Some background: as a kid, my family boated on the SF Bay. I can remember when cormorants were rare on the bay. There were no porpoises or dolphins in the bay. It was rare for a whale to enter the bay. There were zero brown pelicans. All of those observations are entirely opposite of today's bay. Acts of government have seriously improved water ecosystems.
Now that memory is a data point of one. But we also all should know that the Cuyahoga has not caught fire in 50 years and that's not because of the work of zebra mussels -- they don't consume stuff which is volatile enough to catch fire spontaneously.
In summary, before reading the piece everyone should be aware that waterways have generally been substantially cleaned up in the last 50 years.
With that as background, I have immediate questions: What evidence is there that Erie was cleaned up by mussels and not by new environmental laws? Even if the mussels helped, were they a necessary condition to cleaning this up? Or did they simply advance the cleanup by a few years?
The piece contains good skeptical thinking, but it does not sufficiently lay evidence that Zebra Mussels were a cause of Erie's cleanup, rather than a coincidence. It's pretense at being a factual explanation of history is unearned.
You're right, the article makes too strong of a correlation between the affects that Zebra & Quagga mussels have had and Lake Erie's recovery. But I'm curious, does that totally discredit the article?
No doubt, if left alone without any government policy, Lake Erie may not have recovered from purely natural means, such as the introduction of an invasive species. I believe, like you, that government policy has helped in the restoration, at least has helped speed it up.
But I don't think that's the author's real point. The point he is ultimately making is stated in the article:
> "Our culture — meaning here the collective culture of modern Western industrial society — is obsessed by the false belief that nature can’t adapt to our actions."
and:
> "Our habitual way of dealing with Mother Nature assumes that we talk and she listens, full stop, end of sentence. [...] What we need to recognize, rather, is that we’re engaged in a conversation with the old broad. We said “pollution,” she quipped “zebra mussels;” we said “internal combustion engines,” and she smiled and said “coastal flooding.” We can listen to her responses and learn from them - or not, and find out the hard way what else she has to say."
I think the author is suggesting that nature will, in the end, restore balance and that we, as species, could possibly help by simply getting out of the way or maybe working with natural processes. Understanding nature's process rather than fighting it is likely the best way out of the messes that we've created for ourselves.
I believe that the SF Bay losing many larger ocean mammals was related to World War 2 anti-submarine nets that closed off the bay from their migration for years. At least, that's what I recall from a marine mammal course a few years back.
The shutdown of industry and decline of agriculture stopped additional pollution, but Zebra mussels are great at utilizing phosphorus, which when present at high levels reduces oxygen in the water.
Shellfish like oysters are present in the San Francisco bay too. They are a key part of the lifecycle, and the colonization of Lake Eire by the mussels helped other life appear.
It’s also hilarious to declare the mussels invasive. The lake was a pitiful, dead environment. Any life is invasive.
Well, that is one unusual source for an HN submission!
Quite interesting read - about the author, from that website:
> John Michael Greer is a widely read author and blogger whose work focuses on the overlaps between ecology, spirituality, and the future of industrial society.
> He served twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, and currently heads the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn. He currently lives in East Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife Sara.
"Ancient Order of Druids in America" and "Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn" - who has heard of those before?
I'm not one to dismiss something just because it is... unusual. I must admit I would not ask if this was some professor of biology at XYZ University. I have no idea what to think about an American Grand Archdruid. Does anybody have any well-founded opinions about those organizations? I like their page title "Frequently Thrown Tantrums" though -- http://www.druidical-gd.org/ftt.html
My philosophy professor in a college was also a Professor of Magic History in a School of Witchcraft and Wizardry[1]. Really. After that I do not pay much attention to such a things, I prefer to judge by what people say, not by how do they look.
As you can see from his skeptical remarks about Gaia consciousness in this post, he's pretty sane, despite sounding weird. I've enjoyed reading his blog The Archdruid Report, which I'm disappointed to see he deleted.
the FTT page is hilarious. It's also something that speaks to every person who has run a website for an organization, when I was webmaster for a convention, I had a text file with canned responses, 8 of them or so, that answered 80% of the questions received, all of which were answerable by reading the website.
