Chuck Laszewski: Not too huge to be damaged

When it comes to environmental history, we are a classroom of Bart Simpsons.

We forget what we did in the past and we believe, all evidence to the contrary, that nature is too big to be hurt by puny human beings.

So, now we gaze out at Lake Superior and chuckle when environmentalists, conservationists and scientists warn the lake is in danger. C'mon, Superior is better than all the other lakes -- too big, too blue, too cold to crumble from a human sucker punch.

Once again, we are wrong.

Part of the reason we misjudge Superior is because we think the middle of the lake can counteract all the damage we do along the shore. It can't.

As any good angler will tell you, fish congregate around river mouths, rock outcroppings and shallows. Lacking gills, the shoreline is where humans spend their time, too -- and human-caused pollution in these near zones kill fish, or destroy their habitat.

The coaster brook trout is a case in point. The fish lived along the shore and spawned in the streams. In the late 1800s, fishing publications raved about huge catches of the large fish in Bayfield, Wis., and points west. But overfishing and habitat destruction wiped out all 10 of its Minnesota fisheries, and the only three areas where the coaster brook trout barely survive are in Isle Royale and Salmon Trout River in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

The injuries to Lake Superior are inflicted by foreigners, by locals and by you and me.

Decades after we first figured out it was a bad idea for freighters to scoop up water in foreign ports for ballast and then dump it in the Great Lakes, the practice continues. So the New Zealand mudsnail, the zebra mussel from the Caspian Sea and the Eurasian ruffe all have taken up residence in and around the Duluth harbor. Without natural predators, they reproduce wildly and gorge themselves on the water insects native fish need or in other ways cripple Superior's fish species. The snails and mussels also attach to water intake pipes, causing enormous expenses for utilities and other businesses.

Duluth's residents still occasionally send raw sewage into the lake, even though they have separate sanitary and storm sewers. During a heavy rain, water can get into the aging pipes and overwhelm the sewer system. Fixing the problem by building overflow basins, installing sump pumps and replacing old pipes and connections is expensive business and the Western Lake Superior Sanitary District is making only slow progress.

It's a problem shared by numerous communities around Lake Superior, including Ashland, Wis.; Thunder Bay, Ontario; and along Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Throw in poorly designed or maintained septic systems and it's little wonder that state and provincial governments periodically close the lake's beaches.

Nor have we eliminated industrial waste dumping into Lake Superior, the kind of behavior that galvanized the nation in the early 1970s to pass the Clean Water Act. While our Canadian neighbors seem to be bigger offenders, a report produced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency highlighted industrial discharges and chemical spills in the Nemadji and St. Louis river basins. Industrial dumping aggravates the enormous stew of toxic chemicals and elements residing in the sediments at the bottom of those rivers and Lake Superior that we have made little progress in cleaning.

But the rest of us contribute, too. The old mom-and-pop resorts where folks from the Twin Cities went for a week or two of vacation are disappearing. In their place are pricey condominiums and large summer homes. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that Cook County's population saw its population jump 34 percent between 1990 and 2000 while neighboring Lake County increased a healthy 6.2 percent.

All that new housing is coming at the expense of the forests and rivers that flow into Lake Superior. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency's 2002 Assessment of Representative Lake Superior Basin Tributaries found water quality was declining. There was more phosphorus and sediment runoff, which threatened cold-water fish. In fact, juvenile rainbow trout have declined since 1989, according to the report.

There is some hope.

All these issues, as well as the need to clean up contaminated river bottoms like the St. Louis River, are addressed in the Great Lakes Collaboration Implementation Act now before Congress. It provides guidelines and money for controlling or eliminating these problems in all the Great Lakes if it is passed and signed into law.

But we don't have to wait for an act of Congress to tackle our problems. Local units of government around the lake need to develop and enforce wise zoning laws that are sensitive to the natural beauty that draws people to Lake Superior in the first place.

We must be willing to support, with our tax dollars, state programs designed to clean up the rivers flowing into Superior and provide money to upgrade sanitary sewers. We should applaud good state laws like the one passed in May, which significantly cuts the amount of mercury three power plants put into the air. Airborne mercury ultimately falls to the earth and finds its way into Superior's fish.

We must do it, because nobody wants to see it renamed Lake Mediocre.

Chuck Laszewski, communications director for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, was a longtime energy, environment and transportation reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.