John Hartig looks out the window at his converted cottage on Hickory Island and sees freighters passing on the Detroit River to the east and the open waters of Lake Erie to the south. On a clear day, he can see the Ohio coastline. For someone whose career has been in and around this waterway, Hartig has found his paradise.
“It’s the view, the view,” he emphasizes. “And it’s the river, the connection to the river. I look at Sugar Island (a wildlife refuge). I look at the berms for the shipping channel, the open waters of Western Lake Erie — it’s incredible… the moon on clear nights: the reflection on the water is just breathtaking.” He speaks of storms crossing the lake, water spouts, and sturgeon leaping up out of the water.
Hartig has done a lot of thinking about rivers since receiving his doctorate in limnology, the study of the biological, chemical, and physical features of lakes and other bodies of fresh water, from the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Actually, his thoughts about rivers date back to childhood, when he witnessed the polluted Rouge River and the filth that lined the waterway. A canoeist as a child, a kayaker today, Hartig’s perspective of the lakes has always been from the waters flowing into them from rivers. “I grew up with a lot of fishing experiences and canoeing. I’d go up north and have amazing experiences in pristine lakes and I’d come home and the shore was covered with oil, oil slicks on the river… carp dying in the Rouge River. I thought, how can that be? It inspired me to be connected and do something about this.”
The onetime river navigator for the Greater Detroit American Heritage River Initiative, Hartig calls them “working rivers,” meant to serve human industry and move commerce. Four of those rivers — the Chicago River in Illinois, Rouge River in Michigan, Cuyahoga River in Ohio, and Buffalo River in New York — caught fire from oil and substances on the water surface. Hartig wrote Burning Rivers: Revival of Four Urban-Industrial Rivers that Caught on Fire in 2010. Pollution was considered the cost of doing business.
“No evidence exists of major environmental impacts” from indigenous people of North America who traveled along the rivers and lakes, and fished its waters, Hartig wrote. However beginning with the European fur traders who hunted and trapped beavers nearly to extinction, the land and water was a resource to be exploited to further economic gain. “The cities of Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago all evolved from early settlements and trading posts to port towns because of their strategic location along the Great Lakes. Each of these ports developed significant ship building expertise and became important nodes in the cross-continent transportation system. Railroads followed, further linking these cities and their ports, and enhancing transportation advantage….There has always been a synergy among these four rivers and technological progress. All paid the price of indiscriminate human use and abuse by becoming polluted rives in he Rust Belt. All became burning rivers.
During the time in which “progress” replaced “discovery,” people working along river fronts turned their backs on the water and moved inland. The disconnection to the water was not only physical, it was psychological, in that we dissociated ourselves from the water. So, dumping oil and industrial scraps into the river meant nothing, until it burned. Hartig says the disconnection began “in rust belt cities (allowing) industry and commerce to dominate the waterfront… We made water our back door. We faced inland and away from the river. That was a message. Maybe it wasn’t well-understood at the time. We didn’t value water the way we should.”
Hartig worked 14 years as refuge manager for the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, the only such refuge in the country. Currently, he is a visiting scholar at the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research at the University of Windsor. He contributed to the “State of the Strait” report, an environmental status report on the Detroit River and Western Lake Erie. The report identifies eight environmental and natural resource threats to the ecosystem, with climate change topping the list. If you’re interested, you can find it at www.stateofthestraight.org.
Our culture has forgotten the basics of the “water cycle,” Hartig says, and newer generations are not even learning about it. “Rain clouds, water comes down, it falls on the lakes and rivers. It also falls on the land. What happens when it goes into rivulets and feeder creeks and streams and rivers?” Storm water runoff, industrial pollutants, and agricultural fertilizer flows into the lakes and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean. “Lakes and rivers are connected. We share the same watershed and catchment area.”
The idea that we have turned our backs on the water helps to explain why restoration of the wetlands, spawning reefs, a other forms of wildlife habit has been such an upstream process. We set out to “discover” and “exploit” the abundant wild life and natural resources of this region, leaving debris in our wake. That may have made it easier to turn our back on the dirty water (as our zeal for space colonization drives some to seek new pastures on other planets).
In his book, Hartig quotes Arthur Golding, a West Coast architect and writer who about watersheds: “To deny the river is to deny the origin of the city. To rethink the river is to discover a unique opportunity to define urban places, join neighborhoods and communities together and reconnect us to our landscape and our history.” You might turn his statement around: To deny the river is to deny the origin of the lakes. To rethink the river is to discover a unique opportunity to revitalize the lakes, and thereby revitalize ourselves.
John Hartig has been reconnecting us with rivers for many years, and now, symbolically, he literally reconnects himself with the Detroit River on Hickory Island.
“We need to see (rivers) and cherish them and revere them because they sustain our life. If we can’t cherish them and revere them, then we’re just going to abuse them and find ourselves in crisis management, tipping point after tipping point…. We need to get people to value, to have a sense of pride for being near the third coast; to have fond memories about experiences they had there, revere them for their majesty, then we’ll care more.”
Photo of the view from the southeast on Hickory Island, courtesy of John Hartig.
