That’s where things stood when I first talked about this issue here more than fifteen months ago. Since then, traces of carp DNA has been found in Lake Michigan, though there is no evidence that a permanent breeding population has been established there.
But if that ever happens, it will be an environmental disaster of unimaginable proportions. The carp are huge awful ugly fish. One variety tends to jump and have broken water skiers’ jaws.
Worse, they suck up virtually all the available food supply, which means they starve out other more desirable fish. Once they get firmly established, they are virtually impossible to eradicate, which would mean farewell to the sport and commercial fishing industries.
Plus, that would play havoc with the ecology of the lakes and could cost the economy, depending on whose estimates you believe, between one and seven billion dollars a year.
I wondered what the government has been doing about this, and last week talked to a highly respected environmental journalist about this. The Toledo Blade’s Tom Henry has been following the carp story for years. He has won numerous awards for his reporting, and is on the Society of Environmental Journalists board.
When I asked him what our government was doing to try to protect our lakes, his answer was “dithering.” Canada, he told me, was at least trying. This month alone, their government has levied two huge fines against two firms caught trying to smuggle live Asian carp into Canada, in one case, apparently to raise and breed.
That’s how all the trouble is thought to have started in the first place, when a flood in Arkansas washed some carp from a fish farm into the Mississippi River almost twenty years ago. Since then, they’ve been migrating north, and the federal response, Tom Henry said, has been seventeen years of indefensible inaction. Last year, the governors of most of the Great Lakes states attempted to get Illinois to close the canal.
But Illinois refused, saying it would be too devastating to Chicago’s economy, and the President and the Supreme Court refused to overturn that decision.
What’s happening now? Well, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has given itself another four years to do an “interbasin study,” of the problem and come up with a plan.
By then, the carp may be all the way to Vermont. The key danger zone, Henry tells me, is Western Lake Erie, the area from Toledo stretching on out past Port Clinton and Sandusky.
That is the anchor spot of the fishing industry and, sadly, also the area in which the carp might find it easiest to establish themselves. But when the Corps came to take public comment recently, where did they go? Ann Arbor.
Which, if they didn’t notice, isn’t on the lakes at all. Senator Debbie Stabenow has introduced a bill to get thing moving faster. “We’re anxious to light a fire under the Army Corps of Engineers,” she said. It would be nice if that happened before muddy-tasting Asian carp are the only things we have left to cook.
The simple fact is that the pathway of greatest concern (it is admittedly not the only pathway of concern) between the greater Mississippi river system and the Great Lakes is the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. That canal is operated as a federal property, under the direct control of the USEPA, the US Coast Guard, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
And all three of those federal executive branch agencies are under the direct control of the President of the Untied States. President Barack Obama it is, at this time.
I cannot imagine, if the current occupant of the White House were named George W. Bush, that Mr. Lessenberry would not be personalizing this battle. It is actually laughable, that in a half-dozen Detroit Free Press editorials on this topic, it is nearly impossible to find the name "Obama" mentioned anywhere.
And speaking of fish, any mention of the U. S. Supreme Court in this regard is a red herring. The legal case seeking an injuction to close the Chaicago canal, filed by all of the Republican attorneys general in the surrounding Great Lakes states with help from none of the Democrat administrations in any of those states, is still pending. There was an early attempt, at a long-shot legal strategy to reopen a 100 year-old supervisory decision, in order to get a fast federal court ruling to close the Chicago canal. It didn't work, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied request for injunctive relief, but not for lack of effort on the part of the Great Lakes Republicans. The U.S. Supreme Court merely said that it didn't have any basis to rule without a full hearing and/or a trial in the federal District Court.
And oh by the way, the Department of Justice and the U.S. Solicitor General's office under President Obama's direction did not weigh in on the side of Lakes preservation; the Obama Administration actively argued against closing the Chicago canal.
In any event, it is really roundabout Constitutionalism, to be looking to the Supreme Court to tell the Executive branch how best to operate the Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers. President Obama could close the canal, like yesterday, if he so chose. He possesses that Executive power, far more clearly than he possessed the dubious power to suspend all deep water oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon accident. Unlike the deepwater drilling sites, the Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal is actually under President Obama's direct supervision and control. He could close the canal with a stroke of his pen, and the only plausible reason to understand why he hasn't so far is to look at the local political influence-peddling in Chicago.
And let it not go unsaid; the President's homey, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, is also playing this situation like the political master he is. Durbin solemnly talks about what a serious problem this is, and how there is an urgent need -- a need, that is, to fund an expensive, long-term federal study of the problem. (Mr. Lessenberry mentions the study.) Thereby taking the heat off of a fellow Democrat and President from the South Side of Chicago, and allowing the shipping operators to buy more time for business as usual. All the while, creating some more federal patronage "study" jobs in Durbin's home state.
Posted by: Anonymous | March 17, 2011 at 03:07 PM