Science Friday - Great Lakes Book Club Wrap-Up, California Groundwater. Feb 14, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

The Great Lakes hold 20% of the world’s surface drinking water, with Lake Superior holding half of that alone. The lakes stretch from New York to Minnesota, and cover a surface area of nearly 100,000 square miles—large enough to cover the entire state of Colorado. And they’re teeming with life. Fish, phytoplankton, birds, even butterflies call the lakes home for some portion of their lives. But not all is calm in the waters. In The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, journalist Dan Egan tells the story of the changes that have unbalanced these ecosystems since the St. Lawrence Seaway was first made navigable for cargo ships and, with them, invasive species, like sea lampreys, alewives, quagga mussels and, perhaps soon, Asian carp. The Science Friday Book Club has spent a month swimming in Great Lakes science. We’ve pondered the value of native fish to ecosystem resiliency, the threats facing people’s access to clean drinking water, and the influence of invasive species. SciFri producer and Book Club captain Christie Taylor, Wayne State University ecologist Donna Kashian, and Wisconsin-based journalist Peter Annin discuss potential paths to a healthy future, from ongoing restoration efforts to protective policies and new research. Dennis Hutson’s rows of alfalfa, melons, okra and black-eyed peas are an oasis of green in the dry terrain of Allensworth, an unincorporated community in rural Tulare County. Hutson, currently cultivating on 60 acres, has a vision for many more fields bustling with jobs. “This community will forever be impoverished and viewed by the county as a hamlet,” he says, “unless something happens that can create an economic base. That’s what I’m trying to do.” While he scours his field for slender pods of ripe okra, three workers, community members he calls “helpers,” mind the irrigation station: 500-gallon water tanks and gurgling ponds at the head of each row, all fed by a 720-foot-deep groundwater well. Just like for any grower, managing water is a daily task for Hutson and his helpers. That’s why he’s concerned about what could happen under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, the state’s overhaul of groundwater regulations. Among other goals, the law sets out to eliminate the estimated 1.8 million acre-feet in annual deficit the state racks up each year by pumping more water out of underground aquifers than it can replenish. Hutson worries small farmers may not have the resources to adapt to the potentially strict water allocations and cutbacks that might be coming. Their livelihoods and identities may be at stake. “You grow things a certain way, and then all of a sudden you don’t have access to as much water as you would like in order to grow what you grow,” he says, “and now you’re kind of out of sorts.” Read the rest on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, paying respect to the world's largest bodies of fresh water as the Sci-Fry Book Club wraps up its dive into Dan Egan's The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. But first, remember that strange snowman-shaped object in space, formerly known as MU69, then they briefly named it Ultimate Tully, and now it's called Aracoth. A lot of names going in there. You'll recall it was visited by the New Horizon Space Probe back about a year ago in January 2019. And what they found is, well, spoiler alert, they found that it's old and cold. Babita Sa'es, Saha is senior editor at Popular Science, and she's here to review the findings published in the journal Science. Welcome back to Science Friday.

Hi, I really happy Valentine's Day. Oh, thank you. Thank you. You're the first ones. So let's talk about what's in the news. this week about the Kuiper Belt object that looks sort of like a snowman. Right. So as you said, we got our first good look at Arakoth, which is the name of this object,

last year after the New Horizon Space Prope fly by. And some people say it looks like a snowman. It's this weird, flattened, two-part shaped object. And I think it personally... I think it's a snowman. You think it's a snowman? It's like two round things bumping together. Yeah, it looks something like that.

So bumping, we will come back to that in a little bit. I think it looks like a badly baked donut, but that's just a personal reflection. So New Horizons, the data collected from this flyby, you know, it took a while to be beam back to NASA. And just this week, the research team that's combing through this data published three separate papers that look into. what the origins of Arakath possibly are. So like you said, it's one of the most ancient objects that we've studied in space, probably dating back to 4.5 billion years when our solar system first formed. And so looking at the origins, there were two competing theories.

First, the scientists tested, could Aeroch could Aeroch be a result of what we call hierarchical accretion, which is essentially you have disparate parts from different regions of the solar system colliding at very high speeds. And when the dust clears, you end up with a planet. A snowman, idea. Or a snowman. Now, Ayrgyz isn't a planet. It's called what we say a planetismal. So it's a very undergrown planet. But these two different lobes of Arakoth, they're so perfectly intact and undamaged. So scientists are like, how could that happen if, you know, we had all these materials?

Yeah. It would be smashed apart and all kinds of stuff would happen. Exactly. So they tried out this newer theory, which is called cloud collapse. And essentially, when gravity pulls together the gases and dust from a nebula, they squeeze into this clump that spins together slowly. And, And from this, we have various pebbles that clumped together and potentially created the two different parts of Erykoth. And rather than colliding at a high speed, they had this slow dance where they bumped into each other and then became this one unified orbiting object. Cool. I like that. Yeah, it's pretty fun. And the scientists actually simulated this with models, and they saw that once they had the objects brushing together at speeds as slow as nine miles per hour, that's how they ended up with this perfect, although somewhat misshapen, formed body.

