Shrugs That Kill: On Patrick Wensink’s “The Great Black Swamp”

---

Just a few months after Flint, Michigan made headlines for its lead water crisis, the U.S. Midwest faced another environmental scare. This one vanished in a single news cycle, but reflected an even bigger ticking ecological time bomb.

In the unusual heat of summer 2014, an unprecedented algae bloom spread across Lake Erie. Off the northwest coast of Ohio, the world’s eleventh largest lake had turned into a toxic green sludge, compared by journalists to pea soup, pond scum, and the Wicked Witch of the West. Lethal toxins threatened anyone who drank or even touched the water, which municipal lines carried to over 400,000 people. In a deft response, the City of Toledo deployed a cocktail of aluminum and chlorine that miraculously cleared up the mess in just a few days—relieving the immediate threat while failing to address any underlying causes.

Most perplexing was the silence that followed the cleanup. When Ohio native Patrick Wensink visited the coastline a decade later, many locals had barely registered the event. Speaking to sunbathers, surfers, local business owners, and fishermen, he received mostly lukewarm responses. “I wasn’t too shocked about it,” says one museum clerk. “That beach has been opened and closed our entire lives… it sounds bad, but I was kind of like ‘Okay. What else is new?’” Here was Wensink, developing a book idea about a toxic algae bloom that hardly impressed the people it most directly impacted.

This local Midwestern history reflects a global environmental crisis. As temperatures rise, warmer water creates an ideal breeding ground for toxins. In 2023, harmful algae blooms (HABs) were reported in all fifty U.S. states and one-third of the country’s 1,200 lakes. They have surfaced on every continent except Antarctica, and over the past two decades, swelled nearly 13 percent globally, their affected area collectively approximating the sizie of India. Algae-poisoned water has been linked to the deaths dozens of patients in hospitals through tainted IV fluids, has recently killed hikers in national parks,, and swaths of wildlife from elephants in Botswana to fish in Oakland.

Into this rising tide of algae comes Wensink’s The Great Black Swamp, a genre-blending investigation that traces this emerging threat through environmental history, cultural criticism, and personal memoir. The central narrative thread comprises a “whodunit” mystery behind Ohio’s algae blooms, using a mix of old-school historical research and plucky on-the-ground reporting. Roiling beneath this surface investigation is a reluctant personal narrative: a soon-to-be divorced dad and prodigal punk, drawn back to his hometown as he weighs new beginnings, the legacy of his state and lineage, and a lifetime of toxic relationships.

Despite his Ohio background, Wensink is an unlikely guide for this subject. His hometown of Deshler is a “two-stoplight working-class farming village” in a chronically mocked corner of the already overlooked “flyover” state. His family’s local roots reach back to the 1890s, when his great-great-great-grandfather applied for a permit to dig a drainage ditch for his 159-acre farm. As an alienated Gen Xer and “creative, sensitive weirdo,” Wensink felt little connection to the area while growing up, nor did he reflect much on its possible natural history. He recalls thinking, like many Midwesterners, that “this landscape was simply born a million acres of perfectly level fields.” He also struggled with science, admitting to C’s and D’s in his high school classes. On one early reporting trip, he schleps through a nature preserve of overgrown grass and thick mud with his ill-equipped outfit of tennis shoes and button-up shirt.

This awkward fit, however, provides a welcome perspective for general readers. A published journalist and author of both fiction and nonfiction books, Wensink invites even the most science-averse into this historical riddle with his conversational tone, and his infectious energy carries us along on his adventure. He describes these complex topographies, new and old, in simple language without getting mired in terminology. In describing Ohio’s pre-industrial state, he recalls “a national reputation for mud that swallowed horses alive, gangs of bloodthirsty wolves, and a malaria rate so deadly that grim poems were written about it.” “Sorry, scientists,” he says at another point, explaining his use of the term “algae” instead of cyanobacteria and microcystin. His voice is often funny and self-deprecating, if at times a bit hokey or hyperbolic. His recurring superlatives, from “most uninhabitable land in America” to “worst engineering disasters in U.S. history” lend drama to arcane history, but wear thin with repetition, and occasionally strain credibility.

Before diving deep into the history, the book lures in readers with a love letter to northwest Ohio. The area counts a few notable pop-culture associations, from John Denver’s satirical cover of “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio” to Nixon’s 1968 campaign stop in Deshler to Jamie Farr’s Corporal Klinger on M*A*S*H, who promoted Toledo’s Mud Hens baseball and Tony Packo’s hot dogs to millions of viewers. Wensink also teases the good and bad in the region’s psychology, with its commitment to hard work, civic obligation, and egalitarianism, but also an extreme ambivalence that allows social and ecological horrors to sprout and fester. He memorably sums up this attitude as “A shrug, and a smile, and back to normal.” 

