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: 2010 Michigan Notable Book Award

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

Winner: 2010 CHOICE magazine Outstanding Academic Title Award for 2009

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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

"...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

"This work will be especially valuable for environmentalists, economists, and public library students." - CHOICE

"Pandora's Locks should be required reading for every science class in America. And every legislator." - D'Arcy Egan, Cleveland Plain Dealer

"[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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