The Great Lakes region, Canada included, supports 107 million people working 51 million jobs, and sustaining a gross domestic product of six trillion dollars. That economic backbone—combined with a rich legacy of social, ecological, and intellectual capital—suggests that the Great Lakes should be capable of fixing its abundant problems.
“If there is hope for places like Flint, and for the larger Great Lakes region and its environment, it is beyond the formulas that left it abandoned or damaged,” Jane Elder argues in Wilderness, Water, and Rust: A Journey Toward Great Lakes Resilience. “The boom-and-bust formula has played out in the Great Lakes region.”
Much of this work is happening in sustainable agriculture, green infrastructure, and ecological restoration. Whether or not these sectors will continue to ascend and transform equations of exploitation into a more resilient ecological whole remains to be seen. Elder explores this topic in a deeply personal way, evoking a lifetime of personal memories growing up in the upper Midwest, and drawing ideas and inspiration from her long, accomplished career in environmental policy advocacy work.
Elder began her work lobbying for Michigan wilderness. At a 1978 conference she learned just how divided the public could be on the topic when one attendee, from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, threatened a shotgun-welcome if wilderness advocates ever set foot near his property. “That leaves an impression,” she writes.
That’s the most extreme manifestation of the supposedly “deep philosophical divide between conservation for the sake of protecting hunting and fishing resources, and conservation for the sake of broader environmental health, aesthetics, and intrinsic value,” she writes. “I thought the divide was artificial then and still think it is artificial now. It is a more cultural than practical difference.”
Unfortunately, this divide has been weaponized.
Environmentalists got stereotyped, cast as shrill people “screaming at the wind,” she writes. The movement “unwittingly” allowed this branding to happen, and didn’t have the resources or the savvy to unwind this deliberate marginalization.
The irony here is that the 1970s marked a time of great optimism and progress. Bipartisan acts of Congress passed landmark legislation, protecting public lands and setting aside important recreational resources. Government was actively tasked with environmental protection, and both parties played a proud role in this development.
Then, Reagan’s presidency began to split this consensus. The administration used environmental issues as one of its wedging tactics.
This tactic is still accelerating, and it would have been easy for Elder to document this by focusing on the devolution of the Republican Party. Instead, she focuses on the kind of hard work that goes into the democratic making of policy. Her stories about lobbying against persistent chemical pollution in Great Lakes ecosystems are an invaluable reminder that creativity and the human touch are an important part of social change. Remembering what democracy looks like at a time when our government seems particularly broken feels important.
After the promise of the 1970s, the list of environmental policy gains over the last 40 years is perilously small. One of the big winners has been Great Lakes restoration, but even that rose comes with its bundle of thorns: “[We’ve] been able to secure federal funding for Great Lakes cleanup, but we haven’t had the political capacity to change the underlying threats. We keep paying to treat the symptoms but are unwilling to address the causes, or if we do, it is not at a scale that will solve the problems.”
When people ask Elder if she’s optimistic, she instead says, “I choose to be hopeful.” And this is such a book—candid, sober, grim, funny, deeply informative—hopeful. She subscribes to poet Vaclav Havel’s notion of hope: “an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands to succeed.”
