Assisted migrations: on the salvation and danger in moving the world's species【翻译】

TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1. THE CARP 1
CHAPTER 2. THE STINKING CEDAR 16
The Great Story 16
The City of People and Trees 30
The Biggest Fish 64
The Garden of Eden 80
CHAPTER 3. THE MIRACLE VINE 99
CHAPTER 4. BUDDHA 117
CHAPTER 5. RABBITS AND CONVICTS 141
CHAPTER 6. THE TEXAS SNOW MONKEYS 163
CHAPTER 7. THE PRAIRIE 174
Move it and They Will Come 173
Going on a Burn 191
REFERENCES 199

CHAPTER 1
THE CARP
On a cloudy day in December, the Chicago Shipping Channel Dam straddles what looks like any
other polluted stream of gray water. At nine million dollars in construction, and five hundred
thousand dollars every year in operations, the dam is not even visible, only what looks like a pair
of steel hubcaps on each side. The dam lurks, like what it’s meant to keep out, below the surface.
A barge should and does pass through about every hour.
The dam, in fact, is the hubcaps, or rather, an electric current that runs between them and
the channel, charging 1,500 feet of water between mile markers 296.1 and 296.7. Two volts pass
throughout the water, which is enough to kill a child or an elderly person or someone with a bad
heart and impair the unborn infant of a pregnant mother. It is enough to send sparks flying from
the hulls of metal barges. Everyone, from boaters to dock workers, is advised not to touch any
surface in direct contact with the water
The dam was built with one purpose. It was built to stop a fish.
Asian carp have no stomachs. They are like Hoover vacs, sucking up whatever they can
from the cold water, gorging up to forty percent of their body weight each day, usually
phytoplankton and zooplankton, microscopic bottom feeders that form the base of a river
system's food pyramid. Carp effectively cut out the middle men and everything else at the top
because nothing in turn, besides a few not-so-picky fishers, eats the Asian carp.
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Carp also eat the eggs of other fish, infanticide being an impressively good takeover
strategy. The carp in turn lay five million eggs a season.
The carp can grow to three-feet-long and can weigh over one hundred pounds. In some
sections of Midwest rivers, they make up 90% of the water’s entire biomass.
They are threatening to cross into the Lake Michigan and take out $7 billion worth of
fishing industries.
The fish at the gates of the Great Lakes is really five subspecies rolled into one and called
the Asian carp. The silver carp is perhaps the most famous. It is known as the "jumping fish" or
"flying fish" and is easily seen on YouTube in its most famous habit of scaring at motor boats
and leaping, in-mass, up to ten feet into the air. The fish slap boaters in the face. They can break
noses and jaws. One young woman was knocked off a jet ski by a carp, broke her vertebrae and
nearly drowned but was rescued by a friend.
In 2009 Attorney General Mike Cox of Michigan filed a lawsuit against the State of
Illinois to close the shipping canal for good, requesting immediate action from the Supreme
Court to close the fish's only route to the Great Lakes. In January of 2010, the Supreme Court
denied the request, but in July of the same year, Michigan filed again, this time with Minnesota,
Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin filing a joint lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers to
shut the canal and stop the fish.
There was no other reason for the action, for states to file against state, just the prevention
of the bottom-feeding fish from spoiling the Great Lakes’ catch.
It’s important to pay attention to this fish, this hypophthalmichthys molitrix, the chubby,
vacuum cleaning carp that caused states to sue, fishers to panic, the Army Corps of engineers to
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build its dam and later dump gallons of poison, because I’m going to suggest in a few pages that,
maybe, maybe, it’s worth thinking about moving species to a place where they haven’t been
before.
The writer Joe Abramajtys has equated the Asian carp's plight to the "schizophrenic"
American immigrant experience, "they are brought in to do the shit work other, older, established
groups shun - forced to live in camps and ghettos...discriminated and legislated against...until
some of them escaped their plight to live free in better circumstances but still formidable
barriers."
The Asian carp were original brought to Arkansas from China specifically to clean
sewage plant holding tanks, hog farm swill lagoons, murky catfish ponds and other detritus
filled, polluted lakes. But one summer, heavy rains raised the Arkansas ponds until water and
carp spilled into neighboring streams, which eventually wound into the Mississippi and led the
carp to knock on the Chicago Shipping Canal’s door step.
The Chicago Shipping Canal itself has a tainted history. It is what has led the carp up one
of the largest river systems in the world to the largest fresh body of water in the world. Built in
1900 the canal reversed the flow of the Chicago River entirely, leading the American Public
Works Association to label it one of the top ten public works projects of the century and the
American Society of Civil Engineers to call it one of the "Seven Wonders of the Modern World."
Despite its name, the canal’s primary function was to divert human sewage. Chicagoans
drank from Lake Michigan, which is where, before the twentieth century, they also dumped their
industrial-scale human waste. This was no mere olfactory obfuscation. In 1885 heavy flooding in
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the Midwest backed up “grey” water over the drinking water intakes. Ninety-thousands of
