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Theodore J. Karamanski, "Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan" (U Michigan Press, 2026)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to New Books in History, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here today with Theodore Karamansky to talk about his new book, Great An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan, out with the University of Michigan Press in 2026. Hi, Ted, how you doing?
- [01:27]
C
Very good this morning. Thank you.
- [01:29]
B
Thanks for joining make. So what led you to write a book about Lake Michigan?
- [01:35]
C
Well, a number of things, but one of them was that I teach at Loyola University in Chicago, and our history department building is right on the shore of Lake Michigan. And when I look out my window every morning, there is Lake Michigan with a. Putting on a different face depending on the weather and wind patterns. And so it was there. Unavoidable. I've long been interested in environmental history and the history of the Great Lakes region and had previously, you know, written other things about the lakes and just was time to do a biography of. Of that which was closest to me.
- [02:25]
B
Yeah, I get that. That makes sense. If you, you know, Lake Michigan, she's a. She's a presence, right. It's hard to ignore her when you're. When you're on her shores. And why do you call this an unnatural history?
- [02:40]
C
My first job was working at the Field Museum of Natural history in Chicago. And so, of course, you know, it's all about the natural sciences in addition to anthropology. But it's an unnatural history that I'm working on with Lake Michigan because it's the things that we as humans have done to the lake to change that which was given to us by nature.
- [03:09]
B
Yeah. All right. I mean, full disclosure, listeners. I grew up in a small town on Lake Michigan, and the big lake is like, perhaps the love of my life. I love that lake with my whole heart, and I miss it. And if I'm honest, the whole state of Michigan, every day of my life. I love living in Amsterdam. I'm not leaving her. But Lake Michigan has this place in my. In my heart and soul. So I did not come with this. Come to this book with anything approaching a critical eye. I wanted to love it. I continued. I did love it, and that's how this interview is going to go. So just. Just you understand my position here as we move forward. One of the things I loved is this book begins, you know, as Lake Michigan does, with ice. So how does her story begin here? Lake Michigan.
- [04:00]
C
I think one of the most important things to appreciate about Lake Michigan is that of all the great geographic features in North America, this one's unique in that it has always had an interaction with the human presence because people came here as the glaciers were melting, and those melting glaciers created the lake. And so through the long evolution of the lake, as it changes in size over the centuries, there's people living on its margins, there's people exploiting its resources. And so unlike, say, the Rocky Mountains, which go much further back in geologic time, or the great deserts and the oceans and so forth, this is something that occurs in human time, which is amazing, right?
- [04:54]
B
If we think about the Appalachians are some of the oldest mountains on the planet. And then just right here in our whole region, right, the Driftless region, the Great Lakes, that whole, you know, the peninsula that I call home, are all such babies and on the scale of the Earth. And so it's always had human habitation. But what. Tell me about these human inhabitants that started, that found these melting glaciers and this little tiny bit of a lake that turned into our massive lake.
- [05:30]
C
Well, one of the key features, of course, of Native Americans is that they have an intimate relationship with nature. But it is an ethical relationship. It's not an ecological relationship. It's based instead on an appreciation that all the things around them, trees, rocks, lakes, have a spiritual element, and people connect to that spirit. And so in, say, taking a fish from the lake, one thanks the spirit of the fish. One thanks the lake. And you're in good harmony with nature by following those rituals. And you can take as many fish from the lake. As long as you do that properly, there's no sense that somehow you're exhausting a resource. Whereas an ecological understanding of the lake, we see that there are actually limits and that there's ways in which we can negatively impact the environment by our actions. But because of that spiritual relationship, they generally did not overexploit their resources.
- [06:56]
B
And so there's this partnership there. But the lake is essential to human survival early on Earth. Humans thriving early on in the region. Yeah.
- [07:08]
C
Yes. I mean, particularly in the northern part of the Great Lakes on the Michigan shores, there is this sort of fishing culture that is developed that uses the lake through a whole host of changing seasons, exploiting different types of fish depending on, you know, the time of year.
- [07:33]
B
All right, and so tell me about the fauna of the region as well. Like, early on, we have some megafauna.
