Back in 2014, singer-songwriter Lee Murdock released a song that asked the question: “What about the water?” The song is about the pollution in Lake Erie in the 1960s and ’70s. At that time, headlines that Erie was dying helped energize across the Great Lakes region an environmental movement that forced a national commitment to clean up the lakes.

The Clean Water Act of 1972 ushered in an era of federal activism that did much to restore all of the Great Lakes. More than half a century later, the Great Lakes have again reached an inflection point. People in cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee, which draw their very life from Lake Michigan, need to again ask themselves: What about the water?

The environmental threats to Lake Michigan are less obvious than the images that spurred public action in the past. In the summer of 1967, Chicago’s lakefront was fouled by millions of dead fish. The Chicago Park District dispatched crews to clear the beaches and ran out of places to put the foul flotsam. Billions of the alewives, a small silvery invasive fish, died that summer and awoke citizens to the fact that something was wrong with the region’s greatest natural resource. Out of that awakening came important measures to counteract giant algae blooms by stopping the use of phosphates in dishwashing liquid and other household items. Chicago’s Deep Tunnel and Reservoir Plan to reduce the discharge of street and municipal sewage into the lake received billions of federal dollars.

Today, Lake Michigan is not sending up a warning flag as obvious as miles of dead fish. The threats to our waters are insidiously obscured from sight. Most days, a trip to the beach yields beautifully clear water. The water is actually unnaturally clear because more than 400 trillion invasive Black Sea quagga mussels have taken over the bottom of the lake. Their constant filtering of water for food, about a liter a day, has made the water clearer but also has removed much of the phytoplankton, single-celled organisms, and zooplankton, tiny aquatic organisms, in the lake. In doing so the mussels eliminate the base of the lake food chain, the sustenance for young and small fish.

The result is that whitefish, once the most abundant fish in the lake, are near expiration. At the same time, the remarkably clear water results in localized blooms of Cladophora, a weed-like algae, and Microcystis, a poisonous blue-green bacteria. Phosphate fertilizer that runs off farm fields is a wonder food for algae. Together, they are a long-term threat to the health of beaches and urban water supplies.

Another invisible threat to the lake and public health is microplastics. This petrochemical product is ubiquitous in modern life, from cosmetics to food packaging. As it has become part of daily life for the millions of residents in the region, it has also become an increasing part of the Great Lakes. Plastic in streams, rivers and household water makes its way into the lake and from there into our bodies. It has been estimated that each week we ingest about a credit card-sized amount of plastic.

Another unregulated biology experiment that is underway is the unknown impact of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. We have used these compounds for more than a generation to make fabrics, furniture and firefighting foam, among other products. PFAS have been dubbed “forever chemicals” because they degrade very slowly and are carried widely via air and water. Maybe the only way to combat this toxic pollutant is by consumer boycott, the way we eliminated phosphates in household cleaners in the 1970s.

As residents of the Great Lakes region, we are caretakers of 21% of the world’s most precious resource: freshwater. At a time when Americans may feel beset with crises at home and abroad, we nevertheless must once again ask ourselves: What about the water?

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Theodore J. Karamanski is an emeritus professor at Loyola University Chicago and author of the new book “Great Lake: An Unnatural History of Lake Michigan.”

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