The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (19 page)

 

As you proceed northward toward Chicago on the Illinois, the industrial noise along its banks increases. Turning into the Des Plaines River south of Joliet, you might feel you're in the clanking, racketing final ascent of a roller coaster's highest hill. After Joliet, the machinery of greater Chicago multiplies along the riverbank until, in the municipality of Romeoville, white refinery towers in ranks send white clouds spiraling skyward, and a mesa of coal like a geological feature stretches for a third of a mile, and empty semi-trucks make hollow, drumlike sounds as they cross railroad tracks, and other vehicles beep, backing up. The place is a no man's land. Here the channelized Des Plaines and the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which have already met up some miles to the south, run parallel, about three hundred yards apart. The water in both of them is the color of old lead.

Romeoville is where the Army Corps of Engineers and the state of Illinois think they can stop the carp. At two locations on the ship canal, electric barriers zap the water. The canal, a rectilinear rockwall ditch 160 feet wide and about 25 feet deep, passes through Romeoville behind chainlink fences topped with barbed wire and hung with signs: "Danger: Electric Fish Barrier" and "Electric Charge in Water/Do Not Stop, Anchor, or Fish" and "Caution: This water is not suitable for wading, swimming, jet skiing, water skiing/tubing, or any body contact." At the fish barriers, steel cables or bars on the bottom of the canal pulse low-voltage direct current. The electric charge—according to the navy, whose divers tested it somehow—is strong enough, under some circumstances, to cause muscle paralysis, inability to breathe, and ventricular fibrillation in human beings.

What it does to fish is less clear. Entering Chicago, the plucky Asian carp swims into a whole cityful of complications, and it continues to swim single-mindedly while questions of politics, bureaucracy, urban hydrology, and interstate commerce work themselves out. To put it another way: Chicago is a swamp. Various watercourses, only temporarily subdued, thread throughout the metro area. The engineers who caused local rivers to run backward a hundred years ago so as to send Chicago sewage south to the Mississippi rather than into the city's front yard—Lake Michigan—did not have too hard a job, because the underlying swamp could do the same thing itself when in flood. Given enough rainfall, the waters of swampy Chicago become one. The Des Plaines River needs no electric barrier because its Chicago section does not connect to the lake; however, when the Des Plaines floods it sloshes into the ship canal at points above the canal's electric barriers. And the Des Plaines is very likely to have Asian carp.

Meditating on the complications of the carp's presence in Chicago can disable the brain. Do the electric barriers actually stop all the carp, or are the little ones able to get through? Do stunned fish sometimes wash through in the occasional reverses of flow in the canal? Does the electric charge remain strong and uniform when ships and barges go by? (Probably; instruments in tollbooth-like buildings beside the canal adjust the charge when necessary.) Does the electric field have weak spots where fish can pass? Does a wintertime influx of road salt in the water cause the charge to fluctuate? What about when the current must be turned off for maintenance of the bars or cables? Is the rotenone chemical fish killer that is administered when the current is off effective without fail?

The Chicago waterway system has several locks—why not simply close these and be done with it? Would closing the locks have a negligible effect on the economy of Illinois, as a study commissioned by the state of Michigan has claimed, or damage its economy irreparably, as demonstrated in a study preferred by Illinois? Would closing the locks risk flooding thousands of Chicago basements, as local officials say? How about the part of the waterway where there is no lock at all? Wouldn't the carp simply go that way? Will the new thirteen-mile barricade of concrete and special wire mesh designed to keep carp from swerving out of the Des Plaines and into the ship canal during flood times actually work? Will uninformed anglers introduce Asian-carp minnows while using them for bait? And what about immigrant communities from Asia who are known to perform ritual releases of fish and other animals during certain religious ceremonies? Might they have performed such rituals involving Asian carp already? Might they do so in the future? Will all this bring prevention to naught?

