Best 5 quotes in «great lakes quotes» category

HOWARD TANNER WAS NEVER BIG ON THE IDEA OF VALUING NATIVE species simply because they are native. His priority in the 1960s was to convert the lakes from a resource primarily managed as a commercial fishery into a sportsmen’s haven, and native species just didn’t fit his bill—and they still don’t. “I doubt if the charter boat captains can sustain a fishery on lake trout,” he said. He called trolling for native walleye “about the most boring thing you can do.” “Like bringing in a wet sock,” he said.

A normal lake is knowable. A Great Lake can hold all the mysteries of an ocean, and then some.

A single Seaway ship can hold up to six million gallons of vessel-steadying ballast water that gets discharged at a port in exchange for cargo. And that water, scientists would learn after it was too late, can be teeming with millions, if not billions, of living organisms.

Sandy beaches still rim the lakes, but if Lake Michigan, for example, were drained it would now be possible to walk almost the entire 100 miles between Wisconsin and Michigan on a bed of trillions upon trillions of filter-feeding quagga mussels.

They are the largest collection of freshwater lakes in the world. They border eight U.S. states and the Canadian Providence of Ontario and at time have supplied water to one-third of Canadians and one-seventh of Americans. They're vaster than the entire New England region and define beachfront to many people who have never seen an ocean.