One of my favorite maps is printed on the frontispiece of the first volume of Alfred Russel Wallace’s 1876 book The Geographic Distribution of Animals. It is a Gall stereographic projection (at least that’s what looks like, to my eyes), one that splits the earth’s landmasses into six different “biogeographic regions.” The point of demarcating the world so is to demonstrate that since the breakup of Pangea 250 million years ago, natural selection in each biogeographic region operated in almost complete isolation from the other five. Although Wallace was not the first to publish a map of zoographic regions – that honor likely goes to William Lutley Sclater – Wallace’s more comprehensive, brightly colored, more aesthetically pleasing map (a first printing actually hangs in my breakfast room) is the one still in use today by some biogeographers (Holt et al. 2013).
Today, of course, natural selection in each bioregion no longer operates in isolation from the others. Since 1492, when three ships sailed the ocean blue, one specific species of animal has been spreading plants and animals across the worlds’ biogeographic regions, bringing crops and farm animals and flowers and earthworms and insects and all sorts of other beings to new places. Some of this was unintentional. Stowaway rats and seeds sometimes thrived in novel biogeographic regions. Though, it was often intentional. Colonists wanted to make their new non-European homes and markets like their old European ones. In other words, many colonists wanted to reorder existing natural and social worlds on their terms (Crosby 2004). Whether by design or not, by the time Wallace published his handsome map, human beings were crisscrossing biogeographic regions as never before, stirring up all sorts of speciation and extinction and ecological change.
Biogeographic regions have been crossed at an ever-increasing rate since Wallace published The Geographic Distribution of Animals. This is a deeply important historical background condition that is often overlooked by natural and social scientists, especially those of us who tend to focus in on specific times and/or specific places (York and Clark 2006).
In this blog post I will trace the development of the “Asian” carp invasion. The obvious reason for this is to discuss how these carp crossed biogeographic regions to become an “invasive species” in North America from, well, Asia, one that has had an enormous influence on environmental politics in the American Midwest. Though there is a subtler, yet perhaps more important, reason why the Asian carp invasion is worth investigating. This invasive species event highlights the need for a larger spatial and temporal view of the often surprising, unintentional ways in which human beings are crisscrossing and altering nature (as well as the indelible ways nature is altering us).
In what follows I will point to the three successive “moments” that, over more than a century and across half a continent, combined to form the Asian carp invasion. Only one of these moments involves Asian carp directly. They all share other characteristics, however. In each, human beings assumed they could completely reorder natural and social worlds on their terms. Moreover, in all three natural worlds were reordered by social action for “environmental” reasons. Nevertheless, due to the cross-continental impacts of Asian carp, green intentions led to environmental problems.
The First Moment
According to a great many people in the Great Lakes – mayors, governors, environmental non-profits, commercial anglers, and more – Asian carp are a problem because they may migrate from the Mississippi River basin to the Great Lakes via the Chicago River Sanitary and Ship Canal. While natural scientists disagree on the scale of the impact Asian carp may have if they do indeed migrate to the Great Lakes (Besek 2019), the worry amongst Great Lakes interests is that if Asian carp do find a way through they will disrupt the Lakes estimated seven billion dollar commercial and recreational fishing industries.
The Chicago River Sanitary and Ship Canal, the principal channel all this fuss is about, however, is no accident of nature. Completed in 1900, it is an artifact of centuries old environmental politics. Politics about the ways we should and should not reorder nature on human terms.
On one side of these politics is the city of Chicago. Before the canal was dug, Chicago was drowning in its own waste. All the city’s sewage, storm water, and other industry waste, including that from the famous Chicago stockyards, was emptying into the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, the city’s main sources of drinking water. Chicago needed to flush this waste away, and they knew that a canal connecting Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River basin, if big enough, would largely solve this environmental crisis. Moreover, the city’s elite knew that a large canal would have the additional effect of turning this crisis into a geographic boon to the city’s economy, for at least two reasons. First, Chicago would become the only municipality on the Great Lakes able to take water from the Lakes without returning it. Second, the canal would create a shipping route from the Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Great Lakes and down the canal to the farms of the Midwest. Chicago would be able to build off its earlier railways success to solidify its place as an economic powerhouse.
It worked. Once built, the Chicago Tribune applauded the canal as “the eighth wonder of the world,” a symbol of modernity itself.
Yet not everyone was so happy with Chicago’s engineering feat. On the opposite side of these politics are other cities in the Great Lakes and Midwest that did not so much like the idea of Chicago being able to take water from the Great Lakes (rendering Chicago in de facto control of water diversion), nor Chicago tightening its grip on area trade. In January 1900, just before the canal was completed, St. Louis sought a court injunction barring its opening. In 1901, just after it was completed, Missouri sued to close the canal system.
And the lawsuits kept coming. Great Lakes and Midwest parties refused to give up any more control of water diversion than they had to, and many wanted the canal shut for good. Wisconsin sued in 1929, followed by large suits 1967 and 1980 (for review, see Besek and Shtob 2019).
The latest suit was in 2009. Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox and other Great Lakes Attorneys General petitioned the Supreme Court to re-open the 1967 case. The canal had to be closed, Cox argued. Though this time the reason was not water diversion, but it was “a matter of self-defense.” If the canal was not closed, according to the petition, Lake Michigan would soon be under attack from Asian carp.
Between 2013 and 2016, I interviewed 71 people involved with managing or impacted by Asian carp (Besek 2021). As one person I spoke with, a businessperson in support of keeping the canal open, told me, “it seems to me that a lot of (the controversy surrounding Asian carp) is driven by the age-old thing, (Great Lakes States) just don’t like (what) Chicago does in taking the water out of lake Michigan.” Another informant, an ecologist who thinks the canal should be closed, agreed, noting that recent controversies are “just the latest chapter in that debate…. today people just latch on to Asian carp as a point of conflict.”
