Download The Death and Life of the Great Lakes AudioBook Free
THE FANTASTIC Lakes - Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior - hold 20 percent of the world's way to obtain surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work, and entertainment for tens of an incredible number of Americans. But they are under risk as never before, and their problems are dispersing across the continent. The Fatality and Life of the fantastic Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan's interesting portrait of your ecological catastrophe occurring right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an study of the perils they face and the ways we can regain and maintain them for generations to come. For thousands of years, the pristine Great Lakes were segregated from the Atlantic Ocean by the roaring Niagara Comes and from the Mississippi River basin by the "subcontinental divide". Beginning in the overdue 1800s, these barriers were circumvented to get oceangoing freighters from the Atlantic also to allow Chicago's sewage to float away to the Mississippi. These were engineering marvels in their time - and the changes in Chicago caught a deadly cycle of waterborne ailments - nevertheless they have had horrendous unforeseen implications. Egan provides a chilling consideration of how sea lamprey, zebra and quagga mussels, and other invaders have made their way into the lakes, decimating local species and essentially destroying the age-old ecosystem. And because the lakes are no longer isolated, the invaders now threaten water intake pipes, hydroelectric dams, and other infrastructure across the country. Egan also explores why outbreaks of toxic algae stemming from the overapplication of plantation fertilizer have gone massive biological "dead areas" that threaten the way to obtain fresh water. He examines fluctuations in the degrees of the lakes induced by manmade local climate change and overzealous dredging of shipping and delivery channels. And he records on the persistent hazards to siphon off Great Lakes water to slake drier parts of America or to be sold in another country. In an age when dire problems like the Flint water crisis or the California drought bring ever more focus on the indispensability of safe, clean, easily available water, The Fatality and the Life of the fantastic Lakes is a robust paean to what is probably our most valuable resource, an urgent study of what threatens it, and a convincing call to forearms about the relatively simple things we need to do to safeguard it.
