Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World by Nancy Langston (review)

In 1996, the Environmental Protection Agency (epa) granted a corporation permission—without hearings or an environmental impact statement—to inject 550 million gallons of sulfuric acid into a Wisconsin mine as an attempt to extract copper. Anishinaabe activists blocked a train carrying the acid across their reservation and began legal proceedings to prevent this experiment in “solution mining” (157–158). This is one of many fascinating stories in Sustaining Lake Superior. This interdisciplinary history combines scientific studies with a deep knowledge of the lake’s history—from the glaciers that shaped the basin to Native American cultures and the fur trade that decimated the beaver population and dried out the land; the copper mining that by 1882 annually dumped 500,000 tons of stampings into the watershed; the iron mining and processing that discharged toxic waste, including mercury; and the logging that deforested the white pine, leaving waste that caught fire 1,435 times and burned 12 million acres in 1908 alone. After this devastation, the paper industry stripped the land of spruce and fir and polluted the air and water. Add pesticide and fertilizer runoff, including lead arsenates, and by 1950 Lake Superior was in severe crisis.

Lake Superior has three layers—a warm upper one at the top; a middle layer that changes depth in accord with the day and the season; and a deep, cold layer that is a constant 39° F below 600 feet. Extractive industries long assumed that the world’s largest lake would dilute and disperse these pollutants. But an average drop of water entering Lake Superior remains for 200 years (20), and the pollutants are concentrated in the warmest layer, especially the 4.7 percent of it along the shore that is less than 32 feet deep, where people swim, many fish spawn, and wild birds nest. The epa has become a “pollution permitting agency”; it takes twenty-five years from the time a chemical is proved harmful before the epa will ban it. Hence, toxic levels of mercury and dioxin continue to rise (214–215).

Langston begins with an overview (1–21), a chapter about “industrializing the forests” (22–52), and one about the “pollution boom” after 1945 (53–78). The dioxins that spread throughout North America led to deformities in wild birds. Tons of mercury (used to bleach paper and also present in fossil fuels) were injected into the atmosphere. ddt was sprayed from airplanes over an area larger than New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, in a failed attempt to control budworm. The industries initially responsible are mostly gone, but pollutants still move up the food chain, concentrating in fish along Lake Superior, eaten, notably, by Native Americans.

Three chapters examine the industrial assault on Lake Superior by mining, especially taconite mining on Minnesota’s North Shore, where some pollution laws remain unenforced. For example, “not a single facility on the [iron] range is in compliance with the sulfate standard” that limits discharges wherever there is “wild rice downstream” (153). Taconite processing annually releases 800 pounds of mercury into Lake Superior’s basin, where “10 percent of newborn babies” have mercury levels above epa standards (155). The book concludes with overarching chapters about water quality and global warming (186–235). Some of the most polluting industries have closed, but as the Lake warms 2° F per decade, invasive species flourish, toxicity increases, fish immune systems fail, trees die, and algae increases (224–226). Thankfully, species sometimes develop resistance to pollutants, forests sequester them, reforesting can immobilize some industrial waste, and Native Americans are actively removing buried pollutants.

Langston seamlessly combines science (geology, biology, and toxicology, as well as the measurement of the lake’s rising temperature and shrinking winter ice) with a wide range of materials, including the ethnography of Native Americans, administrative and legal documents (both U.S. and Canadian), industrial history, and cultural history. This synthesis succeeds because all of the case studies concern one...