The issue: Plastic pollution is a problem in the Great Lakes. Research from the Rochester Institute of Technology estimates that over 22 million pounds of plastic enter the Great Lakes each year.
Why this matters: Over time plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces and particles that can end up in drinking water and living organisms in the lakes. These microplastics may eventually be ingested by humans when we eat or drink something with lake origin. Plastic particles have even been found in beers brewed in the Great Lakes region. While the full impact on the animal and human body is not known, there are concerning aspects of humans ingesting about a credit card sized amount of plastic each week (an official estimate according to the Alliance for the Great Lakes).
What actions can you take?
Reduce your own plastic use. Think more expansively than just eliminating single-use plastic drink containers and grocery bags – although do these for sure! Could you eliminate ziploc and single-use snack bags? Could you replace hand soap and dish soap containers with a permanent container and purchase larger refill containers? Could you replace a takeout order with eating in a restaurant or cooking at home? Could you forgo one to-go coffee a week? The Alliance for the Great Lake has a plastic-free toolkit for download if you want to explore more possibilities.
Learn more about the concept of extended producer responsibility. Creating new laws around this concept would require plastic producers to be responsible for their products through the product’s full lifecycle. Over time these laws would force producers to eliminate the most harmful plastics, pay for disposal, or produce less plastic. You can visit the Alliance for the Great Lakes action center to send congressional delegates a message requesting they support extended producer responsibility legislation.
Lead or participate in beach clean-ups if you live near a Great Lake. More about this in my next post. Stay tuned!
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.
Climate change is a journey that we are all on for the rest of our lives. So let’s get right to the point: How will climate change impact the Great Lakes?
Warming temperatures, extreme weather and precipitation events and changes in growing seasons will impact the Great Lakes in many ways, notably:
Increase in invasive species;
Expansion of harmful algal blooms;
Fluctuation of water levels;
Decline in coastal health.
Why do these matter?
Some of these threats will be the subject of their own posts in the future. But a few connections for foundational understanding.
As a fragile ecosystem, the Great Lakes have already been permanently damaged by invasive species. When non-native species are introduced by deliberate or accidental human activity, they often have no natural predators. Invasive species can decrease native fish or other species and degrade lake aesthetic value, threatening existing ecologies and economies. The zebra mussel infestation is one of the most prominent invasive species storylines of the Great Lakes. The mussels, which likely arrived in ballast waters or on ships from international seas, prolifically filter out algae that native species need for food, essentially sucking life out of the Great Lakes. They have created a dramatic upset in the ecosystem and, by reducing plant and animal life in the lakes, make them more prone to harmful algae. The mussels are also a physical nuisance, littering beaches, clogging pipes and even damaging boat motors.
Harmful algal blooms upset the ecological balance of nutrients, plants and animals in and around the lakes. They can impact the respiratory health of animals and humans and they can threaten access to clean drinking water. The drinking water crisis in Toledo, Ohio in July 2014 raised awareness of this issue, but did not yield political or popular willpower to change human activity, notably in the agricultural sector, creating some of the challenge.
Scientists see a future of significant water level variability due to climate change. High water levels and powerful waves and storms are causing coastal damage, including infrastructure damage along the shoreline and eroding beaches. A March 2020 analysis of rising Lake Michigan waters led the city of South Haven, Michigan to cite a cost of $16M to repair damage to infrastructure of the marina, stormwater pipes and utility lines and to make necessary improvements to their water filtration plant.
Low water levels due to greater evaporation as the climate warms put shipping, recreation and hydropower at risk and increases the possibility of harmful algal blooms, which thrive in shallower, warmer waters.
Climate change also exacerbates existing water inequities. Low-income communities and communities of color often bear the burden of environmental threats to the Great Lakes since they are often located in closer proximity to polluted waterways and access points and are more likely to have old and deteriorating infrastructure (e.g. lead water lines; older sewer pipes).
Our climate change journey will not have a happily ever after where everything turns out OK in the end. However, by better educating ourselves about impacts and potential mitigating activities, we can take personal and civic action to try and improve outcomes in our local communities, country and world.
I will continue to profile the impact of climate change on the Great Lakes region; it’s important that we honestly face and navigate the challenges. But I will also explore a connected, but distinct question: Will the Great Lakes region be a climate refuge? Stay tuned.
Sugarloaf Mountain west of Marquette, MI, Lake Superior
In 2011, Good Morning America named Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan the Most Beautiful Place in America. It beat out Aspen, CO, Cape Cod, MA and Lanikai Beach, HI among others, taking many people by surprise. But it shouldn’t have!
