On the Brink: The Great Lakes in the 21st Century by Dave Dempsey

Abstract

Book Reviews 133 Calhoun County, the vignette describes the strange proposal made by C. W. Post, the health-food king, who suggested not only planting cherry trees every sixty feet to enhance the road's overall beauty but also having the annual crop harvested and sold to defer maintenance costs. Barnett has created a delightful work. The research appears to be solid (there is no documentation) and the writing is clear and crisp. He has added a fascinating "Postscript" that discusses "highways envisioned but not born" (pp. 247-52) and three appendices: a listing of named highways organized by county, named highways by route number, and named highways by year of founding. Perhaps scholars elsewhere will adopt Barnett's imaginative approach to the history of named public roads. H. Roger Grant Clemson University Dave Dempsey. On the Brink: The Great Takes in the 21st Century. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004. Pp. 304. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Paper, $24.95. Dave Dempsey's On the Brink broadly surveys the relationship between people and the Great Lakes over the centuries. The prologue tells a hard-hitting, fanciful tale set fifty years in the future depicting conditions at Port Huron and the fate of Lake St. Clair, awarning about the possible effects of the continuing deterioration of lake waters. Next, Dempsey summarizes human-lake relationships from ancient Native Peoples, explorers, missionaries, and fur traders, to early setders. Then he turns to the general decline of the fish population and the damage caused by development based on careless exploitation of natural resources. A review of conservation efforts designed to save some of the beauty of the Great Lakes for the public follows. The thoughdess degradation and pollution of the lakes first alarmed the public when the Great Lakes cities and those elsewhere in the country experienced typhoid epidemics around 1900. Once those outbreaks had been controlled, however, the clamor about lake water subsided and the growth of pollution continued without major outcries. This situation did not change until the mid-twentieth century when the Cuyahoga River caught fire on June 22, 1969, thus bringing the degradation of Lake Erie to the nation's attention. Governments, citizens' groups, and environmental organizations responded. The United States-Canada Water Quality Agreement of 1972 134 Michigan Historical Review provided a framework for action. Just as Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, marked the beginning of a wave of reform directed at toxic chemical pollutants, theWater Quality Agreement marked the beginning of a twenty-year period of broad-based comebacks for the Great Lakes. Dempsey deals skillfully with that era, citing its goals, successes, and failures. Yet despite some progress, he concludes that the lakes are in peril. A litany of failures and the reasons why these failures occurred are cited in rich detail, and the evidence of current serious trouble is spelled out clearly. Dempsey believes that government programs need large scale funding and that the people who live around the lakes must raise their voices and exercise their power as citizens to achieve reform. On the Brink covers several centuries in only 276 pages of text, and these pages are embellished with reminiscences about life on the lakes and colorful episodes in their history. Most of the work focuses on the last half-century, and therein lies the book's major contribution: it provides a critical review of efforts to control pollution. Also important is Dempsey's broad interpretive view of how lake quality has deteriorated during the past two centuries. Wisely, he considers the lakes as a geographic unit, drawing on the history of both Canadians and Americans, and while incomplete and occasionally incorrect, the general portrait is accurate. On the Brink is a wake-up call that draws upon the work of many other scholars. The author has served as an environmental advisor in Michigan government and as a member of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. Margaret Beattie Bogue Em?rita Professor of History and Liberal Studies University ofWisconsin, Madison Michael J. Douma. Veneklasen Brick: A Family, a Company, and a Unique Nineteenth-Century Architectural Movement inMichigan. Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005. Pp. 117. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Paper, $16.00. How do we learn...