> Some of my readers may remember media stories from 1969, when the Cuyahoga River, which flows into Lake Erie, caught fire one hot summer day—yes, it had that much toxic waste in it.
This actually understates the situation; the Cuyahoga caught fire no less than thirteen times since 1868. The 1969 fire was merely the one that served as a rallying cry to pass legislation to take action. https://www.alleghenyfront.org/how-a-burning-river-helped-cr...
Every time I read stories about how polluted our (US/Canada) streams and lakes are it makes me shutter to think of how monumentally bad China must be with little to no environmental protection!
This recent video of just one small, insignificant shop in China for example. It needs to somehow dispose of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83GDV0xsTTs) and my suspicion is that it goes into local rivers.
> Every time I read stories about how polluted our (US/Canada) streams and lakes are it makes me shutter to think of how monumentally bad China must be with little to no environmental protection!
We were that bad. The EPA (signed by Nixon!) is what turned that around.
While I understand the point about zebra mussels cleaning up lake Erie, I can't agree with the idea that we should welcome all invasive species. After all, the presence of e.g. feral cats on various islands or foxes in Australia is just another one of the messes humans made, and we should feel as responsible for the damage they do as we feel responsible for pollution. Zebra mussels may be one of the few examples where an invasive species was actually good for the ecosystem, other invasive species just exterminate or squeeze out native species, leading to a loss of biodiversity.
I don't think that Greer is claiming that we should "welcome all invasive species" as much simply pointing out that Nature doesn't stand still. What we call an "invasive species" is, from a broader perspective, simply Nature adapting to changing circumstances, which includes opening up new habitat to previously unknown species. This only looks odd or threatening if we assume that Nature should be static and fixed, and that only humans can or should enact environmental change.
>Zebra mussels may be one of the few examples where an invasive species was actually good for the ecosystem
And maybe just this ecosystem. As noted elsewhere here, zebra mussels have caused tons of other problems. In less-polluted lakes, they filter the water clear, which not only reduces fish populations but can lead to massive growth of algae.
You can't really even talk about what's "good" for an ecosystem in this large of a context though. Any criterion you would care to come up with or name, is gonna end up being a human idea. You can't see the world except through eyes.
Example: Is clear water inherently "good" or is it just something humans like? These mussels prefer the dirty water. Maybe in the Zebra Mussel Bible, the cleaning of the lake water is called "the coming apocalypse due to our greedy exploitation of nature" and the polluted years are remembered fondly as "the good times."
Is an island populated by a larger number of species more finely-adapted to smaller niches, "better" than an island overrun with mostly generalists (cats and a couple of prey species)? In other words is biodiversity "good" or is it just something humans like? Certainly greater biodiversity is associated with longer periods of unchanging climate/geology/etc. that, to us, resemble our (maybe fitting, maybe not) concept of an "equilibrium." Not coincidentally these periods include the one we've been in for a few thousand years now, during which all writing, agriculture, cities and civilization developed. So we tend to think of them as "natural" and as a "norm," that we maybe will or maybe won't disturb. But those periods are only part of the story. There are also those dynamic, changing, cataclysmic periods. And when those are going on, biodiversity tends to be less initially, as shown by the mass extinctions visible in the fossil record.
Just to completely take it over the top, is life better than death? Cuz the natural order seems to think they both should happen in almost exactly equal measure. Plus, "An empty glass is full of opportunity." A dead tree is a great boon to the next generation of little trees that grow on the rotting trunk, not to mention all the fungi etc. that survive by doing the rotting.
I dunno, it's hard to formulate any "puny huuu-mon" judgments about anything that don't just fall apart.
In the text of the article there are words: "we could always roll snake-eyes in the evolutionary crapshoot" I'm not an English native and I cannot grasp the precise meaning of the "to roll snake-eyes". What does it mean? Does the rolling of snake eyes somehow different from rolling human eyes? Or maybe snakes cannot roll their eyes(?) and... I don't know.
