When I started this blog, my Uncle Mike wrote to me and said: I don’t know a lot about the Great Lakes but I have read about the famous wolf and moose study on Isle Royale.  

I had never heard about this study and frankly was only peripherally aware of Isle Royale National Park. Lo and behold, about six weeks later, I’m at the library with my girls, and on the shelf in the young adult nonfiction section is a book titled The Wolves and Moose of Isle Royale: Restoring an Island Ecosystem with text by Nancy Castaldo and photographs by Morgan Heim.  

I’m sharing the book cover text because it’s a great layperson overview and I couldn’t do a better job summarizing – all credit to Nancy Castaldo and Clarion Books:

“On Isle Royale, a remote island national park surrounded by Lake Superior, a thrilling drama is unfolding between wolves and moose, the island’s ultimate predator and prey. For over sixty years, in what has been known as the longest study of a predator-prey relationship in the world, scientists have observed the importance of wolves to Isle Royale’s unique ecology. But due to illness and underlying factors, the population of wolves on the island has dropped while the number of moose has increased, putting the Isle Royale ecosystem in jeopardy. 

In order to restore the island’s ecological balance, scientists are stepping in… If scientists are successful in growing the island’s wolf population, they can potentially restore the island’s balance and explore ways to repair other damaged ecosystems.”

A couple takeaways from the book:

Isle Royale is the real deal when talking about a remote island wilderness ripe for a living ecologic laboratory. 278 miles from Ontario, 61 miles from Houghton, Michigan and 40 miles from Grand Portage, Minnesota, it is the least visited of all the United States’ 63 national parks. There is little human presence on the island (one lodge, one food establishment, no cell service and close to no Wi-Fi) and it closes for over six months in the wintertime due to inaccessability. 

As always, the facts of the story illustrate the interconnectedness of the natural world, of which we are a part. On the island, the wolves eat the moose.  If there are not enough wolves, the moose overpopulate. The overpopulated moose overeat the trees and bushes on the island, eventually causing the moose to start suffering from starvation and destroying food and habitat for other animals. The ecosystem becomes imbalanced and unhealthy. 

The predictable debate that occurred on whether to reintroduce wolves to the island is really part of bigger questions around environmental ethics. What is wilderness? What are the reasons that humans should intervene in ecological management of wilderness?

In the end, the argument that resulted in the wolf reintroduction project that started in 2018 and that continues at this time rested on the words of the famous naturalist Aldo Leopold: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

The book itself feels very accessible in its design – a photojournalistic structure with gorgeous pictures supporting text that is broken up well with headings and boxes. The book left me hopeful that our young generations might still see benefits of a physical book versus just online content. It was such a joy to find the book sitting on the library shelf that day. It felt a bit like it was there waiting for me. 

This post is dedicated to my Uncle Mike and his enduring love of the natural world.

I love when you find a non-fiction book that weaves multiple engaging storylines together in a readable, cohesive, and impactful way. I found all of these things when I picked journalist Dan Egan’s 2017 book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes off the shelves of my favorite independent bookstore in Cleveland, Loganberry Books.

A twist on Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the book is a testament to both the positive and negative impact humans have had on the ecology of the Great Lakes (mostly negative, to be real). Egan opens the book recounting the incredible ambition and optimism of the late 1950s that propelled one of the most expansive infrastructure projects in history: the digging of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The idea was to dig a nautical expressway through the St. Lawrence river that would open up a shipping channel from the Atlantic Ocean and coast and would drive Great Lakes cities to become dynamic domestic and international commercial ports. Project leaders, politicians and media figures boldly talked about this “Fourth Seacoast” for North America. 

