The Great Lakes Eco System and the Coronavirus

I went to a lecture this week at the senior hall and it was quite unusual to see about twenty chairs with no people in them. The lectures always have a waiting list so when someone cancels their RSVP they call someone else up to take their place. I’m guessing far more than twenty people canceled and the call committee ran through their entire wait list and still came up short. It’s a foreshadowing of what’s to come over the long boring summer. Let’s hope it’s boring rather than terrifying. I’d rather deal with canceled events than mass sickness all around us. If people camping out at home trying to avoid the unavoidable helps, I’m on board. Avoid the unavoidable---I shouldn’t be thinking like that!

The day after the lecture I got an email from the senior hall asking me if I still planned on going to a fish fry at a private club two days later. They had placed 125 reservations for senior hall members and mine was among them. It’s an annual event that I’ve been doing long before I became a member of the senior hall. My husband was a member of that club and the fish fries during Lent are a major fund raiser for the group. Knowing how they serve their food cafeteria style only without the sneeze shields found in restaurants, I was having major regrets about signing up and since they asked, I canceled my RSVP. A couple of hours later our state governor banned any gatherings over 350 people so the fish fry probably got canceled for everyone. I felt bad for the club. What will they do with all that thawed-out fish? We also have some huge events on the tap here in town---a house and garden show, a bridal show. Those poor vendors who plan and stock up for these shows will suffer. They get many of their contacts for their summer sales at those shows.

What gets me is there are still people who are denying the whole coronavirus crisis is real. I went to my Facebook page recently and one of my Trump supporter relatives posted yet another meme about it all being a media and Democratic hoax to bring down the president. Ya, we have that much power over the entire world’s press and medical communities. The day before that post, she posted a meme about abortion killing more people than the coronavirus and why aren't people panicking about that? Duh, the last I heard getting an abortion isn’t catching. Then today she posted about how veterans could use the money we're 'wasting' on the COVID-19. Call me whatever you want—‘vengeful’ might be a good word to apply to my uncharitable thoughts about her getting the virus. People in denial are putting us all at risk like the NBA basketball player, Rudy Gobert, who recently had to apologize for having touched all the microphones of the media doing interviews. It was a joke, he said after he got sick and tested positive for the coronavirus. Sorry about that.

The lecture: It was interesting and filled with facts and figures I hastily scribbled in my notebook in a near-dark room and now I mostly can’t read them. It was given by a university professor on the ecological history of the Great Lakes, starting his timeline 10,000 years ago. He explained how layers of rock formations encircle all of Michigan and the Great Lakes and how if we live long enough we’ll see Lake Huron and Lake Erie become one big lake. And Niagara Falls is on the move, the fastest moving waterfall in the entire world due to the eroding layer of softer rock ringing underneath the harder rock layer that we see on the surface. But mostly he talked about how Man has changed the ecological system of the lakes and not in a good way. In the 1600s, for example, the Great Lakes had 150 varieties of native fish ranging in size from 1-2 inches to 400 pounds and nine foot long. Now we only have 139 native fish and 34 invasive species, mostly brought in by man. A Native American Indian Tribe is trying to reestablish---with some success---the Lake Sturgeon, the largest of fish that were once so plentiful when the white man first came here. The professor traced the changes of our national resources using diaries left behind by early explorers and profiteers. The Europeans, he said, viewed Michigan's abundance of fish, wildlife and forests as opportunities to exploit. And the professor placed a lot of blame on President Jefferson who believed that any resource that wasn’t raped from the land and water was a wasted resource.

The lecture included facts things like how the logging industry ruined the Great Lakes fish species that used the rivers to spawn by filling them up with logs that killed their food sources, and it only took 40 years to clear-cut all of Michigan which caused mass erosion. He showed us a photo of tree stumps that looked like alien creatures walking on top of the land. The soil had eroded so much it left them that way and all that soil ended up in the river down the hill. In that river they discovered a log with a loggers stamp on it that was buried 15 feet down under the muck. He told us about how after the loggers left, the state was on fire, reportedly worse than the Great Chicago fire of 1871 in terms of loss of lives and destroyed property and again ten years later another massive fire took place fueled by all the dead foliage and stumps left behind by the loggers. The lecture made me sad and a little mad that it’s taken mankind so long to figure out that the earth has its limitations on how much we can abuse her resources and not pay a major price. Let's hope it's not too late to turn things around. ©