I've been visiting the St. Lawrence river downstream of the Great Lakes since the 1970s. My mother grew up in the era before the Saint Lawrence Seaway was established in the 50s, which made the river navigable by larger ships (although not container ships) below the Thousand Islands to Montreal and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, opening up the Great Lakes to international shipping and trade.
The river used to be filthy. Lots of industry on the U.S. and Canadian sides and in the Great Lakes dumped all kinds of untreated waste into the ecosystem. I also remember a major oil slick which I believe was caused by a maritime accident. This was before the advent of better navigation technology and environmental protection laws.
The water may have become cleaner over time, but I noticed that by the early 2000s, the types of fish that I had caught off the dock by the dozens as a child in the 70s and 80s -- perch, sunfish, bass -- were becoming extremely rare. Ten years later, these shore species had all but disappeared except for a few bays and harbors.
The disappearance of these fish coincided with the appearance of the zebra mussel. The lore told here is that the zebra mussels were carried over by Ukrainian freighters in the 1990s (similar to the story in TFA). But other new species have appeared on the river, too -- cormorants, carp, and Canadian geese are very visible now, and they weren't in the past.
We also seem to have more extreme variations in water levels, with flooding this year and in 2017, and very low levels in other years. Surely that impacts water temperature and breeding conditions for some aquatic species.
I think some people blamed the zebra mussels and the cormorants for the disappearance of many species of fish, but I think there's a larger story taking place, with many factors contributing to changes in the ecosystem.
We had ConEd workers come to our schools in Ohio in the 80-90's to educate us about how they had to spend millions of dollars and hundreds of man-hours annually power washing the mussels out of the lakewater cooling pools and pipes at the Fermi II nuclear plant between Detroit and Toledo because the mussels prefer the warmer waters.
I cursed and still cursed stepping on the sharp mussel shells lining the now clean and swimmable beach waters of Lake Michigan. Decades of misplaced vitriol.
I was hoping this article would go more into the detail of other invasive species in the Lakes like Asian Carp and those nasty looking parasitic Laprey's.
More of a philosophical perspective than any sort of real proposal, but worth a read if you're into that. It's a mid-length piece, looks longer than it is due to the comment section at bottom.
I'm from Erie and lived there during all of this, and can confirm. Especially this:
> And the human reaction? That’s where things get interesting. The human reaction was all-out panic
Zebra mussels grabbed headlines in the local paper for years. Everyone went nuts. We all thought it was doomsday and believed you'd never be able to float a boat in the bay ever again.
Happy as I am about the result (the essay wanders a bit after getting to the "punch line") it reminds me how bizarre I find that people regularly eat mussels, oysters, vertebrate livers, kidneys and the like. The idea of eating a used filter really revolts me.
I wonder if you could invent a pool filter powered by zebra mussels? You’d obviously need a good way to keep them contained in the filter area and out of the piping and pool proper.
I doubt it. Maybe in a natural pool closer to a swimming hole, but who would want those mussels to be in their bool. If they colonize the pool floor, you're going to end up with your feet being cut up.
What sort of pollution does that blogger think is coming out a nuclear plant? He seems to think cooling towers and water show how pollute. It's just water.
It's a bit difficult to parse. Zebra mussels colonized the Lake Erie at a time when it was so polluted that it had been declare biologically dead. In particular this happened:
"Some of my readers may remember media stories from 1969, when the Cuyahoga River, which flows into Lake Erie, caught fire one hot summer day—yes, it had that much toxic waste in it."
I stopped reading at Gaia is a tough and feisty old broad because no one -- not even a Druid -- is allowed to say "broad" and be taken seriously nowadays. I'm sorry. I didn't write the rules. That's just the way it is.
[+] [-] cjensen|6 years ago|reply
Some background: as a kid, my family boated on the SF Bay. I can remember when cormorants were rare on the bay. There were no porpoises or dolphins in the bay. It was rare for a whale to enter the bay. There were zero brown pelicans. All of those observations are entirely opposite of today's bay. Acts of government have seriously improved water ecosystems.
Now that memory is a data point of one. But we also all should know that the Cuyahoga has not caught fire in 50 years and that's not because of the work of zebra mussels -- they don't consume stuff which is volatile enough to catch fire spontaneously.
