Something happened last week that has not happened since 1968. A strike shut down 13 locks of the St. Lawrence Seaway between Lake Erie and Montreal trapping boats in the shipping artery and preventing others from entering on either end. 

Workers with Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, walked out on October 22nd. They were in a dispute over wages with the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corp. A deal was reached one week later on October 29th, but reflecting on the impact of the strike makes clear the under-discussed prowess of the Great Lakes economy.

The Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway carried over $12 billion of cargo in 2022; estimates were that the strike last week caused a loss of $100-110 million per day. On Wednesday, October 25th, Seaway management reported around 115 vessels that were stuck in the St. Lawrence river or Lake Ontario. Other vessels stalled included a U.S. Naval Warship, the littoral combat ship the USS Marinette, that sat in Cleveland’s port waiting to head into international waters.

This is a particularly busy time of year on the Lakes and Seaway given the fall harvest season. Of great concern was the hold-up of grain shipments that were headed to destinations around the globe. Grain shipments from the Great Lakes regions have been growing in recent years. In November 2022, the Great Lakes Seaway Partnership announced that grain shipments were up almost 25% from 2021. This increase is due in part to the war in Ukraine and changing climate patterns in other grain producing areas. 

An article in the Detroit Free Press last week during the strike reflected the wide economic impact: “We have grain that feeds the world that’s not moving. We have salt that goes on winter roads for safety that’s not moving. We have iron ore for steelmaking that’s not moving,” said Jason Card, spokesman for the binational Chamber of Marine Commerce in Ottawa.

While an article from Great Lakes Now reflected a very human position: “We want a fair and decent wage that shows the value our members bring. There’s a lot of labor unrest in North America right now and people are sick and tired of the ivory tower people getting everything while the rest of us get peanuts,” said Unifor spokesman John Hockey.

Economic interconnectedness reflects human interconnectedness. Human interconnectedness reflects the ways individual people understand how they, and their talents and labor, matter. May we always remain mindful of this as we navigate our daily lives and communities and ponder wider global dynamics.

Credit for all pictures today: pexels.com

Earlier this month the Alliance for the Great Lakes Ambassador program (of which I am a part), held a monthly “deep dive” session on environmental justice.

According to the US Commission on Civil Rights, environmental justice is: 

… the fair treatment of people of all races, income, and cultures with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies, and their meaningful involvement in the decision-making processes of the government.

The truth is that many people are not afforded access to safe and clean water from the Great Lakes and are not protected from the pollution that is a byproduct of the lake economies, or the adverse dynamics of the lakes and their waterways. Disproportionately affected are low-income communities and communities of color.  

Two storylines from Chicago starkly illustrate this reality.

The first is an opinion article on the Alliance’s website from 2019, “Flooding Hits Hardest in Chicago’s Communities of Color”. For a variety of reasons, many Great Lakes cities struggle with stormwater management. Flooding can bring any number of health or economic challenges to individuals already facing many. The article details flooding that occurs in the city’s Southeast neighborhoods during and after severe storms. Some of these neighborhoods are highly industrial and so floodwaters may bring toxic hazards as they run over Superfund and brownfields sites. 

For me, the statistics below speak for themselves: 

{In Chicago} Just thirteen zip codes represent nearly three-fourths of all flood insurance claims. Over three-quarters of a million residents live here – including 200,000 children and 100,000 elderly. Over a quarter of households are below the poverty line. And 93% are households headed by a person of color.

By contrast, seventeen Chicago zip codes had the fewest flood claim payments between 2007 and 2016 (less than one percent combined). Only 30 percent of residents in these areas are people of color.

The second storyline is one I heard though an interview on the Alliance’s podcast, Lakes Chat, in 2022. Oscar Sanchez is the Community Planning Manager with the Southeast Environmental Task Force.

In his role, Mr. Sanchez was part of a group of activists who fought the relocation of General Iron, a metal sheeting company in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago (General Iron has now rebranded as Southside Recycling). General Iron had a large number of violations including for air pollution and questionable operations. The local community (mostly white, more affluent) no longer wanted General Iron as a neighbor. Initially General Iron received support, including incentive funding, from the City of Chicago to relocate to the southeast part of the city (mostly Latino with surrounding Black neighborhoods, not affluent).

But the identified site for relocation was across from a park and a high school and down the street from an elementary school. The local community was a working one where it was hard for people to get involved as they managed day to day struggles. It was, as Mr. Sanchez said, hard for them to fight back, but people were scared. So a coalition of activists from across the community took on the cause. 

After the organized resistance, the city denied the original permit request from General Iron in 2021. This decision was a win for Mr. Sanchez and his local communities in their fight for environmental justice. The win remains a tenuous one; final decisions remain in limbo as General Iron moves their case through the courts (as of September 2023 news articles).

The heart of the matter sits with a question Mr. Sanchez poses in the interview regarding stark differences in city and regional planning and policy between the north side and south side of the city: 

Just because we are poor doesn’t mean we should be treated poorly…  If it’s not good for one community, why is it OK for a different community?    

It’s a worthy question that should be asked again… and again… and again.  

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.