But the ships and great port cities never really materialized. And the reason is a real kicker. In a brilliant short vignette, Egan tells the story of a gas station attendant turned truck driver named Malcolm Purcell McLean who one day in 1956 put into action an idea he had dreamed up while sitting in his truck watching stevedores haphazardly and inefficiently load ships at a port. He took an old oil tanker, installed a raised platform on it, and built a structure that could hold 58 trailer trucks whose tires had been removed. The structure could hold 58 containers. It was still a number of years before this invention completely took hold of the shipping industry. But it was also still a number of years before the Seaway was completed. And by the time it was fully operational, the channel and locks built were too narrow for the container ships that came to dominate the shipping industry in the 1960s. Whomp whomp.

Tragically what did materialize from the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 was ecologic disaster. The cargo that was delivered by international ships came via the millions of gallons of ballast waters that kept ships’ weight steady and balanced while sailing and were then released near and in ports when they picked-up cargo. In those millions of gallons of water were millions of living organisms from around the globe – some of which found new life in the freshwaters of the Great Lakes.    

Many of the storylines that follow in the book are so good that they are worthy of their own blog posts – a scientist who singlehandedly found a way to rid the Great Lakes of sea lamprey (do not look this creature up unless you want to give yourself quite a fright), the incredible effort to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, and the complex root causes of Lake Erie’s toxic algae problem that endanger drinking water. You can wait for my synopses of these storylines, or you can head to your local library or independent bookstore for this very worthwhile book.

If you have read earlier posts, you know that my interest, advocacy and activism related to the Great Lakes is relatively new. It’s not my professional work, and not my sole interest, but the Great Lakes have become a significant actor in my life. I’m sharing today how I shifted my energy in this direction, which is by listening to a whisper.

In her fantastic book The Lightmaker’s Manifesto: How to Work for Change Without Losing Your Joy, Karen Walrond shapes this activist origin story and I immediately connected with it. She interviews a consultant and activist in the arena of women’s and girls’ rights who shares about “the call”:

… for some people there isn’t a single awakening experience. Instead, it’s just a whisper. And I’ve talked to young people who hear the whisper, and they want to get involved more, but they don’t know how.  When they ask for my advice, I always tell them to keep listening to the whisper. Don’t ignore it. Keep listening, and let it guide you to do the very first thing, even if it’s just getting curious.

Getting curious is exactly what I did after my January 2021 retreat on Lake Erie. That year, I read two books about the Great Lakes that anchored my knowledge base – The Living Great Lakes by Jerry Dennis and The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan.  

In 2022, I started to volunteer for two organizations. I became an Ambassador with the Alliance for the Great Lakes, a nonpartisan nonprofit working across the region and in Washington, DC at the federal level, to protect the lakes. As an Ambassador, I join monthly virtual meet-ups with others from around the region for learning sessions on Great Lakes issues. I represent the Alliance at local events in Northeast Ohio. Last year I tabled at Cleveland State University’s EarthFest and at an environmental justice event. I even had the opportunity to be on a panel after a local documentary film festival showed a series of short films on water resources.   

I also joined the Cleveland Metroparks Watershed Volunteer Program (WVP). My volunteer efforts with the WVP focus more on the watershed systems in Northeast Ohio that feed into Lake Erie rather than the lake directly. I have participated in water monitoring activities, planted trees, and cleaned and sorted seeds for rain gardens. These efforts and learnings have impressed upon me the incredible interconnectedness of land and water.

As a result of my advocacy and activism, I’m living in an atmosphere of growth – and a space of creativity I didn’t know I inhabited. As Elizabeth Gilbert writes in her book Big Magic, “I believe that curiosity is the secret. Curiosity is the truth and the way of creative living.” I’m so thankful that you are curious enough about the Great Lakes to join this blog community. But I wonder what other whispers you might hear as well. I encourage you to listen to them.

My husband and I moved to Cleveland in 2014. That fall we had a BBQ with some new Cleveland friends, one of whom was stationed here with the U.S. Coast Guard.

Partway through the evening, someone posed a question: What if the Great Lakes were the characters of the classic 1986 John Hughes movie The Breakfast Club about five teenagers serving detention one Saturday?  Which lake would be which character?

