Imagine that there was a sudden outbreak of smallpox in Connecticut and New Jersey, and then a case in Pennsylvania.
Smallpox has been eradicated for so long that children are no longer routinely vaccinated against it. So what would you think if there were a sudden outbreak and one of our congressmen responded by introducing a bill to start vaccinating children again in, oh, 2010? And one of our senators then countered with his own bill, which would have us start giving them shots in 2012. Of course a few million would be dead by then, but you wouldn’t want to rush the legislative process.
Yes, I know that sounds sarcastic and my example sounds insane. But if the Great Lakes are in peril from invasive species, as they clearly are, why wait three to five years to do anything about it?
This is not a problem discovered yesterday. Last summer I talked to a bunch of fishermen on a dock on northern Lake Michigan. They were cursing because almost every time they hooked something, it turned out to be a little inedible goby.
These are fish that aren’t native to this country at all, but got here in the 1980, you guessed it, in the ballast water of trans-Atlantic vessels. They eat the eggs and hatchlings of other fish, like perch and walleye, and speedily drive out native species.
Then, there are the zebra mussels, which clog pipes and drains and motors, and which can accumulate dangerous concentrations of cancer-causing chemicals in their bodies.
And now we have viral hemorrhagic septicemia, a disease that causes fish to internally bleed to death. Last year it was reported in Lakes St. Clair and Ontario, and in Lake Erie, where there was a large die-off of yellow perch due to the disease.
Environmentalists are now desperately trying to find a way to keep VHS from infecting the upper Great Lakes, but no one is very optimistic that they will be able to do it. And the last thing the Great Lakes needs while we try to solve that is a new set of horrors.
The Pacific Coast states have been fighting similar problems, and are doing a better job. They have tough rules on what ships can do with ballast water, and they are enforcing them.
Washington, Oregon and California also sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in federal court, and won a ruling in 2005 that said the EPA had to regulate ballast water discharges.
What I don’t understand is why Michigan didn’t join that lawsuit. Nor do I understand why keeping our waters safe from foreign parasites isn’t the EPA’s job in the first place.
What I do understand is that this is a problem every level of government owes it to us to fix. And unless lakes filled with parasites and bloody dead fish are what you want, you ought to pressure every elected lawmaker you can to deal with it, right now.
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