We spent an idyllic four days in the area in June 2019. I would highly recommend it for a trip. The National Lakeshore includes 64 miles of beaches along Lake Michigan, two islands (North and South Manitou), 26 inland lakes and over 50,000 acres of land. The region more widely includes large inland lakes, Midwest-size mountains (Crystal Mountain), and sits proximal to Traverse City and to the beautiful Leelenau Penninsula.
Some highlights from our trip:
The Dunes themselves are astounding. Many of them are huge and steep expanses sloping down into the lake. From some viewpoints, including many along the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive, all the eye sees is sand sharply meeting water. Many of them should not be climbed! The park posts numerous warnings of the danger of making it down – but not back up the shifting sands. Each year there are approximately 60 search and rescues and individuals will see fines of $2,000 or more for the rescue effort. For those interested though, The Dune Climb is a designated area for dune ascent and descent. Bring water!
We found numerous beach playgrounds in the area. These were basically a dream come true for our two girls, reinforcing that it’s really the simple things that bring joy.
The region includes the sweet town of Glen Arbor with one of most adorable independent bookstores I’ve ever been to – The Cottage Bookshop. We also enjoyed a brewery in Frankfurt and hiking trails in Empire.
Northern Michigan is famous for its cherries. We closed out our time at Sleeping Bear Dunes with dinner at The Cherry Hut, a restaurant that opened in Beulah in 1922. The trip was everything a vacation should be with opportunities for activity and rest while surrounded by water, sand, grass, trees and sky.
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.
Where do you retreat from this complex world? How do you “draw back” (the Latin root meaning of the word) to find quiet, distance, perspective and connect with your inner world?
It was a solo retreat in the pandemic winter of 2020-21 that launched my personal relationship with the Great Lakes and established them as a place of rejuvenation and joy.
I spent nine and a half months of 2020 at home working full-time with a child or two by my side at various times. As a family, we reconnected with the natural world during our Pandemic Parks Tour of 2020. Between March and December that year, we visited 38 parks in Ohio (city, county, state and Cuyahoga Valley National Park). What else was there to do in those early months with then 7 and 3 year-old children?
Many parks took us out into the woods and hills of Ohio where the Appalachian region transitions to Midwestern farm lands – truly underrated terrain in my opinion. Some of the parks were on Lake Erie. I have a picture of my older daughter from Labor Day 2020 swimming at the beach at Geneva State Park. She looks like a Great Lakes mermaid happily lounging in clear, shallow waters stretched across an array of multicolored stones.
However, by January 2021, the cabin fever in Cleveland was real. I had a singular workday that sent me spiraling. The intensity was a confluence of all the contextual elements of pandemic living, but for the first time in my life, I felt a loss of mental and emotional control. I knew I needed to find breathing space somewhere alone.
With the blessings of pandemic Ohio winter pricing, I rented a cottage for myself at The Lodge at Geneva-By-The-Lake an hour east of Cleveland for a Friday and Saturday night. The weather that Saturday I can only describe as somewhat magical for winter on Lake Erie. It was clear, with muted sunshine and lines and whisps of cloud. The temperature was in the high 30s, but there was absolutely no wind that day, making it feel warmer than it was. I spent three hours that morning walking in Geneva State Park along the lake, fascinated by the frozen bushes dripping with icicles, and absorbing the winter lake landscape.
I strolled back to the beach where my Great Lakes mermaid had been swimming five months earlier and sat down. The beach was still sandy but the winter had built up snow banks at the edge of the water – large, undulating mounds of snow crusted with ice. The lake was filled with floating ice close to the shoreline. As at any time of year by a Great Lake, there was that great, distant, unbroken dark horizon line where water meets an enormous expanse of blue sky.
The most remarkable thing about the beach that morning was the absolute, dead silence. The snow banks blocked any noise from the ice and water. The trees behind the beach had just sparse leaves, and with no wind, there was no rustling or whistling, or whispering. Once in a while I could hear a bird somewhere, calling out, but its exact location was distorted by the enveloping silence.
I was profoundly alone.
And I was profoundly grateful.
I left the beach that day, and the cottage that weekend, having found the breathing space I needed at that moment and having an intrigue and curiosity about Lake Erie deepen into something else – a relationship that would become an anchor in my life.
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.
Cleveland from Upper Edgewater Park, June 2022
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.
Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, Lake Superior, Michigan, July 2022Ludington State Park (MI), Lake Michigan, July 2022Lake Erie, Geneva, OH, January 2021Home, Birthday Cupcakes from Daughters, October 2022