So it's more like a fender bender than a giant head-on collision. Yes, exactly. But do we know what it's made out of? Did we find out? Yeah, so the surface is largely frozen methanol. And then underneath that, we have some really complex organic compounds, which give it the reddish glow. There might be water down there. New Horizons wasn't quite able to figure that out.

But, you know, that's always the existential question with the solar system. We love those kinds of questions. Let's move on to another topic. The world has been keeping a close eye on the coronavirus. outbreak, and it now has a new name, right? Yeah, so for a while there, we had been calling the coronavirus or this specific type of coronavirus, the Wuhan coronavirus, because that's the city that's sort of been under siege in China from this disease.

But the World Health Organization this week announced that they'll be transitioning over to this new name. COVID-2019, which stands for coronavirus identified in 2019. And the whole movement behind this is to prevent stigmas around the city of Wuhan because we've seen in previous outbreaks such as MERS and SARS and swine flu. There are some real economic impacts that can precipitate from, you know, the world being gripped by anxiety from these diseases. So the COVID-2019 specifically refers to the disease and not the virus. The virus has its own name, which is something long like SARS-Cove number two really rolls off the tongue.

But there is this differentiation between the two. I know that you just got back from a visit to Mexico and where the Monarch butterfly season is in full effect. What was that, what was that like? You see the photos, you see the videos, people tell you their accounts and you still can't, you still don't know what to expect until you hike up this like mile long path with, you know, people selling blackberries and strawberries along the sides, tons of families from the local area and tourists walking up there with you. And you finally get maybe like 4,000 feet into the Santa Marta Mountains. and it's just like you see the fluttering wings through the air, and every tree trunk and branch is just covered in orange. There's no space for the butterflies to even land.

That's why it sounds like to me such a sad story that two environmentalists working to protect the butterfly habitat have been murdered in Mexico, right? Right. So last month, authorities in the state, Micho Khan found Omero Gomez-Gonzalez. Zalas, dead. He had been a long-time advocate for this butterfly reserve, which is constantly threatened by logging and also illegal clearing because of the booming avocado industry. So Omero and this other activist who was found this month murdered Raul Hernandez-Romero.

they had both been kind of leading this community effort to patrol the reserve and also raise awareness about these illegal activities to protect the butterfly habitat. We'll have to keep following that story. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Yeah. Perbita Sahah is a senior editor at Popular Science. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. For WWO, St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance.

California Central Valley is one of the nation's prime agricultural areas. You've got strawberries, leafy greens, almonds, grapes. It's all grown there, and it all relies on water. And if you've seen the recent Amazon series of Goliath or the classic film, Chinatown, you know just how volatile water and water rights can be in the Golden State, which is why a California state law called the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act has some farmers, among others, concerned. The law recently went into effect, and it aims to eventually bring into balance the water that goes into the state's groundwater supplies and the water that comes out of them. Join me now to talk about the law called Sigma is Kerry Klein, reporter at Valley Public Radio in Fresno.

Welcome back to Science Friday. Hi there, Ira. So give me a thumbnail. the overall point behind this bill? Well, you summarized it pretty well, actually, but essentially for decades, California groundwater has been almost entirely unregulated. And in many places, the amount we use is completely unmeasured.

And so the goal is to finally kind of bring some accountability to that and then bring this use into sustainability so that we're as close to imbalance as possible or in balance as possible in flow and outflow of water out of these underground aquifers. So how is that plan to happen? So it'll take a period of a couple of decades, and it's relatively complicated, but the state, you know, rather than deciding to, you know, deciding on high to do, you know, we will do such and such five steps, the state has decided to allow for kind of local control. So it divided, you know, the entire state into basins and then subbasins.

And ultimately, there are, you know, close to 300 local water agencies that got established. most of them are run by agricultural companies like the irrigation districts, and they all get to create their own plans for how they'll come into sustainability. And then they'll coordinate kind of regionally to make sure they're meeting the requirements of the law. So what's the problem with the farmers? They're upset about this? Well, a lot of people are upset. The farmers especially, because agriculture is by far the greatest water user by volume anyway.

and this will really, I mean, by all accounts, this is going to be huge for the agricultural community. And so there was one big organization that came out with an estimate that as many as, well, as many as a half a million acres could go fallow. And that's just in kind of one region in the San Joaquin Valley. That's about a 10th, 10% of agricultural land that's huge. And that's kind of a conservative estimate even. And so folks, yeah, they're really concerned that their acreage will be in there and that they'll have to do really draconian measures to reduce their water use. Or would they go to sell their property? Yes, and many have. There aren't really, you know, tabulations of how many are already, but I've certainly met a couple farmers who

have sold their land, who are thinking about it, and even those who have been longtime family farmers for generations. But really, I mean, the worry cross cuts kind of all-sized farms as well, and especially, you know, there are a lot of small farmers, many of whom are minorities, many of whom lease their land, you know, so there could be kind of impacts all around. All right. So we'll have to wait and see how this shapes out, Carrie. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Carrie Klein, a reporter at Valley Public Radio in Fresno, California.

