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.