The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes by Lynne Heasley

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes by Lynne Heasley Nicholas Cunigan Lynne Heasley. The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2021. Pp. 264. Black and white illustrations. Index. Notes. Paperback: $27.95. Lynne Heasley beckons the reader of The Accidental Reef to see the Great Lakes through a kaleidoscope. And through her kaleidoscopic vision, the world of the Great Lakes is reflected and refracted through stories of evolution, biology, geology, ichthyology, etymology, walleye taxonomy, scuba divers, and more. This is not simply a case in interdisciplinary research. Heasley is calling out the compartmentalization of higher education, and her work illustrates what can be achieved when one practices what they preach. (30–31) [End Page 118] Heasley blends art, science, and history to illuminate what she refers to as the “accidental reef.” This reef—located in the St. Clair River, which flows from Lake Huron into Lake St. Clair and forms part of the international border between Michigan and Ottawa, Canada—formed as an “accident of history and ecology” when steamships dumped their coal waste into the river and created a spawning reef for lake sturgeon. (x) In vivid, poetic, and often humorous prose, Heasley tells the stories of the lives lived on and in the St. Clair River. She weaves together a menagerie of stories ranging from industrial pollution, the deep history of zebra mussels, the sex lives of sturgeon, and the lost lures of fishers recovered by an intrepid scuba diver seeking to restore broken relationships both in and out of the water. All this reimagining, though, is not without purpose. These seemingly random anecdotes are deeply intertwined. Heasley is arguing through these stories that the “care and protection of the Great Lakes demands different ways of seeing and knowing.” (ix) Heasley joins a growing cadre of historians and reporters (such as Nancy Langston in Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World and Dan Egan in The Death and Life of the Great Lakes) who are plying the depths, shallows, and shores of the Great Lakes to reveal the troubled past of these waters in hopes of ensuring the lakes a better future. Heasley is making important points about the region’s past, including the exploitation of both the Great Lakes’ natural resources as well as cultural knowledge that has been appropriated through extractive biocolonialism. Her most poignant contribution, though, might be in her account of the Great Lakes’ “paradox of abundance;” the Great Lakes are filled with North America’s largest supply of freshwater and are home to the world’s largest lake. This abundance, Heasley cautions, should not be taken for granted. The histories of bison, passenger pigeons, and monarch butterflies show that abundance often give humans a false sense of inexhaustibility. And as climate change is projected to dry out the American West and extend in time and space the current megadrought, the seemingly inexhaustible Great Lakes might be tapped to quench America’s thirst. This warning makes Heasley’s contribution more than a regional history of a forty-mile-long river and the industries, businesses, tribes, and individuals who rely upon it. Instead, Heasley’s work is a lighthouse—warning all those who rely on the steady supply of freshwater that we are too close to shore and without immediate action, we risk crashing into it. [End Page 119] Nicholas Cunigan Calvin University Copyright © 2022 Historical Society of Michigan