Thank you for taking time to be with us today. We're going to take a break. When we come back, one last longing look at the Great Lakes with the Science Friday Book Club. Maybe you're a book club member. You want to talk about it. Give us a call 844-724-825. You can also tweet us at SciFri. We are reading our book, Dan Egan's The Death and Life of the Great Lakes,

the largest set of freshwater, well, 20% of all the freshwater in the earth is locked up in the Great Lakes. That's something to think about. We'll do it after the break. Stay with it. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. You have memorized the names of all five Great Lakes, right?

easy to remember them, HOMES, is the acronym, if you have trouble remembering. The SciFri Book Club has been on a deep dive into these enormous bodies of freshwater for the last month, reading Dan Egan's The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. And in that time, we have learned about how invasive species have reshaped the lakes ecosystems, shifted fish populations, and on Lake Erie threatened the drinking water. So the time has come to close the book on this story. For now, producer Christy Taylor, Captain of the Good Ship Book Club, proud Wisconsin. I'm here to do that. Welcome back, Christy.

Happy Valentine's Day, Ira. Thank you. I heard you complaining just a moment ago. I wish you were happy Valentine's Day. Yeah, well, thank you. So speaking of love, one thing that I've loved about this book club is how many people have a beloved memory of the Great Lakes, including our author Dan Egan's dad, Dick Egan. I'm Dick Egan, author Dan Egan's father. In the book, Dan talks about how big the lakes are

and how it's really hard for anyone who doesn't live around or near them or has never seen them to imagine the size. When Dan was about three or four years old, I was a sailor. I was just learning to sail, and we were sailing across Green Bay from the Dorr County Peninsula, Wisconsin to Upper Michigan. We encountered a very, very large storm, huge waves. My wife was hollering at me.

Everything was bouncing around. and we wondered where Dan was. He was down in the cabin lying fast asleep. So Lake Michigan has also been a huge part of my life. Last summer, I was deliriously excited to show up to my partner the first time they came to Wisconsin to visit my people. But to my disappointment, there was so much fog on the lake that day that my claim that you can't even see the other side

was kind of impossible to prove. We both admitted the fog was eerily beautiful. but so we've been reading about the struggles of people in the Great Lakes to reduce the harms of nutrient gobbling invasive muscles, restore native fish, and protect the remaining native species from a new invader, the Asian carp. And in closing the death and life of the Great Lakes, Dan Egan himself turns to a beloved memory. His son, John, catching his first fish on Lake Michigan. It's a lake trout, one of the species first decimated by the arrival of sea lampreys a hundred years ago. In ending the book, Dan chooses to be hopeful. The fish are beginning to eat invasive species.

species, many, many people are invested in protecting the lakes. Things could turn out okay. But what else might happen in the coming years? And what kind of work will sustaining the lakes take from us? Here to talk about that. My guests, Dr. Donna Cashin, Professor of Aquatic Ecology at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Welcome back, Donna. Hi, Ira and Christy. And Peter Annan, director of the Mary Griggs-Bergs-Berk Center for Freshwater Ecology at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, author of the Great Lakes Water Wars also. Welcome back, Peter. Good to be with you.

Thank you both for being back. And listeners, we want to hear from you. What do you see in the future, whether good or bad for the Great Lakes? Are there laws or changes you want to see? Our number, 844-724-8255. That's 844-Sai Talk, or you can tweet us at SciFry. So Peter, Donna, again, welcome back. The first thing, since we're reading a book, is I want to hear what you thought about the book itself.

Was it good, Peter? Oh, yeah, it's a great book. I mean, Dan and I have been friends for a long time. and we get together regularly to talk about these wonderful lakes that we love to write about. And there's a lot of complex, scientific, and geopolitical things going on, this massive, you know, binational ecosystems, as Ivers says, has 20% of all the fresh surface water on the planet. And the challenge for those of us who are journalists is to help translate that in a way that non-scientific, non-technical people who love the lakes can understand and engage on the policies that impact this.

ecosystem. And Donna, what about you? What were your, was there a chapter that you learned the most from as a scientist? Well, I've been doing research on the Great Lakes for 20 years, and I learned a ton from this book. I'm not a fish person, so I learned a lot about fish. I wasn't either. But what really captured me the most is essentially the beginning of the book, where it goes

into the history of the Great Lakes and ties it to other construction of waterways around the world. I found the history melded into the sense. science, fascinating, and he did an amazing job putting it all together so everyone could love and read about the Great Lakes. But things have been changing. I mean, this book was put out in 2016, and things have changed a little bit since then, Peter. You even just had an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday about a problem that Dan didn't get a chance to cover, which is high water levels. Tell us more about that. Yeah, so we're seeing a lot of dynamics, and Dan did get into the high water levels.