Like a classic Midwesterner, Wensink approaches the mystery of Ohio’s toxic algae with a somewhat naive, good-natured demeanor. While local townsfolk incorrectly blame nuclear waste from the nearby power station or industrial pollution from factories that have since left, he quickly discovers the first real culprit: fertilizer from local farms. But he is also hesitant to blame these farmers, who are only trying to feed folks and make a living. “Almost every farmer I’ve ever known from northwest Ohio is kind, hardworking, and decent… at their core these are good people. Not villains,” he writes. “Can someone be guilty and innocent? Be kind but still cause such destruction?”

Those farmers only plowed Ohio land because of an original sin, earlier back. As America industrialized in the late 1800s, this area was home not to farms or villages but a prehistoric jungle: the Great Black Swamp. A million-acre wetland of towering oaks, six-foot-deep mud, wolves, and malaria, it was arguably “the most inhospitable piece of land in the world.” It was also a massive inconvenience for the emerging trade routes between New York and Chicago. Business leaders sought to wipe out this ecology to pave the way for commerce. 

Wensink relishes the comic details of this transformation, as early attempts to tame the wilderness met laughable ends. Rail lines “buckled and twisted like wet spaghetti.”  Treacherous mud formed the “worst road in America”—a place where horses vanished into mudholes and travelers averaged a single mile per day. Hotels and bars made a steady living not just serving these commuters, but helping them out of accidents (some of which they set themselves).

Eventually, America’s relentless, maniacal, can-do spirit endured. In 1893, inventor James B. Hill sold the first prototype of his Buckeye Traction Ditcher. The automated machine scooped trenches and laid clay tiles simultaneously, creating an instant drainage system of V-shaped ditches that led into Lake Erie. By 1900, just seven years after the ditcher was introduced, farmers had converted the swamp from a dense wetland into “a million acres of bone dry farm fields.” The reckless lunge of industry drained the area’s vital “kidney” in less than a decade. While a lucky generation of farmers and speculators got to exploit some of the most nutrient-dense soil on the planet, their less fortunate descendants contend with the toxic inheritance of depleted land and poisoned water.

Between archival deep dives, Wensink surveys the region as it exists today. He visits several nature conservancies attempting to preserve and regenerate slivers of the Great Black Swamp. He drops into one-room library archives and cutting-edge research centers like the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. One of his most evocative finds is the VHS tape for a forgotten 1982 documentary, The Story of the Great Black Swamp, narrated by a grandfatherly host and with a soundtrack of eerie, brooding synthesizers. His childhood home in Deshler becomes a base for these trips, but curiously we don’t see much of this family dynamic. We learn that this home life is “stable” and his parents are “loving and permissive,” but we don’t hear their perspective as long-time residents about algae or pollution concerns, even as they treat him to morning coffees and home-cooked meals.

At a few cleverly arranged plot points, Wensink uses biological concepts to plumb his repressed psyche. After learning about vernal pools—seasonal depressions that fill with spring rains and become breeding grounds for amphibians—he considers the “dark, vernal pool in my brain… I don’t feel connected to this land in the way I thought I would upon returning.” During another visit to Goll Woods, home of the state’s oldest oak trees, he recalls finding a copy as a teen of Michael Azerrad’s Come As You Are in a Deshler library, a book about Nirvana that became his own vernal pool: a temporary refuge that nurtured his self-discovery as an outsider.

Despite these intimate glimpses, the personal narrative can feel sparse as the book progresses, hovering around the edges. There are brief mentions of his crumbling marriage, but without any scenes and few specific details, it’s hard to feel the full emotional impact of this rupture. Environmental memoirs often revolve around moments of seismic change. Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge interweaves grief over her mother’s cancer diagnosis and death with the flooding of the Great Salt Lake. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass blends Indigenous knowledge with personal reflections on motherhood and reciprocity with nature. Many books lead with this personal frame, as in Connie May Fowler’s A Million Fragile Bones, which devotes its first act to her refuge retreat to Florida’s Alligator Point, before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill arrives like the monster in a disaster film, forcing her to move yet again.

Finally, roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, Wensink finds an inspired moment to reckon directly with his trauma. Just as he sees firsthand, in his present reporting, a refrigerator full of preserved toxic algae samples, “the grossest collection of leftovers you’ve ever seen,” he opens up about the marriage. He details their young love as college sweethearts, their move to Portland and then back to her hometown in Kentucky to raise their son, and the string of compromises and ruptures that followed. The newfound distance of his Ohio reporting trips helps him realize a potential incompatibility between them:

There’s a radar in my heart, leading me back to the comforts of my NW Ohio and its mindset, even as I see its flaws so clearly. That was something my ex-wife and I did not share. How could she? Why would she? It’s like this frame of mind was just as toxic to her as it was to me. We were like two inert elements that were completely harmless, maybe even beneficial on our own—but when we combined we were phosphorus and lake water.

