscape already deeply marred by human influence. Despite copious secondary reading and firsthand experience, the authors are candid about still daunting knowledge gaps in ecological research along the North Shore. Those gaps often force Anderson and Fischer to expand the scope of their research to the entire Great Lakes region and beyond, prodding them also into their most poignant examination of the North Shore as a midwestern locale. As they point out, in the Midwest it is a unique place that can appear on night sky maps like the dark unpopulated expanses of the American West. The North Shore’s forests, covering 85 percent of the land, run unbroken to far northern Canada. The book mentions mountains in this Midwest, without qualification. Contrary to the rhetoric of boosters in the early twentieth century, who tried to sell a new agricultural empire on cutover stump land, the North Shore does not fit the Midwest-as-agricultural-heartland bill.

One of the North Shore’s stated objectives is to help readers “nurture a deep sense of belonging to nature” (594). One of its implicit goals is to foster curiosity about the place. The book accomplishes these by making evident the authors’ personal relationships to the landscape, and, though bereft of foot-or endnotes, the inclusion of rich bibliographies at the close of each section. In addition to reading studies from across ecology, biology, botany, limnology (the study of inland waters), and others, the authors interviewed environmental health, planning, and zoning specialists from cities and counties of the North Shore. These are the people tasked with balancing development—seen as the North Shore...