It’s been a half-century since President Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth II christened  the Great Lakes-Saint Lawrence Seaway, allowing international shipping traffic to reach more than 2,000 miles to the grain- and ore-laden ports of the Great Lakes.

Michigan State University Press has marked the anniversary by publishing Pandora’s Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway by Jeff Alexander, a veteran environment reporter who recently left the Muskegon Chronicle to work for the National Wildlife Federation.

Alexander tells the story of how government mismanagement made an engineering marvel into a highway for invaders like the zebra mussel, sea lamprey and round goby, turning what many considered a fountain of economic development into a quagmire of ecological devastation whose costs outweigh its benefits.

I’ve written more extensively about the book elsewhere, and so have others, so I won’t go into detail here, but I thought GreenBoard readers would be interested in it not only because of its important topic, but because a couple of ESPP’s affiliated faculty are quoted in its pages; William Taylor spoke with Alexander about the economic boost that followed the introduction of Pacific salmon into the lakes, and Orlando Sarnelle told the writer about the link between zebra mussels and toxic blue-green algae (based on research he conducted at Kellogg Biological Station).

Pandora’s Locks is now available, and is an excellent one-stop history of the long and seemingly endless biologic invasion of the Great Lakes.

-Andy McGlashen