Lake Superior

"Dangerous metals such as arsenic and mercury have been found in wild rice beds located on the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community reservation and surrounding areas . . . Exposure to arsenic through diet can result in a higher risk of cancer, as well as liver and kidney disorders." The contamination is a result of copper mining in the Western Upper Peninsula."

The federal government has begun taking steps to regulate PFAS, a group of manufactured chemicals which have been linked to cancer. In response, the state of Wisconsin advises individuals against eating no more than one rainbow smelt caught from Lake Superior per month. The regulation threatens the traditions of the Ojibwe native community. “When you’re asked to lower fish consumption, you’re not just losing meals, you’re losing all those practices associated with fishing: sharing knowledge and passing that to future generations. It changes all kinds of social dynamics.”

“Last year we had maybe 60 pounds of finished rice . . . The year before we had a little over 80 pounds. And the year before that we probably had about 120 pounds of finished rice, so something’s going on.”

"Researchers believe that rapid transitions between extremely high and low water levels could be the new normal as interactions between the global climate and regional hydrological cycles become more variable with climate change . . . Lake Superior itself is experiencing rising water levels on its southern shorelines while its northern shorelines are experiencing the opposite . . . We are seeing the northerly migration of flora and fauna, and the idea is that people will follow"

“The Honourable Leona Aglukkaq, Minister of the Environment and Minister responsible for Parks Canada, today announced the introduction of Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area Act to formally establish the Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area. The proposed Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area (NMCA) comprises more than 10,000 square kilometres of the lake, and includes lakebed, islands and north shorelands – making it one of the largest freshwater marine protected areas in the world.”

“So as the air and the water warms due to climate change and other factors, one thing that we are concerned with and will be monitoring is are we slowly going to be no longer in the suitable range for those plants to grow.”

"I don’t think we’ll ever really stop (the emerald ash borer) . . . I’ve been doing this for 40 years and never seen anything like it. Many insects focus on stressed or damaged trees. Emerald ash borer doesn’t care.”

“Lake Superior isn’t as great as it used to be. It and two other Great Lakes — Michigan and Huron — are shrinking. The water level in Lake Superior, which has the largest surface area of any freshwater lake on Earth, is at its lowest point in 81 years. In the past nine years, the lake has fallen 48 centimeters (19 inches) below its long-term average. In the past year alone, the drop has been 32 centimeters (12.5 inches) . . . culprits for the loss of water appear to be short-and long-term climate change, says Jay Austin, a limnologist (scientist who studies bodies of fresh water) at the University of Minnesota (Duluth) . . . Winters have been growing milder for many years now, gradually reducing the ice cover on the Great Lakes . . . Since 1979, its surface temperature has risen by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit).”

“In 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared Canada’s first ‘national marine conservation area’ in Lake Superior, another two and half million acres of lakebed, islands, and mainland. Major tracts of the Lake Superior watershed have also been conserved by U.S. federal and state agencies, a million acres in parks and another five or six million acres in federal or state forests. Together, this is a conserved landscape in the order of ten million acres in and around the world’s largest lakes, which holds 18 per cent of the world’s fresh water.”

“Despite a decline in the 1970s caused by high levels of PCB pollution, cormorant numbers in the basin have grown to nearly 500,000, about 25 percent of the total North American population. There have been calls for a reduction in the Great Lakes cormorant population. Environmentalists says the birds are threatening vegetation on their nesting sites and several native shorebird species, and fisher claim that a single cormorant eats 650 grams (1 pound) of fish per day; fewer cormorants would mean more fish. But cormorants are one of the few bird species that eat the round goby, which means they are not really in competition for food with ring-billed gulls. And their voracious appetites may be helping to keep the alien round goby in check, a factor that might be kept in mind when contemplating future cormorant culls.”

“In 2005, a panel of experts gathered by National Geographic made a surprising pick as their choice for the most appealing national park in the United States: Apostle Islands National Lakeshore . . . ‘In good shape ecologically. Not over-visited,’ commented one expert. ‘No man-made lights visible,’ stated another . . . ‘The aesthetic appeal of the land and water interaction is both dramatic and comforting.’. . . Fewer than two hundred thousand people visit the Apostle Islands each year, so the park does not face the crowds found elsewhere. This has helped maintain the park’s appeal.”

“Ontario, the custodian of the northern half of the Great Lakes basin, became a world leader in conservation in 1999 when it prohibited industrial development on six million additional acres of its near north, meaning a total of 12 per cent of the territory was protected for nature. Included in this is almost all the public coast and islands of Lake Superior, Lake Nipigon, Lake Huron, and Georgian Bay. Ontario declared this its ‘Heritage Coast,’ the longest protected freshwater coast in the world — eighteen hundred miles, or two and a half million acres.”

“The International Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA) between the United States and Canada. Signed the same year as the two Water Acts were passed, the GLWQA defined the two nations’ joint goals for Great Lakes protection and cleanup and established a framework for cooperative research and abatement actions.”

“‘We drink it, our children drink it, we bathe our babies in it, we believe it’s the purest, best-tasting, most unpolluted water found anywhere,’ said Wayne Johnson, attorney for the town of Silver Bay, Minn., home of the Reserve Mining Company . . . what Wayne Johnson did to demonstrate his faith in the lake’s purity — he downed a glass of Lake Superior — straight, as they say. It may have been a deadly drink. In an injunction issued last April at the end of what has been by far the longest and most expensive environmental trial in United States history, a Federal District Court found not only that Superior’s waters were impure in some sectors but that they contained a cancer-causing agent — asbestos, or something virtually identical to asbestos — which for 18 years has been flowing into the water pipes and gastrointestinal tracts of a number of communities on the southwestern tip of the lake, including one of the nation’s major Great Lakes ports, Duluth.”