It’s a crazy ecological story, like nothing else that I’ve ever seen.”ĭan sets the scene for this ecological story and subsequently the structure for Great Lakes with the idea of two doors: a front and a back door to the Great Lakes. It’s really not an abstraction that’s going on under the water it’s affecting people. We’re not taking the care of the water that it deserves. That’s just crazy when you realize what an economic and ecological resource these lakes are. “As far as I know, mine is the only newspaper job like that in the U.S. “I’m still a full-time beat reporter, and my beat is the Great Lakes,” Dan says. Every page has a quote from a real person whose livelihood has been directly impacted by this cascading ecological crisis.
Great Lakes is packed with information, but Dan’s background as a storyteller salvages this book from the dusty piles of science-laden conservationist books. When we sat down to speak about his new book, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, he was on a public bus in Milwaukee, headed to the University of Wisconsin where he keeps a desk adjacent to experts in the scientific fields he covers.ĭan openly admits he has no background in the hard sciences of ecology and marine biology, and that is the singular saving grace of his book. Not the modern tweet-driven kind, but the pen-in-hand, walking the streets of his beat, man-on-the-ground kind. So I just started writing stories about them, and a year or two into this, the Great Lakes became my beat.”ĭan Egan is a reporter in the purest form of the word. To stand on the shore of a Great Lake brought a whole new level of appreciation.
“I was originally hired as a feature writer, but I’d just spent all this time out West, where water is so scarce.
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