Despite its usually sunny skies and its innocent aquamarine hue, Lake Erie does have something noir about it. Of all the Great Lakes, it's had the most shipwrecks, due to its wickedly shifting sandbars. Also, the western end of Lake Erie is the thunderstorm capital of Canada – the lightning displays are breathtaking, the winds can hit gale force, and, due to the lake's shallowness, the waves build very quickly. But despite these boating hazards, a great deal of alcohol crossed Erie during Prohibition. Mobster corpses were frequently dumped into the Detroit River, to wash up on the beaches of Pelee Island, where a special ice house was built to accommodate them.
Dead bodies haven't been the only kind of pollution Lake Erie's had to endure. Right now the visible junk is plastic, but the invisible stuff is more deadly. Erie, along with the other Great Lakes, has been treated as a sewage system for a very long time. Old industrial deposits are still seeping, and new poisons are tossed in regularly. In the mid-20th century, the Detroit River was so polluted it caught fire, and Lake Erie itself was so contaminated that one bright light suggested draining the entire lake and using the resulting real estate as industrial parkland.
I've lived or worked on the shores of every one of the Great Lakes, with the exception of Michigan. Superior in the '40s, Huron in the '50s, Ontario in both those decades and beyond.
It was birdwatching that first brought Graeme Gibson and me to Lake Erie: Point Pelee is famous as a spring migration landing spot – it draws birdwatchers from all over the world – but Long Pont and Rondeau are also excellent.
In the early 1980s we began going to Pelee Island, which is the southernmost bit of Canada, as well as being home to a number of rare and endangered plants and animals. Pelee attracts the same migratory bird species, but without the human crowding. That was appealing to us, and before we knew it we were part-time Pelee Islanders. We then became caught up in the founding of the Pelee Island Bird Observatory – now an important migration monitoring station. We also helped establish Meadowlark Farm, a small organic-farming experiment that we hope will inspire a non-polluting use of agricultural land in this sun-rich location.
Because of our on-the-ground involvement, we've become very aware of the enormous challenges facing the Great Lakes and Erie in particular.
Much effort was put into cleaning up the lakes in the last third of the 20th century – the Detroit River no longer bursts into flames – but Erie faces many new challenges. Foremost among them is evaporation due to climate change. Erie used to be so cold in winter that people drove cars to the mainland across the ice, or went sailing on iceboats; now it's unusual to have ice thick enough to support such activities. Ice prevents evaporation, open water encourages it: Erie appears to be shrinking. All of the Great Lakes are being affected in this way, but the first to turn into a festering mud puddle will most likely be Erie, due to its shallowness.
The second challenge is the invasive species. There are so many of these it's hard to count them, and not all are bad – Pacific salmon, for instance – but several stand out. Zebra mussels have not only wiped out numerous native bivalve species by eating all their food, but they've filtered out so much sediment that deep-water, blue-green algae have made a couple of big oxygen-poor dead zones in Lake Erie.
Phragmites, that tall reed with the graceful plumes that gives nothing back to native ecosystems, has started to clog up important Pelee Island wetlands. The Carolinian woodlands on Pelee are being threatened by the same killer garlic mustard invasion that's menacing the rest of Ontario's hardwood stands, choking out the native plants and killing trees by poisoning their root systems. All of these pests have reached menacing proportions in only the last 25 years – about the time we've been on Pelee Island. It's not just change that's so disturbing, it's the rapidity with which negative change is now taking place.
But the most disheartening change has been even more recent: the apparent collapse of woodland warbler populations. The 2007 passage migrant count at the PIBO was down by 60 per cent. Perhaps the decline was due to peculiar weather conditions – maybe the birds flew around Erie rather than over it. But many bird populations worldwide are collapsing, due to habitat loss and to the same grisly farming practices that have killed off a lot of independent farmers, either financially or physically: monocultures, especially sun-grown coffee, corn, and soy; soil depletion and erosion; toxic chemicals.
Human beings will keep on saying, "It's not too late" until the very last gasp. It's our nature: Hope's built in. And hope's not always unjustified: Environments can be repaired; water can be cleansed; and species populations can recover, unless, of course, the species goes extinct first. So, ever hopeful, we'll beaver away at garlic mustard elimination and habitat preservation and so forth, and continue to push for change, while remaining fully aware that of all charitable giving, 97 per cent goes to human causes, and of the remaining 3 per cent, 1 1/2 per cent goes to pet animals. That leaves only 1 1/2 per cent for the non-human part of the planet that supports all life, including us.
So, what are the Great Lakes worth to us? The real answer is "a lot," as many southern Ontario cities depend on them for drinking water and much else; but the efforts being made to date have not really reflected that crucial importance. Maybe we should make a diagram for politicians – or why not for everybody?
A) MONEY. B) MOUTH. PUT A WHERE B IS.
That might help.
Margaret Atwood's most recent publications are Moral Disorder, a series of interconnected short stories and The Door, a collection of poetry. She is also the Joint Honourary President of the Rare Bird Club of BirdLife International.