Chicago, IL, USA

". . . sewage sludge is contaminating thousands of acres of northeast Illinois farmland with toxic forever chemicals . . . When human excrement and industrial waste is flushed into sewers, conventional treatment not only fails to screen out PFAS, it concentrates the chemicals in sludge. Most of the fetid muck is dumped on farmland. During the past six years alone, federal records show, more than 615,000 tons of sludge from the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago has been plowed into 29,000 acres near the nation’s third largest city."

"Climate change has started pushing Lake Michigan's water levels toward uncharted territory as patterns of rain, snowfall and evaporation are transformed by the warming world. The lake's high-water cycles are threatening to get higher; the lows lower. Already, the swings between the two show signs of happening faster than any time in recorded history . . . A class between elemental forces -- sun, rain, heat, and ice -- is what is threatening to upend centuries of relative stability along the Great Lakes' 10,000 miles of shoreline, including the 22 miles that define Chicago's eastern edge . . . In fact, the speed and uncertainty of the changes underscore how Chicago, in some crucial ways, is perhaps more immediately exposed to the dangers of global warming than cities on the ocean."

"While appealing, the clarity comes at a significant cost to wildlife. In filtering the lake, the mussels have decimated the phytoplankton, a single-celled, green algae that serves as the base of the food chain. For much of the past decade, prey fish, like alewives, have remained at historic lows, prompting state managers to scale back the annual stocks of prized predators, such as king salmon."

“The nodding wild onion (Allium cernuum) is a member of the lily family (Liliaceae) that inhabits a variety of prairie types . . . Chicago is based on a word in the Illinois Indian language that is rendered in a variety of ways, “chicagou” and “checagou” being just two.  Some early promoters of the city claimed that the term meant ‘ great,' but until recently there has been general agreement that it referred to the nodding wild onion.”

"Quagga mussels are widely regarded as the most destructive invasive species to colonize the Great Lakes, surpassing even the ravenous sea lamprey. The reason: Quagga mussels control the distribution of food and nutrients throughout the Great Lakes they have invaded, which affects every level of the food chain. . . Under normal circumstances, nutrients like phosphorus and tiny plants and animals called plankton were distributed throughout the waters of Lake Michigan, supporting fish and other aquatic life at all depths. Quagga mussels have radically changed that dynamic. The mussels act like a giant sponge, sucking vast quantities of plankton and nutrients to the lake bottom, where it won't benefit many of the lake's inhabitants."

“The United States and Canada have amended a 40-year-old environmental accord on the Great Lakes, expanding its goals to tackle problems like invasive species, pollution and climate change . . . In addition to tightening goals for phosphorus reductions in Lake Erie, the amendments call for action on ships' ballast water, which introduces invasive species into the lake system, and climate change, which is expected to make heavy precipitation like that of 2011 more common."

"The Obama administration has developed a five-year blueprint for the Great Lakes, a sprawling ecosystem plagued by toxic contamination, shrinking wildlife habitat and invasive species. The plan envisions spending more than $2.2 billion for long-awaited repairs after a century of damage to the lakes, which hold 20 percent of the world's freshwater . . . Among the goals is taking a “zero-tolerance policy” toward future invasions by foreign species.”

“In 2011, a giant bloom spread across the western basin once again. The reasons for the bloom are complex, but may be related to a rainy spring and invasive mussels . . . “This is considered the worst bloom in decades, and may have been influenced by the wet spring,” says Stumpf . . . The rain and melting snow ran off fields, yards, and paved surfaces, carrying an array of pollutants into streams and rivers—including phosphorus from fertilizers."

“The Lake Erie watersnake, a harmless critter that can grow to more than three feet in length, has been removed from the federal list of endangered and threatened wildlife after a successful decade long effort to protect the snake and its habitat . . . The watersnake (Nerodia sipedon insularum), found on the islands and shoreline of western Lake Erie in Ohio and Ontario, was on the verge of extinction because of intentional killing and a loss of habitat to development.”

“In April 2010 at Romeoville, municipal employees, rather than Enbridge itself, discovered a major spill from line 6A. All told, six thousand barrels spilled. Authorities evacuated five hundred people from area businesses when the oil spread to the retention pond of a nearby wastewater treatment bland. Enbridge closed three miles of pipeline in order to locate the leak. The closure led to higher gas prices throughout the Midwest. Tom Kloza, publisher and chief oil analyst at Oil Price Information Service, said it was like shutting down the lifeblood that feeds the organs. . . . The canal, straits, and rivers are among the thousands of places where oil crosses above or beneath water. Each is a submerged technological matrix, a vulnerable hybrid of engineered and natural hydrological systems. Collectively they form an interconnected network in which leaks and spills are the norm. Since 1999 North American Enbridge pipelines have lost 6.8 million gallons from over with hundred leaks and spills.”

"A glorious nothing, but nothing nonetheless. That too is an American word, full of the conviction that nothing much stands between herds of bison and herds of cattle, between the millions of acres of tallgrass prairie that once stretched across the plains and the millions of acres of corn and soybeans growing there now. Historically, we have valued the prairie grasses mainly as cattle fodder or as placeholders till the sod could be broken and crops planted, crops that are themselves just placeholders until the houses eventually come."

“It's never going to be like the old days — can't do that. But if we have enough of these little oases around, where people can glimpse what should be, what could be, maybe it will spread — makes me smile when I think about it.”

“'No other orchid in Indiana has suffered the consequences of habitat destructions much as Platanthera leucophaea,' says Homoya . . . ‘One can only imagine the great numbers of P.leucophaea prior to the coming of the settlers.' Although diligent searches for it have been made, the orchid has not been seen in Indiana for more than fifty years.”

“. . . the canal itself embodies a potential catastrophe: biological degradation, or “biological pollution,” of the Great Lakes. The context is this: The unification of the Great Lakes and Mississippi basins created new flows of nuisance aquatic species (NAS in the technical literature). Zebra and quagga mussels and round gobies crosses the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes via the St. Lawrence Seaways, and then migrated to the Mississippi basin via the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. Theses species fanned southward along the Mississippi River and its tributaries to the Gulf Coast. . . From their 1972-1973 introduction to the American south for use as algae cleaners in catfish farms, Asian carp escaped into the wild. They migrated up and down the Mississippi River system, decimating aquatic food webs along the way - “like a school of aquatic bullies,” according to an Illinois Department of Natural Resources article.”