People who live around the Great
Lakes often take them for granted. I
wrote The Dynamic Great Lakes, to give people enough information to make
intelligent choices in their every day lives about the world’s greatest
freshwater system. The Dynamic Great
Lakes is a book about their ecology and the mistakes people have made when
altering the landscape by making locks for shipping, destroying wetlands or
introducing new species both intentionally and unintentionally. It was my aim in writing this book to make
people appreciate these lakes and understand what they might do for their
betterment.
Many people do not understand the
significance of the Great Lakes. They
are twenty per cent of the world’s fresh surface water and need to be
protected. These lakes’ freshwater will
be hotly contested as more and more industries and people in arid parts of the
world would like to exploit them. It is indeed happening now. Some large freshwater lakes in the world
have been destroyed—drawn down to nothing through a lack of understanding.
Bottling plants have their eyes
on the Great Lakes. Bottling water and
shipping it out of the watershed will destroy the integrity of the lakes and
their unique ecosystems. People in the
Great Lakes watershed argue that the water belongs to the commons and should not
be sold for private profit. There are
many more issues the book addresses: directional drilling for oil, nuclear power
plants, exotic species, wetlands, sand dunes and pollution from industries and
municipalities.
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