Annie Lambla

One of my favorite issues I've learned about since coming to Chicago is the fear of Asian carp invading Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes.  I first heard about it from Steven, who had a near-mis-adventure on an early leg of his Mississippi River raft trip involving the electric barriers on the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal.  

Yes, dear readers, parts of the canal are electrified.  Which means if a person falls off the raft, they get shocked, and if a fish enters the electrified section, it gets killed.  This is the goal - to stop Asian carp from getting through from the Illinois River to Lake Michigan.  

The interesting issue only starts there.  The electric barriers, being man-made and evidently very technically complicated (you can see what an engineer I am), malfunction from time to time.  In December, they were shut down for days in order to properly fix the electric barriers.  Oh, no! you might exclaim.  What if the Asian carp sneak through while the engineers are busy working away at the scary traps?  Never fear!  The Illinois Department of Natural Resources decided that the best way to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes was to dump tons and tons of poisonous chemicals in the waterways.  

click the map to see it biggerNever mind the effects of these chemicals on the surrounding ecosystem.  Among the tens of thousands of fish found killed from the poison, only ONE was an Asian carp.  

So much for the incredible risk of invasion.  

I find this whole situation to be so ridiculous it would be laughable, if not for the tons of poisonous chemicals and dead wildlife in the Chicago Area Waterway System (CAWS).  

To make you groan one more time, Michigan has just filed a case that would require Illinois to close the locks from Lake Michigan into the CAWS.  Sure, this would not let the Asian carp through, but it also wouldn't let floodwaters through or - and this is where I really don't understand Michigan's motivations - freight vessels.  Put plainly, this would prevent trade from Lake Michigan into the Mississippi River valley. 

Illinois is, of course, reacting.  And hopefully, through responses from the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) of Chicago, Attorney General Lisa Madigan, and the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, Michigan's case won't pass.  

Really, what it comes down to, for me, is the absurdities that we are driven to because years ago we decided to cut a whole and reverse the flow of the Chicago "River."  THe whole situation is an excellent example of how far we've come in compensating for messing with Mother Nature - concerns for runoff, salt costs, jobs, invasive fish, and sewage and water purification are now what guide our policies about the nature of Nature.  What water wants to do is no longer okay - instead we will just keep trying to force the waters to stay in our palms, and it will just keep dripping through our fingers.  

Oh, and I forgot one of the best parts - Asian carp can jump 10 feet out of the air.  So, why don't we just turn the Canal into a big circus?