It's just even gotten more dramatic since his book came out in 2017. So, yeah, 2017, we break an all-time high-water level record on Lake Ontario. Then we break it again in 2019. Lake Erie last year breaks an all-time high-water level three times, May, June, July. And then the other lakes combined broke, you know, total about 10-monthly-level records. And so what we see, and then Dan sort of got into this, but it's just been expanding ever since. we're seeing a new era of extremes in the Great Lakes region, higher, highs, lower lows, longer drought periods or low water level periods, and more rapid rises when Lake Ontario broke its all-time high water level record in 2017. The lake shot up more than four vertical feet in six months.

That's an amazing, never risen so far, so fast before. And so that's what we're seeing and a lot of conversation about climate change in the Great Lakes these days. Yeah, I was going to ask if we're tracing all this back to climate change. So what happens when the lake levels vary this much? What happens to the people living alongside the Lake Peter? Yeah, so the background, and again, this gets back to what Dan did so well in his book, is trying to translate the complexity. So the Great Lakes have always varied naturally significantly over time. The difference between the all-time high, all-time low water level, and most of the lakes is more than six vertical feet.

Humans, that drives humans crazy. They put their peer in or their marina and they want water level to be the same all the time. But the natural ecosystem in the Great Lakes region thrives on that variability. But again, what we see is with these extremes, the ecosystem and the developed structure, infrastructure in the Great Lakes region is being changed. We have millions of dollars in property damage in the last year in places like Chicago, South Shore of Lake Ontario, all throughout the state of Michigan, Wisconsin, et cetera. So we've had several applications for emergency assistant declarations to the federal government from places like Illinois and Wisconsin just in the last 10 days or so.

Donna, as the ecologist in the house, Peter just mentioned that the ecosystems thrive on variability. Is too much variability a bad thing, or where does this come from? Variability really depends on the situation. And what we're seeing is these huge fluxes in species and water levels, and the water, they all interplay together. We've seen new species come in since the book was written, three new invasive species in the Great Lakes. Since the conclusion of the book, they haven't wrecked as much havoc as things like the lamprey or the zebra muscle yet. But we're going to continue with climate change and invasive species, these extreme water levels. We're going to be seeing the system needing to adapt to them.

And I do think the Great Lakes are incredibly resilient, but I do think the onslaught of all these things at once are creating it very different, making it very difficult for the lakes to stabilize. I think we're going to see them start to, but then another insult comes in, whether invasive species and the fluctuations. of the water levels is going to be really testing on the system. What about just warming waters, too? I mean, Dan has a whole chapter about just the temperature changes under climate change as well and how less surface ice in the wintertime, for example. That one contributes both to water levels, as Dan mentioned in his book, that without the ice cover, we're not having as much evaporation,

and that contributes to the higher water levels. But what we've also seen with the new species that came in, Dan speaks a lot about ballast water. Well, the new species that came in since the book have all come into the United States through ballast water, but they've been southern species, and they're species that thrive on warmer water and salinity variances. And so they have made their way, even though it wasn't ballast water, that brought them into the Great Lakes. It brought them into the country, but not the Great Lakes. These were southern species.

One of them was from rice fields in Louisiana, and suddenly we're seeing them pop up in the Great Lakes. And so we're going to see warmer, adapted species occurring more often in the Great Lakes. So what about those Asian carp, Peter? Yeah, well, I think as we talked about the last time, there have been three, there have been more than 180 species and non-native species introduced to the Great Lakes, but the three big game changers have been the sea lamp ray, the Dresenid muscles, Quagga and zebra mussels. And now that, you know, the big issue now is Asian carp, which have transformed big sections of the Mississippi River watershed, especially the Illinois River.

The whole ecosystem is on it's been turned on its head. And they're knocking on the door at the Chicago diversion, which artificially connects the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds. And there's a huge fear in the Great Lakes region that those fish could get in and breeding populations and transform the ecosystem. The most vibrant fishery in the basin is in Lake Erie, $7 billion fishery basin wide. And so this is not just an environmental story. It's also an economic story, the threat that the carp could pose. When we say knocking on the door, and I think, Donna, you've been a little bit more pessimistic when you've talked about this. But there's, you know, there's eDNA evidence that maybe they're already in the lakes.

