Even Bigger than the Great Lakes: On Nancy Langston’s "Sustaining Lake Superior"

Nancy Langston | Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World | Yale University Press | 2017 | 292 Pages

There’s nothing regional historians love to debate more than the boundaries of their region. This tendency has been evident in the recent renaissance of Midwestern history. Scholars have been working on roundtables, conferences, and volumes dedicated to the Midwest’s western border (where does the Prairie end and the Plains begin?) and its eastern border (does the Midwest start at Ohio’s eastern edge?). Answers often involve the environment and climate or political and cultural history. The Midwestern border that most interests my students at Illinois’s Augustana College, though, is the line between the “North” and the “Midwest.” Is there an upper Midwest and a lower Midwest or are these two separate regions? Are the Twin Cities the capital of the North, just as Chicago reigns supreme for the lower Midwest? Does the North begin in the Northwoods of Wisconsin and Minnesota? Is the Upper Peninsula really that different from the rest of Michigan?

I went into Nancy Langston’s recent history Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World with an expectation that it would describe the dividing line between the North and the Midwest. I assumed that the book would explain just how different the other Great Lakes, with their long history of industrial waste, look when compared to the cleaner, wilder, colder, and more remote lake to the north—Lake Superior. Instead, I came away from Langston’s book with a new understanding of Lake Superior’s complex relationship with the other Great Lakes. Their environmental history not only connects them to each other, but to other areas around the world.

Although I have always thought of the Great Lakes as a key component of midwestern geography, Lake Superior, like three of the other Great Lakes, straddles the U.S.-Canadian border. Hence debates about the lakes’ environmental regulations involve two nations and a lot of different localities. Langston also points out that local pollution from near these lakes can spread globally, while the Great Lakes similarly receive contaminants from industries located much farther away. Not only does Lake Superior get mercury-laden dust from factories across North America, but this pollution also migrates there from Chinese coal plants. Even though Canada and the United States banned the pesticide toxaphene in the 1990s, it still floats from African and Russian fields and into Lake Superior. Some chapters do more to track the transnational nature of pollutants than others, but the incredible and unpredictable spread of toxins certainly becomes apparent.

Although the other Great Lakes, like Lake Erie, are more readily associable with historic pollution, Lake Superior has weathered its fair share of industrial development. Mercury washed into the lake from paper mills and pulp mills. Iron mining, which shifted to massive open-pits in the mid-twentieth century, produced troubling effluents. Ironically, attempts to control nature in Lake Superior often caused more problems. Nutrients coming from the region’s farms and cities fed algal blooms in the lake. To kill the algae, people introduced poisons like copper sulfate and arsenic. Others sought to kill native fish species that anglers didn’t like with a combination of pine oil and chlorine, only later worrying about the repercussions for human health.

Langston shows that the consequences of these pollutants were not and are not evenly borne. Although the lake’s fish population looks healthier today than a few decades ago, consumption advisories still exist for most fish—a problem of particular concern for First Nations and tribal peoples, as their cultural practices dictate significant fish consumption. Different types of human bodies also respond to toxins in different ways—pregnant women and their developing fetuses, for instance, have faced more serious consequences from dioxins, PCBs, and DDT than other people’s bodies.

One major through-line in Langston’s history involves North Americans’ changing understanding of pollution. At first, most scientists and policymakers subscribed to the view that “dilution is the solution to pollution.” They believed that a big body of water like Lake Superior could absorb contaminants if they were spread out. Others claimed that pollutants were stationary. In the middle of the twentieth century, Minnesota’s Reserve Mining Company argued that waste from its operations would stay in place, right where it was dumped in Lake Superior, despite increasing evidence to the contrary.

By the 1950s and 1960s, scientists had recognized that currents carried pollutants far afield. New concepts rose to prominence, including biomagnification, or the process by which the concentrations of substances grow as they move up the food chain (e.g., a bigger fish eats smaller fish, thus concentrating pollutants from them in its own body). These new ideas about pollution served as federal weapons. In the 1970s, politicians like Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson fought to ensure that Lake Superior wouldn’t face the same kinds of pollution as Lakes Erie and Michigan. Pollution limits on traditional sources, like phosphorous, reduced the algal blooms that often plague lakes.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a more sophisticated ecosystem approach to lake management had taken hold. More stakeholders were engaged, and scientists recognized that many of Lake Superior’s toxins, like mercury and toxaphene, now came from far away atmospheric currents. Meanwhile, storms could easily dredge up “legacy contaminants” from industrial work in the past.

According to Langston, this new approach achieved mixed results. The recognition of ecological and societal complexities often provided excuses. Industries could delay regulations by calling for more research or community discussions, while the U.S. EPA and Environment Canada could cite distant pollutants as a reason to reject actual regulations on local industries.

Langston’s history provides lessons for today. Minnesota is currently debating a proposal by the PolyMet Mining Corporation for a copper-nickel sulfide mine in the state’s northeast corner. The open-pit mine and its waste dam would sit near a wetland that drains into the St. Louis River and then into Lake Superior. Proponents celebrate the significant economic impact the project might bring and note that PolyMet has been working with the state and EPA to analyze the mine’s impact. Plus, these metals are critical to our modern lifestyle—nickel alloys are in our mobile phones and medical equipment, while copper shows up in construction, energy systems, and cars.

Critics of this mine project, however, worry about the accumulation of toxins. They cite the fact that Minnesota never required a separate health impact study about the possible release of mercury, lead, and arsenic into the environment and then into people’s bodies. And yet again, tribal peoples might face the worst consequences—the lands of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa sit downstream from the mine site. It’s also not clear that Canadians get a real say in the matter. As Langston shows in her book, pollution doesn’t obey national boundaries.

Those looking to better understand the long-term consequences of additional contaminants in the Great Lakes would, therefore, be well served by reading Sustaining Lake Superior. What happens in the upper Midwest, or the North, or whatever you want to call it, affects the rest of the world, and vice versa. Nancy Langston guides us toward this kind of interconnected thinking.

This review is part of our series on Midwestern history, a collection of reviews on texts of historical significance in the region. Writers interested in contributing to this series are encouraged to contact its editor, Jacob Bruggeman.