
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, ...
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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.
Click here to read the CLEVELAND
PLAIN DEALER review of PANDORA'S LOCKS.
To read about PANDORA'S LOCKS and listen
to an interview with author Jeff Alexander on the Environment Report
web site, CLICK HERE
Click here for a high
resolution cover image of PANDORA'S LOCKS
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.
-
"...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
-
"Pandora's Locks
should be required reading
for every science class in
America. And every
legislator." - D'Arcy Egan,
Cleveland Plain Dealer
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Photographs, maps, notes, references,
indexworld rights
416 pp., 6.00" x 9.00", May 2009
Cloth, $29.95,
0-87013-857-X 978-0-87013-857-7
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