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources addresses itself to many of these questions, as does the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Great Lakes and Ohio River Division), the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Senate Great Lakes Task Force, the Congressional Great Lakes Task Force, the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the interagency Asian Carp Rapid Response Team, and the interagency Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee's Asian Carp Control Framework. The Illinois Chamber of Commerce, the American Waterways Operators, and the Chemical Industry Council of Illinois put in a word for industry, while the Natural Resources Defense Council, Freshwater Future, the Sierra Club, Healing Our Waters Great Lakes Coalition, and the Alliance for the Great Lakes offer perspective from the environmental side. The Chicago Department of the Environment, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, and the University of Toledo's Lake Erie Center are heard from as well. For legal guidance, concerned parties refer to the Nonindigenous Aquatic Nuisance Prevention and Control Act of 1990 (revised as the National Invasive Species Act of 1996, revised as the National Aquatic Invasive Species Act of 2007); also, to the Asian Carp Prevention and Control Act of 2006.

Man proposes, carp disposes. Through waving weedbeds of bureaucracy and human cross-purposes, the fish swims. Starting in 2009, tests for Asian-carp DNA in Chicago waters indicated that the fish might have moved beyond the barriers. In February 2010 the state of Illinois, hoping to calm its neighbors, began an intensive program of fishing for actual fish with electroshocking and nets, while the DNA tests continued. These efforts turned up more DNA but no fish. In March the Illinois DNR announced that six weeks of searching had found no Asian carp throughout the entire Chicago Area Waterway System. Then, on June 22, a commercial fisherman working for the DNR netted a nineteen-pound-six-ounce bighead carp in Lake Calumet, thirty miles beyond the electric barrier and six miles from Lake Michigan. Between this well-fed, healthy male Asian carp and the Great Lakes, no obstacle intervened.

If the neighbors had been worried before, they began to sweat and hyperventilate now. Outcries of alarm came from officialdom in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, as well as from Canada. Michigan's attorney general, Mike Cox, brought suit in federal district court to force the Corps of Engineers and the city of Chicago to close the locks immediately. Four other Great Lakes states, but not New York, joined on Michigan's side; two previous lawsuits for the same purpose had already failed. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water and Power held hearings on the federal response to Asian carp. The governor and the attorney general of Ohio called on the president to convene a White House Asian Carp Emergency Summit. Dave Camp, a congressman from Michigan, proposed a piece of legislation he called the CARP ACT, for Close All Routes and Prevent Asian Carp Today.

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois announced that he had asked the president to appoint a Coordinated Response Commander for Asian Carp, and the president had agreed. This so-called carp czar was to be chosen within thirty days. The president made clear that he had a "zero tolerance" policy for invasive species. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York announced her support for another anti-carp bill, the Permanent Prevention of Asian Carp Act. Michigan's Mike Cox accused Obama of not doing enough about the problem because he sympathized with his own state of Illinois. (Cox, a Republican, is running for governor.) Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, sent Obama a letter asking him to act quickly to protect the Great Lakes from Asian carp, and thirty-two representatives and fourteen senators added their names.

 

Unlike Romeoville, the place where the apocalyptic bighead was caught is quiet. To some it might even be paradise. The part of Lake Calumet in which the commercial fisherman netted this carp doubles as the water hazard beside the concluding holes of a luxury golf course called Harborside, rated by
Golfweek
as the third-best municipal golf course in the country. One afternoon I walked some of the course. To play eighteen at Harborside on a Saturday or a Sunday costs $95; new SUVs filled the parking lot. Several of the raised tees provided a panoramic view of the Chicago skyline, while the surrounding Rust Belt ruins and ghetto neighborhoods of south Chicago just beyond the fence seemed far away. I asked employees at the clubhouse golf shop, waiters in the restaurant, a bartender, and a man tending the greens, but none had heard of the nation-shaking carp netted here two months before.

The reason the fisherman happened to be fishing there in the first place was that a team of scientists from Notre Dame had already found bighead-carp DNA in the water. Working for the Corps of Engineers, the university's Center for Aquatic Conservation has been doing DNA tests for more than a year. As part of the increased tracking of Asian carp, the Notre Dame scientists collected samples from bodies of water all over Chicago. David M. Lodge, a professor of biology, heads the center. I stopped by South Bend to see him on my way back from Illinois.