Managing the Asian carp invasion, it seems, is not only about managing the Asian carp invasion.
The Second Moment
If the previous “moment” demonstrates the need for a longer temporal view of our environmental relationships, this one demonstrates the need for a larger spatial view.
Provided the geographic origin of these fish, it does make sense to start in Mongolia and China, where “Asian carp” (actually a colloquialism used to classify four different species of fish: bighead carp, silver carp, grass carp, and black carp) have been a popular aquaculture species for over 1,000 years due to how they grow quickly, feed resourcefully, and are generally larger than other aquaculture fish (Yuan 1993). Though my main focus here is in the southern state of Arkansas, 600 miles downriver from Chicago.
Arkansas is essential to the “Asian” carp story simply because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Fish Farming Experimental Station in Stuttgart, Arkansas is where these carp first arrived in what Wallace called the “Neartic region” (basically North America). Their introduction was the culmination of a seven-year effort to “green” weed management in aquaculture. The idea was to replace environmentally harmful chemical controls with a biological control. And Asian carp seemed like an environmentally conscious solution.
As one interviewee told me, “a lot of people thought that the answer to a lot of our problems was biological rather than chemical controls, with Rachel Carson and Silent Spring and all of that with DDT and the eagles crushing their own eggs, people wanted to get away from chemicals and rightly so, thinking that biological controls were the answer.”
“Silent Spring” intentions aside, Asian carp quickly became problematic themselves. Many escaped confinement or were introduced to open waters, and by the early 1970’s populations were making their way up the Mississippi river watershed.
One species of Asian carp, in particular, soon became notorious. Silver carp have a unique defense mechanism in which they “jump” out of the water to escape danger, and soon, if they were around, anyone travelling on a motor boat would find cascades of terrified carp jumping from the boat’s wake.
These “jumping” carp soon became the poster child for many invasive species problems in the Midwest. While their impact on aquatic ecosystems remains unclear (they seem to thrive in a relatively unoccupied section of the water column), by the 1990’s many recreators started to avoid waters with Asian carp out of fear of being hit and injured by the jumping fish (Spacapan, Besek, Sass 2016), while commercial anglers became increasingly angry as they continued to find their nets full of relatively worthless Asian carp (Chick and Pegg 2001).
Taking this larger spatial view, it is resoundingly clear that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service attempt to reorder nature, even with the best of “green” intentions, did not go as planned.
The Third Moment
The 1972 Clean Water Act is generally considered to be one of the great legislative victories of the environmental movement. In this blogs’ final “moment,” I am not going to argue against this opinion. What I am going to demonstrate, however, is that no environmental victory is an unqualified win. There are no such things in socio-ecological relationships. These relationships are too complex, too contingent, and too dynamic for any opinion or understanding of them to be settled (Mitchell 2009). And the ways in which human beings are crisscrossing and altering nature with ever more speed and intensity should only make us more open to being wrong. Because there will be surprises.
The Asian carp invasion would not be possible without the Clean Water Act. Before the Clean Water Act, the Chicago River Sanitary and Ship Canal (again, the main channel that Asian carp may travel through to get to the Great Lakes) was so polluted that few complex organisms could survive in its waters. Once the Clean Water Act was passed, a number of sewage treatment plants were constructed in the area, meaning that complex aquatic life could return.
And so, it did. In the early 1990’s, invasive Zebra and Quagga mussels traveled from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River system through the canal, and invasive Round Gobies traveled the same route in the late 1990’s. Now, Great Lakes interests claim, Asian carp will travel the opposite direction. The Clean Water Act, in other words, dismantled the chemical barrier produced by industrial waste and other forms of pollution, allowing “the canal to form a two-way corridor for passage of aquatic nuisance species between Lake Michigan and the Illinois River” (Moy, Polls, and Dettmers 2011: 124).
What now?
I admit, I did not become interested in Asian carp out of concern that they would forever change the Great Lakes. Most researchers actually paying attention to what it would take for Asian carp to enter and dominate the Great Lakes know that – even if they make it through the long, straight, corridor that is the Chicago River Sanitary and Ship Canal – they thrive in shallow, biologically productive, relatively warm aquatic environments (like the Mississippi River watershed) and not in deep, relatively unproductive and cold aquatic systems like the Great Lakes (Cooke and Hill 2012). While I would defer to natural scientists studying the issue, from what I can glean the Asian carp apocalypse will not reign upon the Great Lakes anytime soon.
I am much more interested in the science and politics of invasive species, and for these interests, Asian carp are an excellent case. The Asian carp case is a window into how researchers can negotiate both the power and limits of natural science, how past political struggles shape contemporary environmental management, and the ways in which trade and travel are connecting ecological processes at an increasing rate. There are also some fascinating, important, conversations regarding the very concepts of “Asian” and “invasion.”
For now, I hope the main points of this post are clear. No environmental problem can be properly understood outside its larger spatial and longer temporal context. These contexts structure our understanding and management of all environmental problems. They cannot be ignored; especially as natural and social worlds continue to interact and change like never before.
Moreover, we can never completely reorder nature on our terms, no matter how environmentally friendly we are trying to be. Whether we are trying to build a canal to improve the environmental conditions of our city, replace a chemical control with something more “green,” or passing legislation to rid our waters of industrial waste, there will, eventually, be surprises. It would be wise to plan on them.
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