When bad things happen to good ecosystems: Lake lessons from the Gulf

By Jane Elder

Right now we’re watching a really bad petroleum-based horror story play out in the Gulf of Mexico. All things considered, this is a really good ecosystem, even though it has known some hard knocks, like being home to the world’s largest marine dead zone, thanks to all the chemical fertilizers and semi-treated sewage that our great heartland has flushed down the Mississippi River for decades.

Where the zones aren’t dead, the Gulf and its coast have been one of our hemisphere’s most productive marine habitats. This foodweb with delectable species supports not just the fishing and restaurant trade, but pelicans, dolphins, sea turtles and countless other living creatures large and small.

Where the water meets the land, nature has given us mangroves, islands, emerald beaches — all pretty splendid stuff, and remarkable habitat. And so, it is a stinking shame that so much of this is imperiled by the unleashed liquid remains of the dinosaur era.

When Harold Kushner wrote “When Bad things Happen to Good People” he was reflecting on how to grapple with the unexplainable suffering in our lives. When it comes to the Gulf spill, we have an explanation for all the suffering. This disaster is no mystery, no Old Testament payback. People did this.

The engineers or planners or budget people didn’t factor in a number of potential “oops” factors, and even if they did, it looks like budget people made the decision to not pony up the bucks for an extra relief valve, or to have a back-up plan for when a valve fails. Maybe this made sense in an internal spreadsheet.

It doesn’t make sense from the standpoint of precautionary strategies.

I raise all of this, because bad things happen to good ecosystems all of the time, and most of the time, our species is the responsible party. Amazingly, you would think that a species capable of abstract reasoning (in addition to tool making) might be good at learning from mistakes, and trying something different when it comes to safeguarding our own life support systems, but then, there is mystery to human behavior as well.

And so, with the U.S. and Canada actively renegotiating the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, perhaps it isn’t redundant to scream (politely, but loudly) “If you must err in protecting our water, do it on the side of CAUTION”–a notion otherwise known as the precautionary principle.

Maybe it will cost a little more, or a lot more, or take more time to opt for taking very careful precautions before letting toxic substances languish in our harbors for another 30 years, or licensing new chemicals that will end up in the lakes, or hoping that new, damaging species won’t hitch more rides into the lakes. But you know, a good freshwater ecosystem is a hard thing to find in our galaxy, and I’d just as soon not muck up the one we have any more than we already have.

When we separate risks from their potential costs — whether contaminated foodwebs or despoiled coastlines or lost jobs in fishing communities, we fail to use our intellectual capacity to act on behalf the long-term interests of our species and the rest of life on Earth.

Too often, when mistakes happen, the suffering is borne by the innocent, who, if they have a voice, cannot help but ask “why?” In this case, we know why. Cheap oil isn’t really cheap. Neither is clean water. Let’s learn, and act accordingly, and maybe be the reason that good things start happening to good ecosystems.

Jane Elder is a Great Lakes policy analyst, advocate, writer and die-hard fan of big freshwater ecosystems