Professor Lodge is a tall and genial man in his fifties, with a southern accent, blue eyes, and a D. Phil. in zoology from Oxford University, which he attended on a Rhodes. He wore a yellow tennis shirt, with his ballpoint pen and mechanical pencil stuck neatly in the button part of the neck, an innovation I admired, because I was wearing the same kind of shirt and had compensated for its lack of breast pocket by putting my pens in my pants pockets, always an awkward deal. He asked if I was writing something funny on carp. I said I probably was. "I know you can't not laugh when you see the silver carp jumping all over the place, but it's really not funny," he said. "It's a tragic thing, and people are wrong to trivialize it. We should focus on these fish's potential environmental and economic impact. In the Great Lakes—just as we're seeing now in south Louisiana—the environment
is
the economy. Look how the degrading of Lake Erie in the sixties and seventies contributed to the decline of Detroit and Cleveland and Buffalo. To people who say this is a question of jobs versus the environment, I say it's not either-or.

"The bigger issue is how we as a country protect ourselves against invasive species. At the moment, we are not very good at preventing invasions. We're constantly reacting after it's too late. Most invasions, if detected early, can be stopped, because establishing an organism so it's viable in a new environment is not automatic. Our current approach is more or less open-door. Right now the canal-and-river passage across Illinois from the lake to the Mississippi is a highway for the dispersal of organisms. The Great Lakes is a hot spot for aquatic invasions. In the lakes there are a hundred and six species nonnative to North America that are not in the Mississippi, while there are only fifty in the Mississippi that are not in the Great Lakes. An even greater threat, really, is of invasions going in the opposite direction from the carp's—that is, going from the lakes to the Mississippi. The Mississippi system holds the richest heritage of biodiversity in North America. The electric barrier at Romeoville was built originally to stop a small invasive fish called the round goby from coming south—too late, as it turned out, because today the round gobies are established in the Illinois. A later invasive, the tubenose goby, does appear to have been stopped. So the barrier may have helped. But over time it will not be able to stop everything.

"As for the Asian carp and the lakes, worst case is they're already established there. We wouldn't necessarily know. Usually, the first sign we have that organisms are invading is that members of the public see them. But people aren't underwater, and netting and electroshocking are not good tools for finding out what's going on in a body of water, especially not in one as big as Lake Michigan."

To explain more about how DNA testing for Asian carp works, David Lodge led me to the office of his colleague Christopher Jerde, a brown-haired South Dakotan who helped develop the technique. I did not follow all the science of it. Essentially, the technique uses DNA found in water samples to determine what species might have been present, just as DNA evidence can suggest that a person was at a crime scene. The DNA sequences in water samples are not followed to the point where individual fish are singled out, but that could be done, too. Christopher Jerde said that people who wanted to ignore the carp problem kept pooh-poohing Notre Dame's DNA findings before the confirming bighead carp was caught. They argued that the DNA could have been carried in on a duck's feathers or something. But in places where his team got multiple positive hits, he knew the fish had to be there. When he was proved right, he took no pleasure. The carp invasion only makes him mourn.

Some planners who take a long view believe that the Midwest's invasive-species probiem requires a bold solution: the complete separation, or reseparation, of the Great Lakes from the Mississippi at Chicago. This huge infrastructure project would consist of concrete dikes, new shipping terminals, new water-treatment facilities, maybe barge lifts to transfer freight, maybe the rereversing of Chicago's wastewater flow so that it no longer goes south. Business interests tend to hate this idea. I asked Jerde about it, and he said, "Right here is where you could put something like that," and called up a Google Earth photo of Chicago's South Side on his computer. "This empty area here is a Rust Belt nowhere left over from old Chicago," he said. "The main hub of a new shipping and hydrological arrangement for Chicago could go right here." As it happened, the brown and empty region he indicated on the satellite photo was not far from the green oases of the Harborside golf course.