- [07:40]
C
You know, the people talk about one of the first, you know, really well documented human interactions in nature. They call it the Clovis culture, which is. We would know it in the Great Lakes region as the Paleo Indian period, where people who are hunters and gatherers are moving through the landscape and they are exploiting the areas along the margins of the lake. And so some of our best evidence of these Paleo Indian peoples is from kill sites where animals became bogged down in wetlands and the like, but they very quickly moved into exploiting the waters of the lake themselves in developing watercraft. It's absolutely remarkable in the whole human history of the world how quickly people adapted themselves to be able to move on the water and then there spread across the globe by moving on the water. And so it was very quickly that they were out onto the Great Lakes in dugout canoes, and then we think in perhaps skin boats, and then perhaps a little bit later, the famous birch bark canoes of the Anishinaabe.
- [09:00]
B
I can't even imagine being on Lake Michigan in a skinboat or a dugout when she gets mad. The lake is so scary sometimes.
- [09:12]
C
And one of the advantages, of course, of people who for generations lived on the margin of the lake was to be able to detect in advance some of those changing moods. But then also because of your ethical notion of nature, sprinkling some tobacco on the waters before you head off is a way to bring the spirits of the lake to your side.
- [09:38]
B
It's good to have bribable Spirits, Right. That's a nice thing in a spirit in a lake. I wanted to really quickly talk about beavers because they're so important in the region early on and then, you know, and then there's a story there. So what tell me about the beaver.
- [09:58]
C
The humble beaver is nature's aquatic engineer. Just absolutely remarkable creatures in their effect upon a landscape. And beaver, as well as many other fur bearing animals were hunted by the indigenous people. But when the French fur traders come into the region in the 17th century, they begin to alter the Native American relationship with fur bearing animals, but particularly beaver, since that was the most valuable of all the furs. And they become enmeshed in a market economy which is providing them with, with iron tools which they didn't have, copper kettles, guns, ammunition. And very important to native people was cloth. Europe's beginning an industrial revolution to really manufacture broadly cloth. But this was something that they didn't have. So they would go out and gradually began to over hunt the beaver because their relationship changed from that ethical relationship to a market relationship with the product. And that began the first transformation of the Great Lakes environment in a significant way. Because when the beaver were close to being eliminated in the region, never completely, but pretty close to it, there was no maintenance of the beaver dams along the rivers. And those beaver dams would take a stream or a river and make it a series of ponds where water would go ahead and enter into a pond and the sediment in it would settle and then the water would leak through the dam and continue the stream towards the lake. So waters were going into the lake with little or no sediment. And hence this was very good for the breeding of fish, particularly say whitefish, who are going to be laying their eggs on the bottom of the lake, usually on a rocky surface. Once the beaver were eliminated, you began to go ahead and have the waters no longer halted by these dams, but they would rush with greater velocity down the streams. And as the waters were rushing, they'd be flushing earth soil into the lake, covering up a lot of those spawning beds. And this thus gradually reducing the number of fish in the lake. And this got all the worse once the logging industry started in Michigan. As you know, in the 1860s and 1870s, they start thousands, actually millions of board feet of logs are sent on these rivers, further disrupting the natural ecology and really flushing tons of soil into the lake. Yeah.
- [13:11]
B
Which you know, is part of the problem here is the arrival of non native settlers. And let's talk about where they go and what they are going to do.
- [13:21]
C
To Lake Michigan, the indigenous people were here as the lake evolved. So I regard them as literally as part of the natural environment. Even, of course, they're humans like the rest of us. But the Europeans coming in, they are an invasive species. And part of their invasive nature is a whole different way of interacting with nature. The Judeo Christian value tells them to subdue and conquer the earth, that it is theirs to do with as they choose, irregardless of what they find, to transform it, to transform the earth. And this is definitely what they do when they come in. And particularly in the period after the War of 1812, which concludes, of course, in 1815, it's really a flood of Euro Americans into the region, going from literally a few thousand inhabitants in the Great Lakes region, particularly the Lake Michigan basin, to millions of people there by the time of the American Civil war in the 1860s. So their transformations are based on a social construction of the lake, that the lake is there for them to use. And in particular, it's there for them to use for business. It's a source of commercial value to them.
