We Should Be Shocked.

by Frank J. Regan (August 17, 2007)

Good science demands that the environment be broken up into ‘specialized’ areas that can be assessed accurately and made testable.  Too much information or, more exactly, trying to study too broad an area (like the entire Great Lakes) can overwhelm any attempts to produce useable data.  But, this intrinsic feature of good science also means that we get an unclear model of what’s actually going on because reality is far too big and ‘messy’ to get a clear picture of what is actually going on—a sort of professional myopia that refuses to see beyond what can actually be proven by scientific studies ultimately denying what we see before us. 

Several articles and report highlight this problem: The Democrat and Chronicle article Tests show more tainted beaches; "Up To the Gills" by Environmental Defence; the recent sport fish report by the New York State Department of Health “Chemicals in Sport fish and Game 2007-2008," and “Pollution-Related Beach Closings and Advisories Climb in 2006” by National Resources Defense Council—just to name a few.  Just by themselves, these reports show that we have cleaned up our beaches from previous years and also show some probable toxic contamination of some specific fish species based on testing.  (Not to mention the rapidly spreading fish disease Viral Hemorrhagic Septicemia (VHS), an invasive species killing sport fish in the lake that we have failed to control.) 

But, (and here’s my point) few official agencies come out and give us the big picture.  Over the last couple of centuries of human influence, we have mostly destroyed the water conditions of the largest fresh water supply in the world.  We are blinded by this conclusion by the nature of science itself and our media.  This collapse has taken so long that each generation takes for granted the incremental disintegration of the lakes—unable to see the wholesale, multi-generational degradation.  Like the parable of the three blind men examining separate parts of an elephant, none is able to describe the entire beast because none of them can ‘see’ the entire beast.   

Our scientists, public officials, and the media are often like those blind men, who cannot say for sure what the studies ‘prove’ about the entire Great Lakes ecosystem.  Nevertheless, any reasonable person looking at all the reports about the horrific state of our beaches, the contaminations in our waters, the accumulated toxins in our fish, and the spread of invasive diseases must conclude that we really have a problem ‘seeing’ the state of our Great Lakes.  The reports are not simply warnings that our Great Lakes environment is getting bad: The idiot lights have gone off, the biological machinery is about to shut down, and we may be long past the point of fixing it.

Pointing out that our beaches are a little bit better than a few years ago and listing how many of the fish in the Great Lakes we can safely eat is absurd.  Think about it. It’s absurd because somehow we think we can keep tinkering away at our relationship with the Great Lakes, like keeping an old car on the road that keeps breaking down.  We cannot see that the reports above indicate a wholesale breakdown of one of the world’s great ecosystem, where soon none of the fish will be eatable and no one will be able to swim.  We keep thinking that our way of living mandates that we release a certain amounts of contaminants in the water with our sloppy anti-pollution measures (where human waste must go into the lake in heavy storms) and we can delay an aggressive anti-invasive species act. 

We act collectively as if we can demand Nature to compromise with us: that we will do without some of the pleasures of the Great Lakes (like not being able to eat the fish) if we can still filter the water and drink it.  But Nature doesn’t compromise and there’s no inherent bias towards mankind.  Nature, for all our poetic insights, is merely a mindless, biological algorithm.  We are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic: Our Great Lakes health is in trouble and we cannot see the danger signs because we demand an official death certificate by agencies that are incapable of such a farseeing, compressive evaluation.  Our scientists only see parts: water quality in specific areas, toxins in specific fish, the pollution at specific beaches, which all gives the public the illusion that we are on top of the health of the Great Lakes.  We are not.  Really think about the condition of the Great Lakes now as compared with three or four centuries ago. 

Here is a more reasonable assumption about the reports coming out about the state of our Great Lakes:  When you have to evaluate the pollution in each beach each day, something is dreadfully wrong.  (Some districts on the Great Lakes pride themselves that they don’t need to test and thus never close their beaches, foolishly believing that if they don’t ask Nature won’t tell (i.e. come back with health problems). When you have to severely restrict eating of sport fish because of contamination, it’s reasonable to assume that toxic pollution is so pervasive in the Great Lakes that all the top predators in the lake are so filled with contamination that all their numbers may soon collapse.

In short, we are missing the point of these reports. Yes, we can monitor our beaches and decide one day to swim and not another, we can restrict the fish we eat and who eats them, and because we have alternatives—like swimming in our own swimming pools, or buying fish from the local markets--the message that we have dramatically altered the Great Lakes ecology gets lost.  It’s more than just a life-style issue, we should be aghast at the state of our beaches, we should be demanding that our government get the waters cleaned up so we can swim safely—even if we have a pool or don’t care to swim at all.  If our beaches are too unhealthy to swim in that is signal that we’ve allowed pollution to go to far.  It cannot be acceptable to monitor something as vastly complex as a beach in the Great Lakes ecosystem daily.   

We should be shocked at what we’ve done to the Great Lakes and we are not. 

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