Pandora's Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway - Hardcover

Alexander, Jeff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 087013857X ISBN 13: 9780870138577

Publisher: Michigan State University Press, 2009

Synopsis

The St. Lawrence Seaway was considered one of the world's greatest engineering achievements when it opened in 1959. The $1 billion project-a series of locks, canals, and dams that tamed the ferocious St. Lawrence River-opened the Great Lakes to the global shipping industry.
     Linking ports on lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario to shipping hubs on the world's seven seas increased global trade in the Great Lakes region. But it came at an extraordinarily high price. Foreign species that immigrated into the lakes in ocean freighters' ballast water tanks unleashed a biological shift that reconfigured the world's largest freshwater ecosystems.
     Pandora's Locks is the story of politicians and engineers who, driven by hubris and handicapped by ignorance, demanded that the Seaway be built at any cost. It is the tragic tale of government agencies that could have prevented ocean freighters from laying waste to the Great Lakes ecosystems, but failed to act until it was too late. Blending science with compelling personal accounts, this book is the first comprehensive account of how inviting transoceanic freighters into North America's freshwater seas transformed these wondrous lakes.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeff Alexander is an award-winning environmental journalist and author of The Muskegon: The Majesty and Tragedy of Michigan's Rarest River.

Review:

...skillfully chronicles how the realization of a centuries-old dream of a commercial shipping passage between the Great Lakes and saltwater seas has spawned an invasion of foreign fish, pathogens and other unwanteds that has damaged native fisheries, killed birds, and cost the public billions of dollars to control...Alexander's writing is as compelling as his conclusion. - Dave Dempsey, Conservation Minnesota

About this edition

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 087013857X
• ISBN 13: 9780870138577
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 431