- [15:02]
B
Right. And so then, you know, one of the through lines of this is the extraction of natural resources. And we can, you know, the exploitation of these natural resources, you know, which is the beaver and the skins and the wood and the fish. And then there's a development of some really major industry on the lake as well. And I was thinking about kind of what. How to talk about this. And it seems like the story of Benton harbor and St. Joe, which, near to my heart, obviously, but I think it really works very well as an example of kind of the inner. The interaction of industry, resource extraction and tourism, racism and kind of how this is going to play out. So could you, can you tell us the story of the Benton Harbor St. Joe area?
- [15:55]
C
These two communities are, you're right, they're sort of emblematic of the changes along the Lake Michigan shore. Because all along the lake you had small industrial cities arise in the course of the 19th century. And oftentimes each one developed little unique special specialties. You know, you had the. In Kenosha, in Racine, on the Wisconsin side of the lake. These are again, small industrial cities that were producing automobiles or were producing agricultural machinery. In the case of Benton harbor, at a fairly early date, they get involved first in shipbuilding and then later in the manufacturing of washing machines. And they're among the pioneers of electrical washing machines. And people were pretty, pretty uneasy about the idea of mixing electricity and water. Really. This is going to be good in my house but they perfected it, and eventually one of the major manufacturers, Whirlpool, was established in Benton Harbor. And then of course, they made washing machines for the gigantic commercial enterprise known as Sears, Roebuck and Company. So that these things went all over the world. So a very successful industrial enterprise. But when you get to the 1970s, the these industrial enterprises have outgrown, in many cases, their birth points, their birthplaces, and their mega corporations with international reach. And so they're diversifying their manufacturing locations and the like. And little Benton harbor is kind of isolated there on the shore of the lake and becomes neglected. Next door, right across the river, is another town called St. Joseph. And St. Joseph had always kind of been in the shadow of Benton Harbor. Benton harbor is where the money was. That's where most of the people lived. What St. Joseph had was a really nice beach. And so they decided, let's market that. And they were very successful at having a seasonal tourist industry developed there. And ships would travel from Chicago across the lake and take people for a weekend to St. Joseph. And there was an amusement park there, there was a dance hall and the like, but that's all they Saint Joseph had. And when winter came, the town shut, pretty well shut down. But unfortunately, as deindustrialization set in the Middle west, people who were working for the Whirlpool Corporation and making the washing machines in that in Benton harbor, they began to lose their jobs. And increasingly in the latter part of the 20th century, many of those workers were African Americans who were lured up from the racial segregation in the American south to well paying industrial jobs in places like Michigan, Indiana and Illinois. And, you know, last hired, first fired. And so Benton harbor became increasingly racially segregated as an African American community and one that was increasingly impoverished. Whereas then St. Joseph, which was essentially operating in an amenity based economy. And as more people began to appreciate Lake Michigan less as an industrial resource and more as a recreational resources, St. Joseph's economic choice was the more favorable for the 21st century. And so St. Joseph thrives and grows in population. A population that can afford to live near the water and a population that is essentially white. While declining. Benton harbor is largely African American. So it's really a microcosm of the rise of the Rust Belt as well as the rise of what we see today. Lake Michigan valued not as an industrial resource as much as it is as an amenity for the people along its shores.
- [21:23]
B
Yeah, and you know, there are still areas up north in Michigan, in the Michigan and on the Wisconsin side that like there's land that just nobody really wanted forever and now it's so valuable and so expensive. But the idea that this, it was a lake to exploit and that would carry the carry products and you would have all this like Great Lake shipping and Great Lakes manufacture. And now most of the boats that you see on it are pleasure crafts overwhelmingly. Right.
- [21:57]
C
Lake Michigan was one of the busiest commercial waterways in the world at the end of the 19th century. And the steel companies that were operating, bringing iron ore from Minnesota down to the lower lakes, places like Gary, Indiana, Chicago, Cleveland, Toledo, these, these companies had larger fleets than the United States Navy. Now they have thousand foot freighters that make voyages during the summer months and they still bring the iron ore, but they're so large that they don't need a lot of them. And so today the overwhelming majority of boats on Lake Michigan are, are pleasure craft. And but it is a huge number of the pleasure crafts that are out there. So the lakes are still busy?
