This has to do with Asian carp, which are very close to getting into Lake Michigan. If that happens, it could effectively destroy the fishing industry in the Great Lakes. Last month, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox sued, asking the court to close the locks connecting the already contaminated Chicago River with the lakes.
That lawsuit has been joined by Cox’s counterparts in Minnesota, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin. But it is being opposed by Illinois, and by the Obama Administration. The President is a political native of Illinois, and shipping industry interests in Chicago say closing the locks could cost the local economy $30 million in revenue, and inconvenience the entire region.
That, however, seems a small price to pay, given that many biologists think an Asian carp infestation could wipe out much of the Great Lakes‘ $7 billion dollar commercial and sport fishing industry, and do other ecological damage as well.
It is hard to exaggerate how great a threat Asian carp represent. There are two species, the Bighead carp, which can easily get up to a hundred pounds, and the Silver carp, which top out at half that size, but have another deadly feature.
They jump. Boaters and water skiers on the Mississippi have had jaws broken, equipment damaged, and faces lacerated by these appalling fish. But the bigger problem is what both kinds of carp do to the food supply. They suck it all up, consuming as much as a fifth of their body weight in plankton every day, starving out the other fish.
This all started years ago, when some fish farmers in Arkansas imported Asian carp and were raising them in outdoor fish farms. Then along came a flood, and they got into the Mississippi River. They’ve been working their way north ever since.
Six weeks ago, I reported here that an electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal that was supposed to stop the car had failed, more than likely because it was never turned on full-strength. This fall, an Army Corps of Engineers study found Asian carp DNA in the water within eight miles of Lake Michigan.
Closing the locks, at least for a time, seems to be the last realistic hope of stopping them. It is anyone’s guess how the high court will rule. It seems to be the first U.S. Supreme Court case in history where one state has sued another over invasive species.
More importantly, as Attorney General Cox says on his website, “the present situation presents a unique opportunity in the long and unfortunate history of invasive species entering the Great Lakes to prevent an invasion before it starts.”
Let’s hope that happens. There’s no guarantee the carp aren’t already in Lake Michigan, or that closing the locks will halt them forever. And, we should remember this too:
We could have done more to stop them a long time ago. Yesterday, Cameron Davis, a senior advisor to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, told a group of Michigan legislators that everyone had seen the Asian carp threat coming for many years.
Yet nobody did much about it.
Americans have a habit of waiting till one minute before midnight before addressing serious problems. One of these days, that’s going to be just a little too late.
This is absolutely fascinating. Yesterday, the Detroit Free Press (the newspaper of record for Democrats in the state of Michigan) ran an editorial, noting that the case filed by Attorney General Mike Cox (the Free Press went out of its way to claim that Governor Granholm somehow made the AG file the lawsuit) was about to be presented to the U.S. Supreme Court. A casual reader of the Free Press would have thought, well, the U.S. Supreme Court better not screw this up! There can only be one right conclusion, can't there?
The Free Press editorial did not once mention President Barack H. Obama, nor the fact that HIS administration and HIS Solicitor General, Elena Kagan, had formally opposed the Michigan AG's suit to close the locks of the Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal. Which is an operation of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. One might easily conclude that if President Obama acknowledged the kind of danger that Jack Lessenberry observes, the President could close the locks by Executive Order. (Those locks exist as part of a basically illegal waterway, by the way; the United States Supreme Court has ruled that Illinois and Chicago had no right to reverse the flow of the Chicago River and connect it to the Mississippi River system, thereby breaching the entire Great Lakes watershed.)
I just wonder, if the current President were a Republican and not a Democrat, would the Free Press have omitted any mention of his or her name? And would Jack Lessenberry, marginally more intellectually honest than the Free Press, have confined his discussion to two sentences, referring only to the non-personal "Obama Administration" and the respectful, "the President"? I suspect that if the party of the Current Occupant were changed, so too would the Free Press editorial language. Likewise, we would more likely see some of the language that Mr. Lessenberry had previously reserved for President Bush, a la "The Smirking Chimp." (Just try using such a metaphor with respect to President Obama in polite company. And let me know how that works for you.)
For my part, I'd just like to remind all that Illinois is the state that has given us all the Daley-Chicago political machine; Obama's neighbor/financial backer/convicted felon Antoin "Tony" Rezco; a string of indicted governors leading to George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich; and too many other scandals to list. It's a charming place, politically, and is just the kind of political operation that you'd love to have holding veto power over the rest of the Great Lakes region.
Anyway, I too join in the hope that the U.S. Supreme Court takes action to protect the Great Lakes from the Asian carp. But unlike the Detroit Free Press, I'm not hiding the Obama Administration's central role in perpetuating the present risk.
Posted by: Anonymous | January 15, 2010 at 02:38 PM