Restoration of the Great Lakes: Promises, Practices, Performances by Mark Sproule-Jones

Abstract

144 Michigan Historical Review Mark Sproule-Jones. Restoration of the Great Lakes: Promises, Practices, Performances. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002. Pp. 149. Illustrations. Index. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $24.95. The word "performances" in the tide of this study of efforts to rehabilitate polluted areas of the Great Lakes is an apt choice. Despite the rhetorical commitment to Great Lakes restoration made by government officials both in the United States and Canada, Sproule Jones convincingly argues that progress has been checkered at best. He suggests that the two governments have made the appropriate gestures but have been and continue to be unable or unwilling to accept the broad-based public guidance that the cleanup programs in question were designed to encourage. Sproule-Jones examines a program launched in 1985 to restore the ecological health of forty-three so-called Areas of Concern (AOC) scattered across the Great Lakes basin. Sitting at the heart of the Great Lakes, Michigan contains or shares with Wisconsin and Ontario fourteen of these AOCs. The contaminated bays, harbors, and river mouths comprising this group are by no means the only pollution problems in the lakes, but they were recognized as a top priority by the International Joint Commission (IJC), a binational institution created under the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909. Under the 1972 and 1978 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements and a 1987 protocol, the IJC monitors the progress of the U.S. and Canadian governments inmeeting water-quality objectives. This 1985 program called for developing remedial action plans (RAP) for the areas of concern. The RAP initiative was intended to implement the concept of ecosystem management, which takes into account the interrelationships of all natural resources such aswater with living things, including human beings. However, the initiative has collided with government compartmentalization and other long-established priorities. As Sproule Jones observes, "Agency agendas are set, at best, with other concerns competing prominently with those focused upon remediating impaired beneficial uses in different locations" (p. 114). The author notes that the best RAPs, such as those for Hamilton Harbor, Ontario (in which the author participated), and the Cuyahoga River inOhio resulted from goodwill and voluntary cooperation among both governmental and nongovernmental participants. But elsewhere the program has been hampered by the unwillingness of governments to "fundamentally alter the powers and immunities of the stakeholders" (p. 112). Most of theAOCs continue to suffer from serious contamination Book Reviews 145 and are years if not decades away from the restoration of what the IJC's water-quality board calls beneficial uses. This slender, thoughtful volume is particularly valuable in light of a new Great Lakes Basin Collaborative strategy released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in December 2005 that calls for $20 billion in public spending to restore and protect the Great Lakes. Spreading a layer of cash over existing, and sometimes dysfunctional, governmental efforts to restore the lakes will not deliver the anticipated results, however, as Restoration of theGreat Lakes illustrates. Even so, the author remains hopeful, arguing that "the potential remains great" (p. 115) for Great Lakes rehabilitation if governments can learn the value of working in close partnership with ecosystem users and citizens at large and cede or share some of their management authority. Dave Dempsey Saint Paul, Minnesota Derek Vaillant. Sounds of Reform: Progressivism andMusic in Chicago, 1873 1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. 291. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95. Derek Vaillant presents a detailed, nuanced examination of music as the handmaiden of progressive reform and charts the motivations, triumphs, failings, and ideological limits of using music for civic uplift. In the years covered by this book, Chicago provided music progressives with a seemingly vast opportunity to impose Americanization and democratization on newly arrived working-class European immigrants. Competing plans for reform, however, and the claims of Chicago's many different ethnic groups meant that most proposals for musical uplift were contested. Additionally, the necessity of rebuilding following the disastrous Chicago fire engaged the musical reformers in designing and locating new parks and spaces for musical performances. Not only were musical progressives divided about which musical forms best suited their purposes...