- [23:01]
B
Yeah, it's. Oh they're crazy busy. God, just sitting, you sit like in the evening and just the, watching the speedboats go by and the ski dos go by and the occasional stand up paddle boarder et cetera. Just so busy the lake. But yeah, and loud and alive and there people at every beach. So you know the idea that the subgroup of Homo sapiens known as European Americans spearheaded the invasion of a cascading series of exotic species that radically transformed Lake Michigan. Beautiful prosecution. So it's the beginning of the invasive species, but it's. We're not the last. Right. We've brought a lot of things with us into Lake Michigan since they, since.
- [23:52]
C
That first Euro American invasion came in. And they defined the lake as this commercial resource. They altered the waterways, mainly the connecting waterways to enhance the natural, you know, 94,000 square miles of open water on the Great Lakes. You could just connect various whole regions of the country through it. So let's make it even better. Let's build connections to the ocean. And beginning with the Erie Canal, then the Welland Canal in Canada and then finally the St. Lawrence Seaway, these became highways for greater industrialization of the waterway, but also highways by which invasive species entered. And those invasive species have utterly transformed, particularly Lake Michigan. So that today the look of Lake Michigan, which in most places on a calm day is incredibly clear. It's like you're off Key west in the Caribbean. How clear the water is, that's totally unnatural. And that's because on the bottom of Lake Michigan are somewhere around 280 trillion small little bivalve muscles called quagga mussels almost completely blanketing the bottom of the lake, each filtering the water on a 247 basis.
- [25:43]
B
And that's one of the many ways that this lake is of the invasive species. We're kind of all mad at Chicago, we're all mad at Illinois for some of their decisions about our lake. But this is one of the things, is that Minnesota, Minnesota has a different lake, but Wisconsin and Michigan, Indiana and Illinois all have to share this resource. And we don't all treat it the same way.
- [26:10]
C
No, this is like one of Lake Michigan's biggest problems. On one hand, it's the only of the Great Lakes that's completely in the United States. And maybe that's not a good thing because we have allowed each one of the states to do what they want with their portion of it. So Indiana has literally the smallest little sliver of the lake down there at the southern end. And they produce the most pollution into the lake. And they have the laxist environmental regulations because it means so little to Indiana. Michigan, on the other hand, they call themselves the Great Lakes State. Oh, we love the Great Lakes. We love Lake Michigan, but we won't stop mining the sand along its shores to facilitate fracking or the automotive industry's need for windshield glass. They decided at one point, let's make it the world's greatest fishing hole. And they introduced Pacific salmon into the lake, asking nobody's permission again, transforming the environment. Of course, I'm from Chicago. They decide on their own to let's divert millions of gallons of water from Lake Michigan to go ahead and flush our ship down to St. Louis. I mean, it's. And again, asking no permission, just simply doing it. And we don't want to leave the Badger State out of this. Wisconsin farmers, particularly in the Fox Valley, but they're going ahead and flushing into the lake all sorts of heavily polluted water with fertilizer. And that fertilizer, phosphorus rich, is interacting with the clear water. Sunshine's getting in and creating photosynthesis that is clogging the lake with algae. So it's a strange situation that we have, but the fact that we've got these states sharing it is not a good thing.
- [28:30]
B
No, Indiana, you know, Indiana is lucky Ohio exists, otherwise it would be the worst place in the U.S. all right, talk about a place that's between you and where you want to be. All right, so. And hey, can. What's. What's happening also with the other thing we're all doing, which is climate change, global warming and how that's affecting our lake.