Chicago's just recently traumatized-by-fire population died subsequently from typhoid, cholera
and dysentery. That’s 450 times more people than died in the Great Chicago Fire itself in 1871.
The Chicago Shipping and Sanitary Canal became not just an architectural and
engineering marvel, but a concentrated piece of public reconciliation, progress that was
Chicago's upward civic trajectory following decimation via mythic back-kicking cow and the
city’s self-poisoning.
The canal was 28 miles long, 24 feet deep and 160 feet wide, the largest municipal earthmoving
project ever completed and the largest human-made canal at the time. According to the
APWA, the construction of the Chicago Canal was a key event for the Panama Canal’s
completion because the Chicago Canal trained many of its same engineers.
The Canal was begun in 1892 and was finished eight backbreaking years later. It required
28 million cubic yards of glacial grit displacement and the removal of 12.9 million cubic yards of
rock. In other words to dig, meander, steam-shovel and dynamite, workers, thousands of them
who were immigrants, had to remove enough earth and glacier debris that would equal a square
mile of buildings, each 47 feet tall.
Their work reversed multiple millennia of gravity, sending water (and sewage) towards
the Mississippi instead of the Great Lakes. Today the Big Muddy continues to carry the ancient
glacial silt on down to the bayou where it forms the great dead zone, widening a New Jerseysized
stamp licked on the spot were mighty river meets ocean. In this milieu are agriculture runoff
from Iowa, manure from Kansas and Nebraska and Chicago citizens' morning flush.
The shipping canal cost $70 million, or $1.7 billion in today's money. Then as now, a
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neighboring state sued to close the Chicago Canal. That time it was the Attorney General of
Missouri who claimed that adding metropolitan manure in the Mississippi might send the waste
into St. Louis's drinking glasses. And again as now there was a concern from the other Great
Lakes states, then that the six hundred thousand cubic feet of water moving out of the lake and
down the canal every minute might lower the level of Lake Michigan like a balloon deflating
from a tiny puncture. People were concerned the lake would drop as much as eight inches, which
when spread over the surface would have caused widespread ship docking problems, as it would
have altered wave and even weather patterns.
Missouri failed with its lawsuit as Michigan and the others later would, but at least in
1930, the Supreme Court recognized the national importance of the canal and ruled that the
Sanitary District of Chicago was no longer fit to manage it, and turned the waterway over to the
Army Corps of Engineers, who has controlled over it ever since.
Carp aren't the first invaders to the Great Lakes. Steamer and tanker ships when they
release their ballast water, set loose Trojan horses on local aquatics. The ships have brought a
formidable array of creatures: 183 documented exotics including: zebra mussels, quagga mussels
(there are now over one trillion quagga mussels in the Great Lakes) flat worms, humpback pea
clams, European flounder, spiny water fleas and the famous sea lamprey, an eel-like creature
with a circular row of sharp teeth and a piercing tongue that clamps onto the bodies of fish and
sucks out their blood and bodily fluids.
Zebra mussels, for one, have spread to every tributary of the Mississippi from the Great
Lakes (reversing the flow of the carp) south of Minnesota.
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And, of course, the Pacific salmon that the Attorney Generals of Michigan, Minnesota
and other states are worried about have to be stocked in the Great Lakes from other states far
away. The salmon are stunned by electricity in their home rivers, snatched as eggs from their
incapacitated mothers, and are put in the largest fresh water body for fishers (many of them on
expensive chartered yachts) to catch. They are not native here and do not do well. But neither are
the rainbow trout nor brown trout Great Lakes natives. The latter is a fish that is now artificially
stocked in over 500 rivers in the United States.
And you probably shouldn't eat the Lakes salmon anyway, given all the petrochemicals
and heavy metals poured in from the Rust Belt and pesticides from Agriculture centers like
Indiana, especially if you're young or elderly or pregnant, in other words the same people who
probably shouldn’t be swimming in the Chicago Shipping Canal
The Asian carp, on the other hand, are remarkably healthy. They are very low in mercury
because they don't eat other fish and are high in cancer-fighting Omega 3 fatty acids. The carp
are boney, which leads people to view them with suspicious unsavoriness, but people eat them all
the time in China. An irony here is that in China they are sometimes overfished.
New Orleans chefs, with preparation, say the carp taste like a cross between scallops and
crab. Louisiana chef Philippe Parola, for one, has become a national-known advocate for what he
calls invasive species culinary arts. He has written a book on the subject and posts recipes on the
internet that use Asian carp, which he calls “silver fin” (in hopes that a new name, like Snoop
Dog’s Snoop Lion, will change its image). Silverfin Provencale needs, along with four silver fin
steaks, four tablespoons of olive oil, four ounces of white wine, lemon juice, fresh garlic, onion,
one diced tomato, parsley and seasoning to taste and should be baked and served over pasta or
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mashed potatoes.

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