“I told her, ‘You need to look at this report and you need to take it very seriously,” said Mattson.
The document, the First Triennial Assessment of Progress on Great Lakes Water Quality, was published in November by the International Joint Commission (IJC), a group formed in 1909 to help prevent disputes over transboundary waters. It is the first such appraisal of the largest freshwater ecosystem in the world since 2012, when the U.S. and Canada updated the bilateral agreement on water quality in the lakes.
To compile the document, the six IJC commissioners drew on the latest science on the Great Lakes. They also reached out to communities across the region to come up with steps government bodies can take to ensure that the water becomes drinkable, fishable and swimmable—the highest standard for freshwater.
Sure, the Great Lakes are a lot cleaner than they were back in the 1960s, when a Cleveland newspaper pronounced Lake Erie dead due to the huge amount of industrial and agricultural pollution and sewage that had flowed into it. But as recently as 2014, pollution rendered Toledo’s water unsafe to drink. And the dead zone that materializes in Lake Erie every summer serves as a reminder that the lakes still aren’t clean enough to meet the drinking water, recreational and aquaculture needs of the surrounding communities.
“I think Lake Erie is the perfect example of how, if we aren’t diligent and we don’t keep constant pressure on governments and agencies to maintain the quality of the lakes, we see what happens,” said IJC’s public affairs officer, Sally Cole-Misch.
Many people are shocked to learn that communities along the Great Lakes’ shores still dump untreated sewage into the water. In just one year, the authors note, 20 cities in the U.S. and Canada allowed 92 billion gallons of untreated sewage and stormwater to course into the lakes.
A warming climate only exacerbates the problems facing the Great Lakes, said Cole-Misch. Stronger storms that come with higher temperatures soak the region and can overwhelm infrastructure in places like Chicago, whose Deep Tunnel project is designed to prevent floodwater and sewage from surging into rivers and Lake Michigan. But even that massive public work may not be able to catch the amount of water that cascades into the system as storms intensify.
The commission’s suggestions, however, are just that. States are not required to implement them. But following the panel’s counsel would keep the lakes safer for the 34 million people who depend on their waters—as well as the 65 million pounds of fish pulled from their depths each year. More people would be drawn to the region, a sure way to create more environmental stewards, said Mattson.
Already, citizens help monitor the lakes for pollution. Every month, up to 75 members of Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper, for example, monitor water quality in the Niagara River watershed, which acts as a drain for Lake Erie into Lake Ontario. The group also publishes annual water quality reports and maps. In the new report, IJC recommends establishing a new binational monitoring program that would make information about potential health hazards in all of the Great Lakes available to the public.
Government officials would be wise to act on that suggestion and the report’s other recommendations, said Mattson, or risk losing “the people who are connected to the lake, are using the lake, and are caring about it.” At stake, he said, is “a generation of people who are going to help us restore it.”
Canada’s environment minister McKenna seems to be listening: After Mattson handed her the IJC report, her government informed the Waterkeeper Alliance that it will soon announce new initiatives, actions and funding for the Great Lakes. Mattson’s confident they’ll be in line with the report’s recommendations.
OnEarth’s Midwest correspondent, Susan Cosier previously worked at Audubon magazine and has written for a number of science and environmental publications. She’s a graduate of New York University’s science journalism program.
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PARIS — The bioacoustician and musician Bernie Krause has been recording soundscapes of the natural world since 1968, from coral reefs to elephant stamping grounds to the Amazonian rain forest.
Now, Mr. Krause’s recordings have become part of an immersive new exhibition at the Cartier Foundation here called “The Great Animal Orchestra.” Named after Mr. Krause’s 2012 book of the same title, the show opens on Saturday and runs through Jan. 8.
‘The Great Animal Orchestra’
Soundscapes from the natural world recorded by Bernie Krause.
At its heart is a work by the London-based collective United Visual Artists, who have transformed Mr. Krause’s recordings of the natural world into 3-D renderings. Imagine stepping into a soundproofed black-box theater whose walls spring to life with what look like overlapping electrocardiograms, representing different species’ sounds.
“It’s way cool,” Mr. Krause, 77, said last week, opening his laptop to show the sounds and spectrographs on which United Visual Artists based the sound-and-light installation. Higher-pitched sounds, from animals like bats and insects, appeared at the top of the screen, then below them frogs and other amphibians, and finally lower-pitched mammals toward the bottom, each with a distinctive yawp.
The installation includes recordings Mr. Krause made in Algonquin Park in Ontario, where he found himself caught between two packs of wolves; in the Yukon Delta, a subarctic area in Alaska, where birds from different continents converge; and in the Central African Republic, where he heard monkeys. He also captured the cacophony of the Amazon, and whales off Alaska and Hawaii.
“They’re very jazzlike, actually,” he said of the whales.
But the animal calls also carry a message. Mr. Krause estimates that of the sounds in his vast archive — more than 5,000 hours of recordings from 2,000 habitats encompassing some 15,000 species — 50 percent come from habitats that no longer exist.
“A lot of these habitats in this exhibit are in danger,” he said. In the forest where he recorded in the Central African Republic, “all the elephants are gone now,” he said.
“Wolves in North America are always under great stress,” he added. “In the Yukon Delta, with the birds, the tundra is melting, and global warming is beginning to take over.”
Mr. Krause is a polymathic musician who performed with the folk group the Weavers and helped introduce the Moog synthesizer to pop music — including songs by the Doors and Van Morrison — and film scores. He hears natural sounds with a studio producer’s ear and is dismissive of scientists who focus on only one species at a time.
Singling out one bird in a habitat is “like trying to understand the magnificence of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony by abstracting the sound of a single violin player out of the orchestra and hearing just that one part,” he said. “You’ve got to hear the whole thing.”
In 2014, at the Cheltenham Festival in England, Mr. Krause and the composer Richard Blackford presented the debut of a symphony composed for orchestra and Mr. Krause’s recordings from the natural world. Last year, that music was used for “Biophony,” a ballet performed at Jacob’s Pillow.
The Paris exhibition, curated by Hervé Chandès, the general director of the Cartier Foundation, is the most extensive visual response to Mr. Krause’s work yet. For the show, the foundation commissioned an original work by the New York-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who works with gunpowder on paper.
Mr. Cai made a 60-foot-long mural of horses at a watering hole by lighting the gunpowder until the images were burned into the paper.
“It’s so amazing to me,” Mr. Krause said. “It looks like the caves at Lascaux.”
There are also black-and-white photographs of dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, taken by Hiroshi Sugimoto, and photographs of birds by the Japanese photographer Manabu Miyazaki, who uses robotic cameras.
Mr. Krause, who lives in Northern California, began to study bioacoustics after working on the soundtrack to the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now.” Like many involved with that movie, he said he was hired and fired by the director, Francis Ford Coppola, multiple times. “A lot of people were kind of destroyed by that process,” Mr. Krause said. “I got tired of that whole Hollywood scene and I decided I didn’t want to do it anymore.”
He also finds the natural world therapeutic.
“I have a terrible case of A.D.H.D.,” Mr. Krause said. “Forget medication, forget therapy — the only thing that works for me is going out into a field and putting on a pair of earphones and listening to natural sound.”