- [28:55]
C
Well, it's interesting that in a lot of ways we're just beginning to see that, of course, impact and it's most manifest in the extreme fluctuations in Lake Michigan today as we have a wet cycle then Lake Michigan gets bigger than its neighbors would like and is causing the loss of lakeside homes and businesses, disrupting or the lake drops down in size and people are worried, well, what's going to happen? What's the future of the lake? So that's an indication of the future. The long term aspect of climate change, however, is that places like Michigan, Wisconsin are ideally suited to being desirable places to live as climate change sets in. As the southwest, in the whole south becomes more and more hot and lakes, oceanside locations become inundated. Here we are in the heart of the continent, but with a much more stable environmental setting and one that is going to be only more enjoyable to people, not less.
- [30:38]
B
It'll be interesting to see.
- [30:40]
C
We'll have to face perhaps an influx of population then.
- [30:45]
B
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens in that regard. I mean, and you know, we were both of an age we can remember when winters were not kidding around and now winter barely happens anymore.
- [31:00]
C
Yeah, that's a very noticeable change as well. And like you say, it's literally in our lifetimes. Throw away the ice skates because you don't have much chance to use them anymore.
- [31:14]
B
Nope, I used to cross country ski. We don't. We have almost no snowfall. I mean, what I consider almost no snowfall, I realize is a little bit different as you know, someone who grew up on the, on the lake effect side of this big body of water. But yeah, throw away the ice skates. We're not doing that. It's interesting. But you know, and I at the, I don't want to become an alarmist. I want to be alarmist as much as I am concerned about the future of the lake in my state. But you know, as you end the book on this beautiful note that you know that the lake abides and it's.
- [31:55]
C
Still a remarkable thing that say, so I live in the city of Chicago and you've got this dramatic skyline that rises directly from the shore of the lake and there's 25 miles of parkland along the lake and it all just looks so nice and beautiful. But if you step off a lakeshore dock onto a boat or you wade into the lake from a beach, you are entering an alien landscape. You are entering into a place that is.
- [32:33]
B
Not.
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C
Humans were not made to be and it has the power of a wilderness. You know, you think of the Rocky Mountains or Alaska as a wilderness. You get out on Lake Michigan and the wind kicks up and you're not ready for it. You are in a powerful, unforgiving natural force. And so the lake still has that element of mischief and mayhem to it. And I think that that reminds us that even all that we've done to the lake, it still is an untamed and therefore majestic piece of the environment.
- [33:26]
B
You know, you open the book remarking how people just don't get it. You don't get the lake until you've seen it. And I took my in laws to Michigan this summer. They are plains folk and have no clue. And they, and I insisted that we stay on the big lake and they could not sort it out. And then they got it, you know, then, then you look out and you can't see across it. And you know, you, you get a tiny bit of the undertow and you, you get it.
- [33:58]
C
Yeah, that's so true. I mean, the Rocky Mountains, you can see from practically halfway across the state of Colorado, there's the Rocky Mountains. And they'll always be in your view as you, as you travel in that area. But you can be 100 yards from Lake Michigan and not know it's there because the lake sit in this basin. And it's only people who are aware of the lake that really care for the lake. And I think that's one of the things that have made Lake Michigan endangered, is that in a place like Chicago, and I know this because I grew up in the neighborhoods that were closer to the stockyards in the city, is that you go for years without seeing the lake. I mean, your water that you're drinking, that's all coming from the lake, but you just take that for granted. And so I think that the future of the lake that I can be optimistic about is that there are, however, lots of people who make the effort to be on the lake, to interact with the lake, and they're the stewards of the lake for the future. And as a writer, I was attracted to write this book in part to enhance people's appreciation of this great natural resource so that they can become stewards of the waters as well.
- [35:43]
B
Wow. Yeah. Then it works. So, you know, I've taken up quite enough of your time today, so thanks so much for joining me. And just one more question. What's next for you?
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C
Well, that's a good question. Right now I'm working with another writer on a historical atlas of the Great Lakes to chart through maps the changing understanding people have had of all of the Great Lakes. So we'll see how that works out. Since we have to have pictures of lots of maps. It's going to be an expensive project, and I don't know if people want to publish expensive projects anymore.
- [36:31]
B
Someone's gotta. Yeah, we'll see how that works out. I'm rooting for you. All right. Thanks so much for joining me today. It's been an absolute pleasure, Ted.
- [36:42]
C
I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Yana.