Donna, how do you feel about where they're already at, I guess, but also what actually could happen if they, if they, get established? Why are they such bad news? We've seen two things. We've seen the carp on the on the Lake Michigan size that are knocking at the door that we're getting these hits of E-DNA and that has been, especially during the time period of the book, a huge focus. But since the book was written, we've seen more and more attention that has been focused on grass carp, which is another one of the Asian carp and the potential invasion into Lake Erie. So we know they're reproducing in Sandusky in the Mami River and the tributaries of Lake Erie. We're seeing fertilized eggs.

We're seeing spawning occurring. And we're still refusing to commit to say that they are established in these areas right now. And that's a decision by the Asian carp regional committee to make that designation. They're still calling it prevention instead of established. So I think we're on the cusp of that designation, seeing we've got young and we've got reproduction. And once they get in, whether it's, it's the western side or the eastern side, they're going to have different things. I, in my personal opinion, I don't think they're going to, in the Great Lakes proper,

I don't think we have the food resources to support the populations in huge numbers. But what I think is going to happen is they're going to move into the areas where they do have higher quality food, more and higher quality food in the embayments like Green Bay, Saginaw Bay, in those areas, and they're going to wreck havoc in those regions, disrupting the entire ecosystem. And unfortunately, in those embayments, they're going to move into the tributaries. And in the tributaries, they're going to be rich in resources. And so they essentially can pose to invade the entire states in addition to the Great Lakes proper. So you're worried, Donna.

Is that fair to say? Yeah. Oh, sorry, Donna, go on. But I do think that, like we're seeing with the zebra mussels and fish adapting to eating them, We eventually, I will think the system's resilient and we will reach some sort of balance. But in the meantime, there's going to be economic consequences and disruption of the entire food web. Just to remind everyone, I'm Christy Taylor, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about the Great Lakes, recovery, and what lies in the future.

I'm going to take a quick call from we've got Anne in St. Croix, Minnesota. So sorry, Anne. Go ahead. Yes, hello. Thank you for having me. My major concern in northern Minnesota is the proposal to have a foreign corporation open a copper sulfide mine, which is in the Lake Superior watershed. It threatens to pollute some of our cleanest water in the world, our cleanest body of beautiful, fresh water with acid mine drainage, which is impossible to clean up. So water quality is a key concern, and our state is this copper sulfide mine is in the permitting process. So it's a major national and international concern. Thank you.

Thanks, Ann. Peter, what does the pollution frontier look like for the Great Lakes right now? I mean, we're no longer in the days of rivers catching on fire, but people are concerned about other potential disasters. Yeah, well, this mine in northern Minnesota, my proposal in northern Minnesota, which has a long, long, history of iron mining. And what's going on there now is this hard rock mine that has a sulfide potential component, has really tearing the community apart in northern Minnesota, both in the Great Lakes watershed and up in the Boundary Waters in the Quedico. And we're seeing a lot of mines and my proposals pop up all around the Great Lakes region, Northern Great Lakes,

Midlake Superior Watershed on both sides of the international boundary. And I was flying in from Great Lakes Days a few years ago. And there was a hearing on this mine in Duluth. And I went to the hearing. There were a thousand people in the room. And they had bust in miners from the Iron Range of Northern Minnesota, environmentalists from the Twin Cities. And there were so many people there, you had to take a lottery to ask a question. And so it shows just how emotional this issue is. And it's really tearing communities apart in northern Minnesota. And Donna, in your neck of the woods, there are some other things that you've been worried about. I know you've mentioned pharmaceuticals and microplastics.

What's on your, in a couple minutes before our break, what's on your worry list, I guess? I guess increasing just pollution loads in general. We are also seeing increased mining in the UP of Michigan, too, and it's really hard because these are communities that have a history of mining and then to bring in different types of mining that cause a different type of pollution. We have PFOs creeping up. They've been around for 70 years. But we didn't acknowledge or understand the impacts from them or understand how distributed they were in the environment.

Theo Coburn, who wrote a book called Our Stolen Future in the 90s, outlined a bunch of impacts of pollution in the Great Lakes. And one of them that I think we're going to worry about a lot. In 1998, Lake Ontario, we started seeing intersex fish from chemicals that were endocrine disruptors. And a lot of these compounds are endocrine disruptors, and they have impacts. greater than just mortality and impact reproductive systems, impact are already impacted fisheries. They have resulted in pollution has shut down commercial fisheries around the Great Lakes. Now we're seeing, we just keep getting new contaminant and new contaminant identified,

