Traverse City Record Eagle
June 13 , 2004

HISTORY OF LAKES FLOWS

by Loraine Anderson

Dave Dempsey's new book, "On the Brink: The Great Lakes in the 20th Century," does for the Great Lakes what his first book did for the state of Michigan.

It provides an environmental history of the lakes. It details public activism that goaded government and elected officials into enacting laws and policies to rescue the lakes from neglect and abuse. It outlines the growth of an 'ecosystem approach" over the last several decades to environmental laws and policies.

It is this combined focus that makes Dempsey's new book as important as his "Ruin and Recovery: Michigan's Rise as a Conservation Leader," published in 200l by the University of Michigan. "On the Brink", new this year from Michigan State University Press, provides a resilient and expansive framework on which to hang a growing environmental consciousness - - and conscience - - about these five spectacular inland seas.

Lakes Michigan, Huron, Superior, Erie and Ontario are great not only because they contain an estimated one-fifth of the world's supply of fresh surface water, but because of what they have survived.

Dempsey takes us through all of it. The Great Lakes as sewers. The Great Lakes as chemical waste dumps. The Great Lakes depleted of fish from overfishing, contamination and introduction of exotics that have hitchhiked into the ecosystem via the St. Lawrence Seaway and ocean freighter bilge tanks.

"On the Brink" is more than a depressing litany of environmental wrongs and reluctance of state and federal policymakers to enact and enforce strong laws. The strength of Dempsey's book is that he chronicles the many
visionary citizen efforts to save the Great Lakes, the Indiana Dunes, Niagara Falls and other natural features of the ecosystem from human imanipulation and misuse.

You'll read about Cleveland car dealer David Blaushild, who launched a billboard effort in l964 to save Lake Erie from death. You'll learn about Ohio millwright Gilbert Pugliese, who refused in the l960s to push the button to discahrge steel mill waste into the Cuyahoga River.

"When you read and hear about all the pollution and industries don't seem to be taking heed but go on stalling and alibiing and getting permits...well, then you feel there is only one alternative...That's the people," Pugliese
told a Clevland newspaper at the time.

"You'll also read some area names here:

-- William Milliken, of Traverse City, governor from l969 to l982, who Dempsey described in his first book as Michigan's first and onlyenvironmental governor.

-- Joan Wolfe, now of Benzie County, who was a founder of the West Michigan Environmental Council in Grand
Rapids and helped lead the successful fight to ban DDT and enact the state's Environmental Protection Act in l970.

-- Traverse City attorney Jim Olson who led the recent legal battle against a plan by Nestle/Perrier to to pump millions of gallons a year from Mecosta County groundwater for its bottling operation.

"On the Brink" is well-written and easy to read. It is focused, informative, well-organized, researched and sourced. And Dempsey is well-qualified to write it as a former state environmental adviser to former Gov. Jim Blanchard and a policy adviser to the Michigan Environmental Council."

Dave Dempsey will be signing copies of "On the Brink" at Horizon Books in Traverse City on Friday, June 18, from 6 to 8 p.m.

EXERPTS:
From his introduction on, "On the Brink" author Dave Dempsey asks what is the future of the Great Lakes.
Can they be saved? Can they be protected? How?

He never loses that focus in his 276-page environmental history of the Great Lakes. He starts the book this way:
"People don't experience public policies - - just the results of them. They experience foul beaches, declining
stocks of contaminated fish, tainted drinking letters, skies yellowed by smog, wetlands amothered in concrete, plummeting Great Lakes water levels.

"Or, if the policies are shaped a different way, they enjoy honey gold beaches, abundant fish that are safe to eat, clean drinking water, skies as blue as Lake Superior wetlands that please the eye with vegetation and
water fowl, and Great Lakes levels that cycle in a predictable and mostly naturalpattern."

"He says the latter did not happen because of enlightened public leadership but because of visionaries in high places and an indignant and outraged public. In the final two paragraphs, he writes:

"There is no escaping the fact, no matter how modern generations might seek to evade it, that democratic governments are tools of the people, subject to the pupular will if the people choose to exercise it...Now it is time
for them to instruct their governments on how to do so. If they act, they can show the world."