How Great are These Lakes?

The waters of the Laurentian Great Lakes are a special treasure in a thirsty world. The Great Lakes are the largest freshwater surface water system on Earth and contain approximately 21% of the world’s freshwater supply (US EPA, n.d.). In this chapter, we’ll learn more about this history and the organizations working to restore and protect the Great Lakes today.

The Laurentian Great Lakes are a single, connected system flowing west to east through several connecting tributaries. Each lake has unique properties.

• Lake Superior is the largest and coldest lake. Because it has the least development, it also has the cleanest water.
• Lake Michigan is the second largest lake and has a high amount of industrial and urban development, housing ⅕ of the basin population along its southern shore.
• Lake Huron is the third largest lake by volume and has intensive agricultural development in the Saginaw Bay region.
• Lake Erie is the smallest, most shallow lake with the warmest water temperatures. It has experienced the greatest impairment from urbanization and agriculture due to the large amount of runoff it receives from Ontario, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan.
• Lake Ontario is deeper than Lake Erie and therefore has a slightly larger volume. The Canadian side of the lake is highly urbanized, contributing impairments from runoff.

Great Lakes Ecosystem Services

Ecosystem services are benefits that humans obtain from the natural world and its ecosystems that make modern civilization possible (Steinman et al., 2017). These include:

• Regulating services – air and water purification, temperature control.
• Provisioning services – freshwater, food production, fish, wood.
• Supporting services – soil fertility, photosynthesis, habitat and biodiversity
• Cultural services – recreation and tourism, traditions, scenic beauty.

When the Great Lakes Basin was settled by Europeans, it experienced widespread logging, tilling to convert forests to farmland, and fish were harvested in large numbers without attention to sustainability.

Industrialization and urbanization further degraded Great Lakes water quality. Industrial byproducts and untreated sewage were discharged directly into the lakes. Commercial travel opened the formerly isolated inland lakes to the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River. Ships traveling between water bodies transported invasive hitchhikers, like the zebra mussel, that have wreaked chaos on the Great Lakes food web (Egan, 2017).

Exploitation of Great Lakes natural resources fueled the Industrial and Green Revolutions that catapulted human civilization into the modern era. The lifestyles we enjoy today came at heavy costs to Great Lakes ecosystems. However, the Great Lakes are also remarkably resilient. Through collaborative management, great strides have been made toward restoration.

Great Lakes Governance

The U.S. and Canada have long recognized their shared stake in protecting the Great Lakes. In 1909 the two countries signed the Boundary Waters Treaty, which outlines principles for preventing and dealing with conflict over shared water. The International Joint Commission (IJC) is a binational governance body established in 1912 to mitigate disputes and coordinate management of lake and river systems along the U.S. – Canadian border (IJC, n.d.). Because of the broad range of ecosystem services the Great Lakes provide to Americans and Canadians, the IJC deals with a dizzying range of decisions – from drinking water, to farming, to shipping, and fishing, and hydropower – oh my!

By the 1960s, bacterial and chemical contamination, and floating debris in the lakes caused sufficient public concern to motivate political action. In 1972, the U.S. and Canada signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, committing to “restore and protect the waters of the Great Lakes” (U.S. EPA, n.d.). Learn more in the video, Keeping the Great Lakes Great.

As a result of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, in 1987 the U.S. and Canada designated 43 highly degraded shoreline sites as “Areas of Concern.”

AOC sites became the focus of cleanup and restoration efforts. The agreement defined fourteen beneficial use impairments (BUIs) resulting from chemical, physical, or biological changes compromising the integrity of lake ecosystems. All BUIs must be restored before a site can be delisted as a Great Lakes AOC.

An example close to home is Muskegon Lake, where the GVSU Annis Water Resources Institute is located. Learn more in the video, Back from the Brink.

In the U.S., the AOC program that was leveraged to clean up Muskegon Lake is administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with funding from the Great Lakes Legacy Act and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI). Each year these programs fund millions of dollars worth of contaminated sediment removal, invasive species mitigation, shoreline and habitat restoration, and environmental monitoring in the Great Lakes Basin.

Environmental managers working for universities, research institutions, non-profit organizations, and local governments (i.e., county conservation districts) all compete for funding to implement improvement projects throughout the basin and support the salaries of staff, technicians, researchers, and other natural resource management professionals. Since Michigan is the only state or province located entirely within the Great Lakes basin, it’s important for emerging professionals in the environmental field to be aware of the unique funding opportunities available in this Water-Winter Wonderland state.

Summary

The Great Lakes provide beneficial resources to humans and have been severely impaired by historic exploitation of those resources. Through the Great Lakes AOC program, severely degraded sites, like Muskegon Lake, are being restored. As more legacy pollution sites are remediated and beneficial use impairments restored, researchers are asking new questions about how people are enjoying the restored Great Lakes. This creates new opportunities for social science researchers to quantify the ecosystem services provided by the lakes, qualitatively describe what people value about them, and evaluate public knowledge of human impacts to water resources.