From the land of sb-dubs.
Dave Dempsey, yet again, with another great link.
I’m inspired by the thinking behind the “100 mile diet,” but I’d probably be more enthusiastic if I were living back in Maine or Hawaii. While the lobsters are disappearing in some waters off of New England, and the Hawaiian atolls have become the ocean’s trash sieves, the Great Lakes have already been thoroughly abused and decimated.
This is not lost on James MacKinnon of the “100 Mile Diet.”
It’s amazingly easy to forget that Toronto sits at the edge of the lakes that hold about one-fifth of the world’s fresh water. But this is exactly why seeing the world with 100-mile eyes is so valuable. The Great Lakes seem empty now - but that’s only because the recent human occupants on the shorelines have made no effort to live within ecological limits. I didn’t have to do much research to discover that the lakes were once teeming - an old saying declares that, once upon a time, fishing the Great Lakes meant going down and beating the surface of the water with an axe handle.
There is still a much reduced fishery - the story now heard around the world - but the loss is enormous. Most startling is the damage done to biodiversity. The variety of Great Lakes fish species was once among the richest in North America; today, an estimated 90 to 99 percent of the fish biomass in the lower lakes consists of introduced species. Some native species, such as the deepwater ciscoes, are gone from the face of the Earth.
I bet I would have loved deepwater ciscoe. I wonder if it is too late to restore the Great Lakes to their former glory, but how can we not try?
