This NPR story features Upper St. Lawrence Riverkeeper Jennifer Caddick. Follow the link at the end to read the full story or to download the audio. It’s not a good-news story for Canadians, because it describes how the Canadian government is pressuring the U.S. government to relax environmental rules.
Let’s say you’re the captain of a ship tied up at one of dozens of ports along the St. Lawrence Seaway or the Great Lakes.
You’re taking on a cargo of iron ore or corn or salt. And as you fill your hold, you keep your ship level by pumping water out of your ballast tanks – a process I watched in a little port city called Sorel, Quebec just east of Montreal.
There’s a big freighter here that’s tied up at the wharf. And coming out from its stern, as long as I’ve been standing here is just an enormous gush of water.
The trouble is that this water could have been collected just about anywhere on the planet. James Tierney is assistant commissioner for water quality for New York state’s Conservation Department. He’s an expert on ballast water pollution.
“Ballast water may be sucked out of a port in the Black Sea, or Singapore, or Amsterdam. And then it’s brought over and it’s released. So ballast water has been a very effective mechanism to bring in all sorts of invasive species,” Tierney says.
Tiny creatures literally hide in the scum and saltwater stored inside these ships. Once they’re dumped here in the Seaway they are free to spread.
And that’s just what they’ve done, turning up in waterways from Quebec in the east to Minnesota in the west.
“Things like the zebra mussel, round goby, spiny waterfleas, quagga mussels, all of those things have come in through ship ballast tanks.”
Jennifer Caddick heads a green group called Save the River. On a brilliant summer day she’s taken me to a narrow stretch of the St. Lawrence Seaway near Clayton New York, not far from Lake Ontario.
It looks like a healthy stretch of river. But Caddick says just two of those alien invaders – the zebra mussel and the quagga mussel – have spread so rapidly and grown so densely that they are altering the entire food chain of the Great Lakes. They’re changing the chemistry in the water, and triggering nasty algae blooms.
“So we’re seeing massive outbreaks of this cladophora algae, which along with it harbors bacteria. And when cladophora algae dies and washes up on shore, it smells like sewage,” she says.
Invasive species tend to get a lot less attention than other environmental problems — industrial pollution, say, or climate change.
But JeffAlexander – an environmental journalist based in Ann Arbor Michigan – thinks the opening of the Seaway triggered a kind of slow-moving ecological disaster, far more devastating than the Gulf oil spill.
