Jeff Alexander

Jeff Alexander has been an award-winning environmental journalist for more than 25 years. Jeff was awarded the prestigious 2009 Historical Society of Michigan State History Award for his book, ...

Pandora’s Locks
The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway

Jeff Alexander

Winner: 2009 Michigan Historical Society State History Award, and the Healing Our Waters — Great Lakes Coalition award.

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A 50-year retrospective of the St. Lawrence Seaway: 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 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.

CONTENTS:
Acknowledgments
Preface
Timeline
Prologue
Part 1. Dominion
Chapter 1. Conquering Nature
Chapter 2. Vampires of the Deep
Chapter 3. Salt in the Wound
Chapter 4. Alewife Invasion Chapter 5. A King Is Born
Part 2. Plague
Chapter 6. Fatal Error
Chapter 7. Dangerous Cargo
Chapter 8. The Reckoning
Chapter 9. Ruffe Seas
Chapter 10. Smoke and Mirrors
Chapter 11. Meltdown
Part 3. The Dreissena Effect
Chapter 12. Something Amuck
Chapter 13. Blue, Green, and Deadly
Chapter 14. A Cruel Hoax
Chapter 15. Caspian Sea Diet
Chapter 16. Whitefish and Green Slime
Chapter 17. Paradox
Chapter 18. Fear This
Part 4. Betrayal
Chapter 19. Dirty Secrets
Chapter 20. Who’s in Charge?
Chapter 21. Mission Impossible
Chapter 22. Seaway Heretics
Chapter 23. Westward Ho!
Chapter 24. Saving Paradise
Epilogue. Hope amid the Ruins
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"[Pandora's Locks] tells the twisted story of this exotic disaster — and the story of our abject failure to prevent it — in a manner more complete and more understandable than any other work which is likely to ever be written."
—Eric Reeves, Ph.D., J.D., Cdr., U.S.C.G. (Ret.), former U.S. Coast Guard staff officer for Great Lakes ballast water policy.

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"...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