Without any hesitation, the group dove into serious analysis. Here is where we landed, with some context on the five characters given the movie is almost 38 years old.

Lake Michigan: Claire Standish as played by Molly Ringwald

The rich, popular lake. Molly Ringwald’s character was perceptibly “the princess”, but one who struggled with peer pressure to be perfect. It seems possible to say that Lake Michigan might feel that same way. According to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources in 2017, the most visited parks in the Great Lakes region are on Lake Michigan. Chicago, sitting on the southwestern shores of Lake Michigan, is arguably the most well-known, and is the most densely populated Great Lakes city. And while the state of Michigan’s slick, well-known tourism marketing campaign “Pure Michigan” aims to promote the entire state, people invariably associate it with Lake Michigan and some of its shinier resort towns on its eastern coastline (think South Haven, Charlevoix).

Lake Superior: Andrew Clark as played by Emilio Estevez 

The jock of the lakes – the coldest, deepest and largest. The most populous city on Lake Superior is Thunder Bay, Ontario, a place known for producing college and professional hockey players. Lake Superior is a solid lake – but it’s also volatile, like Emilio Estevez’s character. Late fall is storm season and the lake can become rough, turbulent and angry. The largest waves ever recorded on the lake were 28.8 feet (8.8. meters) high (recorded October of 2017) and one of the most famous shipwrecks in Great Lakes history happened when the Edmund Fitzgerald sank on Lake Superior in 1975.

Lake Ontario: Brian Johnson as played by Michael Anthony Hall

The smallest and most cerebral of the lakes. Ontario has a neat, tight shoreline and is not known for beautiful beaches like some of the other lakes. But it has a hip side with the gem city of Toronto on its northern shores. Like Michael Anthony Hall’s character in the movies, it’s small, but has ambitions for something larger: the waters of Lake Ontario flow into the St. Lawrence River, pass by Montreal and Quebec City and out into the Atlantic Ocean. 

Lake Huron: John Bender as played by Judd Nelson

The dark horse of the lakes. Potentially the least discussed, it is the second largest of the Great Lakes with tremendous variety in terrain including over 30,000 islands, many of them in the Georgian Bay. There are over 1,000 shipwrecks sitting on the bottom of Lake Huron due to the varied geography and potential for storms. There is also a petrified forest of trees over 7,000 years old in the vicinity of Lexington, Michigan. In sum: A lake of great variety and unknown inner depths just like the rough, but somewhat misunderstood, character of the movie.      

Lake Erie: Allison Reynolds as played by Ally Sheedy

The basket case of the lakes. The black sheep. The shallowest of the Great Lakes by far, Lake Erie has been prone to challenges, most notoriously ones created by pollutants of different kinds (algal blooms, fires near the mouth of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland due to industrial pollutants). But, like Ally Sheedy’s character in the movie, cut back those bangs and wash out that dandruff and she can clean up well. Lake Erie’s health absolutely remains threatened, but there are also remarkable stories of renewal and it is currently the strongest fishing arena in the Great Lakes – something many people don’t realize.

The Breakfast Club closes with a voiceover reading of a letter the group wrote while in detention. In the letter they ask the school principal to see more expansively their traits and talents both individually and as a group. I like to think the five Great Lakes would make the same ask of all of us.

Over the past two years of my soft fascination with the Great Lakes, there are many facts and statistics I have either learned or revisited. But one fact stands out: The Great Lakes and their connecting waterways make up the largest surface freshwater system on earth.

Why this matters: The Great Lakes are actually one system, and it is this interconnectedness that also makes them ecologically fragile.

The Great Lakes are the result of glaciers that built up over North America starting about 500,000 years ago. About 14,000 years ago, temperatures began to warm, and the glaciers shrunk and retreated. As they did this, they carved new landforms, including massive depressions. Some of these depressions filled with the melting glacial ice, creating the early Great Lakes. 