and the new ones are nanoparticles not too long ago. Now we're hearing a lot about microplastics, which we don't know the impacts. I know our lab is doing some research. We find them in the fish guts, the stomachs of all of the fish we look. at. And we know they impair filter feeding in zebra and quagga muscles, which some people may think it was good, but there's other species that are filter feeders, and we don't want to hang those. We should definitely get back to that, but I need to cut you off for the moment. We have a break we need to take. Yeah, we have to take a break. This is a great conversation. We'll be back

with the more on the future of the Great Lakes with the producer, Christy Taylor, journalist, Peter Annen, and Ecology Professor, Dr. Donna Cashin. Our number 844-724-825, if you want to phone in, You can also tweet us at Cy Fry. Tell us about what concerns you about the Great Lakes and reading the book. Lots of interesting stuff to come. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. Here with Science Friday Book Club captain Christy Taylor talking about Dan Egan's book, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. Christy? Yeah, so we're talking about the future of the Great Lakes after centuries of environmental challenges and change with our guest, Peter Annen, director of the Mary Griggs-Bergs-Berk Center for Freshwater, over at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin. He's also the author of the Great Lakes Water Wars,

and Dr. Donna Cashin, a professor of freshwater ecology at Wayne State University in Detroit. So we've already established that the Great Lakes are pretty well loved by the people who live near them. They're beautiful. They offer a source of drinking water, food, commerce, and, of course, recreation and tourism. And in a country with pretty deep partisan divides right now,

it's noteworthy when something has bipartisan support. The president, for example, has for the first time, in his time in office, suggested increasing the budget for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative to $320 million up from $300 million. It's also not just the Great Lakes that people have feelings about, though. On the Science Friday Vox Pop app,

listeners sent us all kinds of memories of time they have spent with water. I still get the shivers remembering as an eight-year-old one morning on a canoe trip in the boundary waters. The pre-dawn mists cover the lake and the dead silence is broken by the eerie, haunting, lamenting call of the lone loon.

Thanks to Andrew from Elbuquerque for that submission to the Science Friday Vox Pop app. Peter, do you think that there's a reason why people have this really strong emotional connection to bodies of water? Why are they so charismatic for us? Well, especially in the Great Lakes, you know, the magnitude of these water bodies is just really amazing. And, you know, a lot, most of the people, of course, live in these urban areas, which are heavily developed, but a huge portion of the watershed is wilderness, especially on the Canadian side. Some of its low W wilderness that's not federally designated,

but Isle Royal National Park in Lake Superior, Apostle Islands, and Lake Superior places like that are federally designated wilderness, and these are just magical places to visit, especially during peak seasons. You want to avoid peak bug season, for example, but there's many, many months when they're just stunningly beautiful, places and they have people have formative sometimes life-changing experiences or at least experiences like that person's anecdote in the boundary waters and they remember that for forever and it's really really telling about the power and the magnitude of these globally significant water

bodies i want to read a tweet we got from stacey she says my sister is facing a hundred thousand dollar bill to move her house that's been there since the 50s back from the bluff at lake Michigan, presumably because of erosion and high water levels. And then we also have a call from Madeline in Manistee National Forest. Go ahead, Madeline? Yes, I wanted to comment that houses all along, we're on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. And lately, the winds have been much stronger than usual. Several times a year we get 60, 65 mile an hour and occasionally 90 mile an hour winds. And the homes are falling into the lake along all the way. I I know from Holland all the way up the eastern coast.

I don't know whether they are farther down. Thank you for calling in. So that turns me to a question I had for you, Peter. You wrote an entire book about the Great Lakes Compact, which is this agreement among the Great Lakes governments, basically about who can take water from the lakes, which was supposed to protect against thirsty states, taking all the water out of the lakes.

With the level so high, is that really, do you think that's a legitimate concern right now? Yeah, I think it will always be a legitimate concern. I don't think it's in the interest of the Great Lakes to get people outside the watershed addicted to the water because the levels are going to go back down. And again, the natural variability that Don and I've been talking about is really important to the ecosystem. As I said, always has driven humans crazy.

In some cases, some people whose homes are falling into the lakes built too close to the shoreline. In other cases, as the caller mentioned, we're seeing documented higher winds on the gray lakes, and that is creating a climate change implication. And the question is, really, as I said in the New York Times op-ed yesterday, you know, we need to examine each of these cases individually and decide whether spending money to armor the shoreline and kind of hunker down is the right option, or whether it's time to pull out or even in some cases offer to buy some people. out and turn that landscape back to the environment. Donna, well, we have a caller. Marty in San Jose, California, you were talking about things getting better or worse for pollution. Marty has a thought on that.

