Take this in for a moment:
What you see is a system in a rare sisterhood of water bodies. In its family, the deep and ancient Lake Baikal in Siberia and the long and strange Lake Tanganyika in Africa. A sisterhood of massive inland seas of fresh water.
Right there in that picture, 20% of the whole world's above ground fresh water supply. 6,000,000,000,000,000 gallons. That's six quadrillion. Enough to sink the continental US under nine and a half feet of water which sometimes, SOMETIMES, I have to admit on my grumpy days doesn't sound like a half bad use of six quadrillion gallons. But I digress.
Several months ago I watched the Planet Earth series on the Discovery Channel. They had a whole episode dedicated to fresh water systems. They talked about the Amazon. They talked about Lake Baikal. They talked about Lake Victoria.
But nothing about the Great Lakes.
Not a word. Not even an honorable mention (that I recall, and I waited eagerly for my lake to get some mention).
This kinda bothered me.
I mean, what? Are they too obvious?
Admittedly, the Great Lakes don't have the bio-diversity of Lake Baikal. And they don't have the bizarre offshoots of a single species like lake Tanganyika. But the Great Lakes are a fragile ecosystem and they do contain threatened species.
I don't want to focus too much on the snub of one mass produced television show, but to illustrate a larger point. If the purpose of a show is to educate people about ecosystems that need to be preserved and protected, we do have such systems right here that we, personally can Do Something About. And yet they're not exotic enough. So we end up knowing more about the plight of the giant panda than, say, the gigantic and now rare lake sturgeon.
Rare and endangered always seems to be someplace on the other side of the world instead of right here in our own lakes and rivers and forests. Michigan used to have a native population of woodland caribou. No more. Buffalo once thundered across our plains. No more. We flattened and shot through our own continent and damn near once regarded the Great Lakes as nothing more than a gigantic fishery put here for our own pleasure. And now we want to tell other parts of the world how important it is preserve their natural heritage?
Because, you know, we've seen the light...Now that the view from a trans American flight shows an almost unbroken chain of farms and cities.
We create shows that tell us of Other Places that have important and breathtaking wildlife to be preserved. They tell us how uncertain their future is because Those People Over There are over-farming, slashing and burning, dumping stuff into the lakes and streams, over-fishing for sustenance. But of course it's all happening right here as well.
The fragile and wondrous isn't always someplace else.
Yeah. I'm pretty burned that the Great Lakes have been taken for granted as a globally unique North American treasure. We allow ships with un-cleaned balast water from other parts of the world to tramp through and introduce invasive species. We entertain the notion of bottling and exporting water from this system to other parts of the world, sending water out of the water basin that will never ever return. We dump our sewage and industrial waste into it. We riddle it with tons of lead from live-ammo shooting practice for the Navy and Coast Guard.
And a lot of it is still happening. The Great Lakes will, at best, over the course of hundreds of years reach a new equilibrium with the hundreds of new species we've introduced minus the ones we've pushed to the brink.
I don't know why the Great Lakes haven't rated an honorable mention in the endangered and spectacular waterways and aquatic ecosystems of the world. Maybe they're too close. All I know is, I've had it up to "here" with those who take the Great Lakes for granted. And by "here" I mean, say, nine and a half feet up.