In an earlier post on the impact of climate change on the Great Lakes, I shared very real challenges that the Great Lakes and region will face in the years ahead. I closed the post foreshadowing this post on a different question: Will the Great Lakes be a climate refuge?

The International Economic Partnership estimates that 1.2 billion people will be displaced by climate change by 2050. In the United States, access to water is starting to impact growth in places like Arizona where earlier this year Phoenix had to slow housing construction due to lack of water resources. In the past 20 years over 5,000 people have been killed by major hurricanes. Tornadoes, heat waves and major wildfires have become routine events across the country. There will be a future of climate migrants, “climigrants”, driven to seek new places to live.

There are reasons that climigrants might choose the Great Lakes region:

1. Fresh water access. Sharing my often repeated fact: The Great Lakes hold 84% of all surface freshwater in North America.
2. Less extreme weather events than some areas of the country. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has an interactive natural disaster risk map that shows the Great Lakes region as remarkably free of threats compared with much of the country.
3. Moderating climate. Those famous, frigid Great Lakes winters? They still happen, but temperatures are rising and snow and frost days are declining. By 2050, average temperatures in the region are expected to increase by 3 to 5 degrees since 1951. The number of frost-free days increased by 16 days between 1951 and 2018. This National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) page summarizes Great Lakes region climate change headlines.
4. At present, more affordable housing than many places in the US. According to Zillow, the average current home value in the Great Lakes region ranges from a high in Minnesota of $307,000 to a low in Ohio of $219,700. Most all Great Lakes states are ranked between 20th and 40th among US states.

There are also reasons that the idea of a climate haven or refuge might be too hyped:

1. Per my past post, negative impacts of climate change on the Great Lakes. And some threats may grow faster or differently than anticipated – e.g. this summer’s Canadian wildfire smoke.
2. Climate politics. This varies state to state in the region. Unfortunately, here in Ohio, policies from the current statehouse and governor have not been climate-friendly including a bill the governor jammed through in December 2022 redefining natural gas as a “green energy”.  
3. Decaying infrastructure. Drinking water, sewer and stormwater management improvements are needed in many places. Illinois and Ohio lead the list of states with the largest number of lead water lines still in use. Investment is needed in properties to make them livable and strategy needed to keep housing affordable proportional to regional jobs.
4. Economics. To attract new people who will stay, a wide range of job opportunities need to exist. Growing remote work opens up new avenues for some demographics but some Great Lakes economies remain fragile with the decades-long decline in manufacturing in the region.

I am grateful to live in this geographical region. There is an opportunity to attract a new generation of people seeking a stable, safe, livable place to settle. But for this to happen, there will need to be the vision, plan and political and popular will to prepare for it and reinvent ourselves and our way of living. I hope we find the courage to make this shift.

When we moved to Cleveland in 2014 and I saw Lake Erie up close, one of the things that took me by surprise was the color of the water. Standing on shore and looking out in the summer months, in many places the most visible stretch of water has a gorgeous blue color – it can be close to a turquoise. I’ve now seen this color in Lake Michigan, and memorably in Lake Superior, as well.

The color of Great Lakes waters varies tremendously of course – season to season, day to day, even hour to hour depending on weather and lake conditions. It can have a steel color, a deep green-brown, a dark blue.

But the turquoise, gem-like blue is something that many people notice and comment on – usually with enthusiastic disbelief.  People who grew up on the shores of the Great Lakes in past decades describe returning to one now and finding clear water in remarkable shades of blue. 

People flying cross-country might even notice it from an airplane. A cousin of mine flying between the west coast and New York City described looking out the plane window and being completely disoriented.  “We didn’t know where we were!  It didn’t make sense that we were above the Carribbean!”

I’ve been reluctant to share with people what I have learned about that bright turquoise blue.  Unfortunately, this striking color and clarity is not a sign of lake health as we would be inclined to think.  Instead, as Dan Egan writes in The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, it’s a sign that “the life is being literally sucked out of the lakes”.

A write-up from a 2019 segment on Chicago’s WGN 9 TV station summarizes a number of key points.

Many people think that water appears blue due to the sky. There is an element of light and refraction that can impact the appearance of a body of water. But it’s also the case that water radiates blue.

Water color is impacted by things in the water. Algae, decaying material and sediment can all be churned up in the water causing a color to shift. 

It’s also impacted by things not in the water. In the case of the Great Lakes, it’s the absence of healthy algae that used to be omnipresent in the water that has lightened or made many of the lakes “more blue”. The criminals in this storyline are the zebra and quagga mussels that arrived in the lakes sometime around the late 1980s and have since spread relatively uncontested. In a stunning statistic, scientists say there are so many mussels in Lake Michigan that they can filter the entire volume of the lake in four to six days, and they have reduced the amount of light-absorbing algae by over 50%.

So now when I look down into the lake and see clear waters and white sandy bottoms, I feel a tug of mixed emotions: a socialized response of what is thought to be beautiful waterscape and an ecologist’s gut feeling that all is not as it should be.