Wensink’s diagnosis of his marriage echoes a broader critique of the region’s obsession with “straightness.” Initially, straight lines were a tool for survival and the “herculean task of civilizing the Great Black Swamp.” During the algae scare of 2014, communities’ “stubborn resilience” allowed residents to work together and endure without panic. But this hardheaded attitude also curdles into an “extreme ambivalence” and “defense tool for shirking attention.” Even more than most pragmatic Americans, northwest Ohioans often keep their heads down, avoiding talk of systemic causes or questions about what counts as “progress.” In seeking to “eliminate abnormalities” from the land to support business as usual, the region discarded the unique inheritance of a major wetland ecosystem for a “bone dry” landscape that is now “the worst place in the world for all this [fertilizer] runoff.”

While America’s Gilded Age industrialists drained the swamp, a cast of more recent villains have continued to squeeze its remaining life for maximum profits. In the 1960s, a dubious mix of industry interests pressured Ohio farmers to maximize corn production. Goofy brochures with a cartoon corncob like an “unwitting Tony the Tiger of ecological collapse” reflected the era’s lack of serious concern over potential environmental issues. Studies funded by the USDA and Ohio State University urged farmers to stop diversifying their output and increase their yields over 400 percent by focusing solely on corn, the most fertilizer-hungry crop. At this time, Lake Erie was already known as “America’s Dead Sea,” choked with sewage from hundreds of local industries.

Ironically, Ohio’s dire ecology sparked the beginning of modern environmental regulation. When the Cuyahoga River caught fire in June 1969, it led to renewed federal protections of the country’s aquatic ecosystems. Despite President Nixon’s veto, Congress passed the Clean Water Act into law in 1972. But the rapid success of subsequent cleanup efforts became its own risk, creating a false sense of achievement that opened the door to regressive action. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan gutted funding for Great Lakes aid. His EPA administrator, Ann Gorsuch—mother of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch—fought to revert the CWA’s powers back to the Rivers and Harbors Acts that Congress passed during the 1890s.

The book’s layered history exposes the wicked task of assigning guilt for such sprawling environmental sins. From Ohio’s early industrious farmers to the corn-obsessed USDA officials to the land speculators who profited from drainage, who should pay for the costs of killing the Great Black Swamp? Wensink could have probed this question further. Later in the narrative, his tone sharpens in disgust at our collective idiocy in plundering nature without care for consequences. He names the obvious villains, but shies away from untangling threads he himself raises. While noting the Ohio State studies that pushed corn monoculture, he never probes the conflicts of interest and funding sources behind them. Nor does he explore how pesticides, by depleting soil fertility, perpetuate the very dependence on fertilizers. (Or the fact that it’s often the same corporations manufacturing both poison and antidote.)

After so much toxicity—ecological and personal—Wensink arrives at something unexpected: hope. This positive turn has become an unofficial requirement in environmental nonfiction, as publishers struggle to reach burned-out readers tired of apocalyptic narratives. Sometimes these “solutions” can feel bolted on after the fact. Even the supremely dire cautionary tale of David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth includes a late pivot to how “we can still act” after 200 pages of doom. Sometimes, the author stumbles into a happy-ish ending, thanks to ongoing efforts from activists and scientists. In her recent history of forever chemicals, They Poisoned the World, journalist Mariah Blake traces her story through the small town of Hoosick Falls, New York, as it wins major settlements against local manufacturers—landmark victories that may serve as a model for PFAS-affected communities across the country.

The optimistic ending here feels natural and well-earned. Readers get a survey of recent actions to address pollution, from proposals for a Lake Erie Bill of Rights to bans on factory farming to nonprofit groups working to buy and “rewild” vast swaths of land. In his final reporting trip, Wensink arrives at Forrest Woods—properly dressed, this time, in tall boots and leather gloves—to set traps for salamanders, an indicator species whose growing presence signals improved ecosystem health. To save this Great Lake, and countless other critical wetlands, we must learn how to un-drain the swamp and invite various life forms back in. Much like Ohio’s tireless conservationists, this book itself is an attempt to “rewild” a vital piece of American eco-history. It is a call for readers to research their own hometowns’ forgotten environmental histories that have planted ticking public health time bombs across the land. But before that, it is also simply a reminder to pay attention. “I never knew there were so many surprises in my old home,” Wensink writes in the closing pages. “Wonders everywhere, hidden under the surface.” The real test of The Great Black Swamp is whether it can make people uncomfortable enough to stop shrugging.