In summary, before reading the piece everyone should be aware that waterways have generally been substantially cleaned up in the last 50 years.
With that as background, I have immediate questions: What evidence is there that Erie was cleaned up by mussels and not by new environmental laws? Even if the mussels helped, were they a necessary condition to cleaning this up? Or did they simply advance the cleanup by a few years?
The piece contains good skeptical thinking, but it does not sufficiently lay evidence that Zebra Mussels were a cause of Erie's cleanup, rather than a coincidence. It's pretense at being a factual explanation of history is unearned.
[+] [-] taftster|6 years ago|reply
No doubt, if left alone without any government policy, Lake Erie may not have recovered from purely natural means, such as the introduction of an invasive species. I believe, like you, that government policy has helped in the restoration, at least has helped speed it up.
But I don't think that's the author's real point. The point he is ultimately making is stated in the article:
> "Our culture — meaning here the collective culture of modern Western industrial society — is obsessed by the false belief that nature can’t adapt to our actions."
and:
> "Our habitual way of dealing with Mother Nature assumes that we talk and she listens, full stop, end of sentence. [...] What we need to recognize, rather, is that we’re engaged in a conversation with the old broad. We said “pollution,” she quipped “zebra mussels;” we said “internal combustion engines,” and she smiled and said “coastal flooding.” We can listen to her responses and learn from them - or not, and find out the hard way what else she has to say."
I think the author is suggesting that nature will, in the end, restore balance and that we, as species, could possibly help by simply getting out of the way or maybe working with natural processes. Understanding nature's process rather than fighting it is likely the best way out of the messes that we've created for ourselves.
[+] [-] nothal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|6 years ago|reply
Shellfish like oysters are present in the San Francisco bay too. They are a key part of the lifecycle, and the colonization of Lake Eire by the mussels helped other life appear.
It’s also hilarious to declare the mussels invasive. The lake was a pitiful, dead environment. Any life is invasive.
[+] [-] nosianu|6 years ago|reply
Quite interesting read - about the author, from that website:
> John Michael Greer is a widely read author and blogger whose work focuses on the overlaps between ecology, spirituality, and the future of industrial society.
> He served twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, and currently heads the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn. He currently lives in East Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife Sara.
"Ancient Order of Druids in America" and "Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn" - who has heard of those before?
I looked them up and found
- https://aoda.org/
- http://www.druidical-gd.org/
I'm not one to dismiss something just because it is... unusual. I must admit I would not ask if this was some professor of biology at XYZ University. I have no idea what to think about an American Grand Archdruid. Does anybody have any well-founded opinions about those organizations? I like their page title "Frequently Thrown Tantrums" though -- http://www.druidical-gd.org/ftt.html
[+] [-] ordu|6 years ago|reply
[1] http://ostentum.ru/en/
[+] [-] kragen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aloha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HillaryBriss|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaas|6 years ago|reply
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
It's incredibly well researched and written, and gave me a much better understanding of what's going with the ecosystems.
[+] [-] sehugg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|6 years ago|reply
This actually understates the situation; the Cuyahoga caught fire no less than thirteen times since 1868. The 1969 fire was merely the one that served as a rallying cry to pass legislation to take action. https://www.alleghenyfront.org/how-a-burning-river-helped-cr...
[+] [-] canada_dry|6 years ago|reply
This recent video of just one small, insignificant shop in China for example. It needs to somehow dispose of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83GDV0xsTTs) and my suspicion is that it goes into local rivers.
[+] [-] bsder|6 years ago|reply
We were that bad. The EPA (signed by Nixon!) is what turned that around.
[+] [-] rob74|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaspax|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Amorymeltzer|6 years ago|reply
And maybe just this ecosystem. As noted elsewhere here, zebra mussels have caused tons of other problems. In less-polluted lakes, they filter the water clear, which not only reduces fish populations but can lead to massive growth of algae.