Go ahead. Good morning. My senior paper Tulane was on the lamprey eel, which fortunately has been solved. That problem. And that isn't my question. I grew up in Cleveland. Lake Erie was highly polluted,

mainly from the steel industry. has the decline and fall of the steel industry, Cleveland, Gary, other places, and for that matter, the coal industry, had a beneficial effect, at least on the Great Lakes, as far as the pollution goes. Thanks, Marty. Donna, do you have a thought on that? Yeah, I think that's part of the equation, but we've also seen an improvement of laws in the Clean Water Act to help with pollution. we've seen organisms come into the lake that can filter the water and they can actually pull the pollutants out of the water column and deposit them into the sediments like the zebra muscles. So there's been a variety of things, but that is one of them. So you were starting to, you were talking about pollutants. Actually, our caller just mentioned the lamprey.

Is the lamprey issue solved or is it just solved for now? Have we figured out how to control these invasive species that we're already controlling forever? Well, I don't think we control anything. But I do think the, I wouldn't say it's solved. It's reached one of those equilibrium. I think there still, we're pouring lots and lots of money, millions probably, I don't know, into treating Lampere's still. So it's not hit a balance on its own.

We're still every year fighting this battle, and they are down to a number that's what some people consider controlled, but that's still with human effort and human resources doing that. We have a tweet coming in from Michael who says, what are we doing as far as partnership with Canada to take care of this North American treasure? Thanks, Ira. That's a good question for Peter. Yeah, and so there's several organizations, binational organizations. The first one was International Joint Commission 1908. Then we have the Great Lakes Commission in the 50s,

and then we have the Great Lakes in St. Lawrence's initiative. and then we have the Great Lake St. Lawrence Cities Initiative. So there's several, all of those are binational organizations that are working very hard to, but, you know, A, protect the environment, B, ramp up the economy as much as possible, you know, sustainably without impacts on the environment. And the Great Lakes region, I think, is one of the most successful reason in the world that's working binaw nationally on these issues.

And it's really important because, as we've said several times, it's a binational system. And if we can't work together, you know, a huge system stretching from Minnesota to New York, Quebec, obviously has an official different language in French. And so it's very complicated at times, but it's very important. And then the entire environmental NGO community is very much binational as well. So I think that's a real strength of policymaking and thought leadership in the Great Lakes region. Sure. I want to go back to some of the sort of future-looking things with the science research. Donna, you're working on one thing we might be able to do with these.

So we haven't really talked about the hazardous algae blooms that happen on Lake Erie that much. But you're looking at how that algae may actually be connected to possibly controlling quagga muscles in the future? Yeah, we've determined that the muscles can actually communicate with the algae and the algae can communicate back with the muscles. Wait, what do they say? They're saying essentially giving signals to help spawn and to reproduce or not reproduce. And so we're trying to isolate this compound that is being produced by the algae, mycosistus, which is the one that caused the Toledo water shut down a while ago,

and pull it out, see if it's specific to zebra muscles, and use it in another tool to help control them. So how's that going? And might we be able to wipe them out completely, or is this more of a, like, keeping water pipes clear sort of situation. Yeah, there's pretty much nothing, I think, that you can discharge into the entire Great Lakes. They're massive.

We can't. So this would be just a tool to help control them, drinking water intakes, and small enclosements, and even possibly smaller bodies of water, marinas, and stuff like that, if it works out, yeah. Okay. So what's giving you hope for a more, I guess,

balanced ecological future for the lakes? Is it work kind of like yours? Is there other stuff happening that makes you feel good? Donna? Well, this is where you mentioned I can be pessimistic. I noticed that last time I was going to see. I feel like the lakes I said are resilient. They can bounce back.

But we need to control pollution. We need to control inputs. The agricultural industry has so many odd things about it in controlling the nutrient inputs into the lake. And I do think that's one of the big areas. it's in policy that we really need to focus on reducing some of the impacts. That way the good stuff can take hold. To follow up on your comment about agriculture, we have Charlie in Sharden, Ohio, who had a comment about that.

Go ahead, Charlie. All right. Thanks for taking my call. I work with a company that I won't name, and basically my job is to educate farmers around Northeast Ohio and the proper use of chemicals, fertilizers, and things like that. One of the things I run into and one of the problems I see is education because in Northeast Ohio, I mean, everybody knows, you know, the effects of phosphorus and other things on the lake. A lot of the farming community doesn't, one, believe it. And two, they, even in Northeast Ohio, we may have bipartisan support in Congress right now, but there are local politicians of certain parties that will use that as kind of a campaigning tool where, you know, this party wants to attack your farm, you know, Go with the guys that aren't going to try to take your livelihood away. And that's not what people are trying to do.

But I see educating the farming community on the effects that these fertilizers and pesticides have is got to be crucial to the health of Lake Erie, at least. Thanks, Charlie. Peter, as a person who lives not on Lake Erie, though, what are you seeing on a management wish list for Lake Superior, for Lake Superior, for Lake Michigan, more on the western side? Yeah, well, if I could just address that question. Actually, you know, when I was at Notre Dame, we did a lot of work in Ohio and the Lake Erie Watershed. And so I think the caller is spot on. And so what we have is a lot of non-farmers trying to reach out to farmers and tell them how to do their job. And any sector would, you know, have skepticism about that, whether it's agriculture or aviation or anything else.