The lakes and connected rivers have changed shape and form over the past 14,000 years, but today, water flows through the system more or less eastward. It starts in the deep, cold, expansive waters of Lake Superior (the largest lake by surface area and deepest with an average depth of 489 feet). It flows into the St. Mary’s River and then into Lakes Huron and Michigan. I say “Lakes” because Huron and Michigan are actually one body of water, appearing like two lungs, connected at the Straits of Mackinac. Lake Huron waters flow into the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers before moving into the western basin of Lake Erie. On the eastern basin of Lake Erie (the shallowest of the lakes with average depth of 62 feet; much more on the impact of this shallowness in future posts), the water flows into the Niagara River, over Niagara Falls, and into Lake Ontario (the smallest lake by surface area). From there, water moves into the St. Lawrence River and eventually flows into the Atlantic Ocean.  

This interconnectedness is what enabled a multisectoral economy to emerge on the Great Lakes. Manufacturing, agriculture, mining, energy services and tourism all thrive with ships moving between the US, Canada and further global reaches. A notable example: the history of the automobile industry in the US is interdependent with the history of the Great Lakes. But the interconnectedness is also what makes the lakes vulnerable to environmental threats, notably invasive species, which have had dramatic impacts I will discuss more in future posts. Chemicals, plastics, toxins and warming temperatures also upset the balance of the lakes as they flow through the system.These threats create an interlocking and cascading range of issues for the plants and animals in the lakes, and those that live on lands surrounding the lakes – including humans. Approximately 40 million North Americans get their drinking and household water from the Great Lakes. Affirming this tremendous natural resource while simultaneously recognizing its fragility is critical to protecting the lakes for the very near and distant future.

I’m Ellie and I’m an East Coast girl living a Great Lakes life.

I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, hundreds of miles from the Great Lakes. I spent my early adulthood in Boston and then New York City for a decade. In that decade I met and married my husband, who grew up in Cleveland. In 2014, after our first daughter was born, we decided to move to Cleveland to be closer to family and for a better cost of living. We live in the Cleveland area with our now two daughters.

My favorite class throughout my K-12 years was 7th grade geography. I loved maps, places and people. I’ve always had a certain fascination with the Great Lakes. On a map they appear as huge patches of blue nestled in the middle of North America. If you look closely at them on the map and take a moment to compare their size to that of surrounding states, you may start to recognize their actual expanse – which is enormous. They are really inland freshwater seas.

Why this matters: We are living through accelerating climate and environmental change. Access to freshwater is rapidly becoming a very real issue in some parts of the United States. It is worth pausing to consider what it means that the Great Lakes hold 84% of all surface freshwater in North America.  

I invite anyone, from America’s east and west coasts, sunbelt, western mountains, or here in this region to take a closer look at our Great Lakes. As I have explored and learned more about them over recent years, I have come to see them as nothing short of awe-inspiring.

There are gorgeous coastlines, dramatic stories of ecologic disaster, recovery, and threat, and rich historical storylines. As a place of natural beauty, their value is immeasurable. The shores of Lake Erie are the first place I go to seek peace and solace in this increasingly complex world.

The goal of my blog is to inspire love and respect for the Great Lakes. They are, simply, one of the most tremendous natural resources on earth. They are also specific places, shaped by natural forces and human life. My blog posts will be a mix of content intended to share on both of these topics. The objective of some posts will be to share information about issues relevant to the Great Lakes. Other posts will share and celebrate my Great Lakes experiences.

I plan to keep most posts short; I believe it’s best to keep content concise and meaningful. I will not provide all the information on a topic, but hopefully I will nurture your curiosity. You can bookmark this page, or you can subscribe to receive a newsletter from me every other Wednesday in your email linking to new posts.

Let me edit the opening line of this post to close it out: I’m an East Coast girl loving a Great Lakes life. I’m so glad you are here and joining me on this journey.