[+] [-] rdiddly|6 years ago|reply
Example: Is clear water inherently "good" or is it just something humans like? These mussels prefer the dirty water. Maybe in the Zebra Mussel Bible, the cleaning of the lake water is called "the coming apocalypse due to our greedy exploitation of nature" and the polluted years are remembered fondly as "the good times."
Is an island populated by a larger number of species more finely-adapted to smaller niches, "better" than an island overrun with mostly generalists (cats and a couple of prey species)? In other words is biodiversity "good" or is it just something humans like? Certainly greater biodiversity is associated with longer periods of unchanging climate/geology/etc. that, to us, resemble our (maybe fitting, maybe not) concept of an "equilibrium." Not coincidentally these periods include the one we've been in for a few thousand years now, during which all writing, agriculture, cities and civilization developed. So we tend to think of them as "natural" and as a "norm," that we maybe will or maybe won't disturb. But those periods are only part of the story. There are also those dynamic, changing, cataclysmic periods. And when those are going on, biodiversity tends to be less initially, as shown by the mass extinctions visible in the fossil record.
Just to completely take it over the top, is life better than death? Cuz the natural order seems to think they both should happen in almost exactly equal measure. Plus, "An empty glass is full of opportunity." A dead tree is a great boon to the next generation of little trees that grow on the rotting trunk, not to mention all the fungi etc. that survive by doing the rotting.
I dunno, it's hard to formulate any "puny huuu-mon" judgments about anything that don't just fall apart.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ordu|6 years ago|reply
Would someone be so nice to explain this, please?
[+] [-] sha666sum|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffmcjunkin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilamont|6 years ago|reply
The river used to be filthy. Lots of industry on the U.S. and Canadian sides and in the Great Lakes dumped all kinds of untreated waste into the ecosystem. I also remember a major oil slick which I believe was caused by a maritime accident. This was before the advent of better navigation technology and environmental protection laws.
The water may have become cleaner over time, but I noticed that by the early 2000s, the types of fish that I had caught off the dock by the dozens as a child in the 70s and 80s -- perch, sunfish, bass -- were becoming extremely rare. Ten years later, these shore species had all but disappeared except for a few bays and harbors.
The disappearance of these fish coincided with the appearance of the zebra mussel. The lore told here is that the zebra mussels were carried over by Ukrainian freighters in the 1990s (similar to the story in TFA). But other new species have appeared on the river, too -- cormorants, carp, and Canadian geese are very visible now, and they weren't in the past.
We also seem to have more extreme variations in water levels, with flooding this year and in 2017, and very low levels in other years. Surely that impacts water temperature and breeding conditions for some aquatic species.
I think some people blamed the zebra mussels and the cormorants for the disappearance of many species of fish, but I think there's a larger story taking place, with many factors contributing to changes in the ecosystem.
[+] [-] dole|6 years ago|reply
I cursed and still cursed stepping on the sharp mussel shells lining the now clean and swimmable beach waters of Lake Michigan. Decades of misplaced vitriol.
https://goo.gl/maps/VrWdpomeGvXZcFsJ6
[+] [-] lostlogin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctrlaltdylan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giardini|6 years ago|reply
Mmmmm! Good eating:
"Eat The Enemy: The Delicious Solution To Menacing Asian Carp"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/eat-the-enemy-asian-carp_n_63...
[+] [-] slfnflctd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandonmenc|6 years ago|reply
> And the human reaction? That’s where things get interesting. The human reaction was all-out panic
Zebra mussels grabbed headlines in the local paper for years. Everyone went nuts. We all thought it was doomsday and believed you'd never be able to float a boat in the bay ever again.
[+] [-] corliss78|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrfusion|6 years ago|reply
Can it be done?
[+] [-] Something1234|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jswizzy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dm3730|6 years ago|reply
If it's an effluent or sewer pipe, do you think "it's just water"?
[+] [-] pvaldes|6 years ago|reply
It never recovered.
[+] [-] lgrebe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] credit_guy|6 years ago|reply
"Some of my readers may remember media stories from 1969, when the Cuyahoga River, which flows into Lake Erie, caught fire one hot summer day—yes, it had that much toxic waste in it."
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pvaldes|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] HillaryBriss|6 years ago|reply