And so I think we really need to work hard and a new way of outreach to the agricultural community that's nonpartisan. A lot of the information they get about how much nutrients have put on their farms comes from fertilizer consultants and who obviously have a great interest in encourage them to apply more. And there's a sort of a situation in the farm sector where if you put on just a little bit more fertilizer, you have a better sort of like an insurance policy to have a better, yield and often it's not needed and it runs off. And so Dan, again, bring back to Dan's book, he did an amazing job of covering this Lake Erie algal bloom situation. It is by far the worst water quality situation we have now throughout the Great Lakes region and we have to get a handle

on it and we have to work in new and better ways, as the caller suggested, to reach out to the agriculture industry in a way that's not threatening and try to bring them on board in some kind of a win-win situation because obviously we don't want to harm their productivity and the ag sector is really being pinched right now financially. So it's a tough time to outreach and have them try and think out of the box. But we have to get our heads wrapped around this for the benefits of the lakes, especially Erie. Sure. Well, and so this is, I'm Christy Taylor and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Again, talking about the Great Lakes. So Peter, I did mention in the intro to this segment that the president has asked to increase the budget of the

Great Lakes Restoration Initiative this year. Is this a sign the lakes are going to be getting more investment overall, or, I mean, it's an election year? Is that something that may be influencing this? Oh, it's a classic election year thing. So when the president first came in, he proposed, his budget director proposed cutting this program by 90%. And I actually wrote an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune about that way back then. Then the next year, he proposed cutting it by 100%. And each time, the bipartisan congressional delegation in the Great Lakes region restored those funds back to $300 million. And so now what we have for the first time is the president is proposing not only to do that $300, but actually raised up to $325. Meanwhile, the bipartisan congressional delegation has a proposal on the hill that's already passed the House to eventually increase that funding to $475 million.

So an election year should be a good year one way or the other. other for the Great Lakes from a funding standpoint. The point is this is a long-term investment, and hopefully there's the bipartisan coalition on the Hill and elsewhere in Washington can make sure that it is a long-term investment. And that funding, Donna, for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, what is that actually doing? And is it enough? Like, does your research lab need more money? Do other organizations need more money, too? What's on your wish list? I wanted to comment on one thing in addition to that, too. And although the Great Lakes Protection Front is getting more money the Clean Water Act is being caught so

that is another way to protect our water bodies is through the Clean Water Act and money that was promised to help with the Asian carp just a couple weeks ago when Trump was visiting town halting in Warren Michigan that actually isn't going forward so even though some increases there's cuts other where else what I see with the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative is a lot of the projects that have been funded there are amazing restoration projects but But there's no follow-through. There's no assessment.

So we get a lot of these projects done to improve wetlands or create habitat, but we're not going back and seeing if what we've done actually work. So the scientists are screaming for money to help go back and check to see if these are working, and that can improve their science. But also the long-term monitoring is crucial that a lot of the projects are not for long-term monitoring. And that's where we're going to identify the problems, and changes in climate change, changes in new invasive species, new pollutants and stuff like that, is through the monitoring, which that has to happen in the GLR.

All right, screaming for money. So we're out of time. I'd like to thank both my guests, Peter Annen, director of the Mary Grigsberg Center for Freshwater Ecology at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, also author of the Great Lakes Water Wars, and Dr. Donna Cashin, a professor of freshwater ecology at Wayne State University in Detroit. Thank you both so much for joining me today. You're welcome. And thank you, Christy. Taylor, for all the work you've done on the book and the Great Lakes.

Thanks, Ira. And if you're in New York, you can enjoy the book club in person. We've got one last time next Thursday night. We're tracing our waterways from the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, straight to Lake Superior, talking to author Dan Egan and meeting a robotic fish. Ooh, I want to see that. Go to our website, sciencefridy.com slash robofish to get tickets. That's next Thursday night.

ScienceFriety.com slash robofish to get tickets. One final, Science Friday Vox Pop app. We want to know your teeth questions. That's right, your teeth. What do you wish you could understand about teeth? Dental care or related science? Ask a dentist. We're doing Ask a Dentist on a Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps.

Charles Berkowitz is our director, senior producer Christopher Taliatta. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Feather. Technical and Engineering Help from Mitch Kim, Kevin Wolfe, Lisa Gosselin, VJ. Leighterman, B.J. Leighterman, the famous BJ, composed our theme music, and of course, we're on social media all week. One last word about the Vox Pop app. We want your teeth questions. It's ask a dentist. Boy, do I have questions I need to ask. I'm I reflato in New York.