Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World

In 1996, the Environmental Protection Agency (epa) granted a corporation permission—without hearings or an environmental impact statement—to inject 550 million gallons of sulfuric acid into a Wisconsin mine as an attempt to extract copper. Anishinaabe activists blocked a train carrying the acid across their reservation and began legal proceedings to prevent this experiment in “solution mining” (157–158). This is one of many fascinating stories in Sustaining Lake Superior. This interdisciplinary history combines scientific studies with a deep knowledge of the lake’s history—from the glaciers that shaped the basin to Native American cultures and the fur trade that decimated the beaver population and dried out the land; the copper mining that by 1882 annually dumped 500,000 tons of stampings into the watershed; the iron mining and processing that discharged toxic waste, including mercury; and the logging that deforested the white pine, leaving waste that caught fire 1,435 times...