Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario, five interconnected freshwater lakes, make up one of the largest surface freshwater reservoirs on Earth. (The polar ice caps and Russia’s Lake Balaika are larger.) The 10,900 mile coastline touches eight US states (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York) and two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec. The 295,000 square mile Great Lakes watershed, including five rivers linking the lakes to each other and to the Atlantic Ocean, provides 95 percent of the United States’ fresh-water supply Unsurpassed water transportation routes and the region’s seemingly limitless supply of lumber, iron and other metallic ores sustained the Great Lakes area from the 1820s to 1960 as the United States’ premier center of industrial production. Well-paid union labor, making wood products, steel and later railroad equipment and cars, built the ethnically diverse industrial cities of Chicago, IL, Detroit, MI and Cleveland, OH. Milwaukee grew famous brewing beer from Great Lakes’ water, while rivals Green Bay Wisconsin and Kalamazoo, Michigan tapped the waters for their paper industries. Buffalo, New York prospered first by moving cargo around Niagara Falls and later as the headquarters of massive hydroelectric power systems utilizing Niagara itself.

The general decline of heavy industry in the urban Northeast after 1960 impoverished the region, which has tried to encourage tourism, leisure and summer-home development to replace good jobs lost in industry and shipping. Leisure had long contributed a share to the regional economy especially at Mackinac Island in Michigan, Door County in Wisconsin and the area around Niagara Falls. Since 1960, fishing, boating, cruising and sightseeing have grown in proportionate importance as industry has declined. Sportfishing mushroomed in Lake Michigan after the introduction of Coho salmon to the lake in the early 1960s. Old industrial waterfronts in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and elsewhere were reclaimed in the 1970s for leisure use. Since the 1980s, shipwreckhunting cruises, restored historic lighthouse facilities and collections of Great Lakes shipping history and lore have fed new tourist interest in the more romantic aspects of the region’s industrial past.

The continuing importance of the Great Lakes’ water both for consumption and leisure has generated numerous interstate and international cooperative efforts to control water quality detoxify sediments, clean beaches and rebuild the damaged ecology of the whole region. Modern environmentalism has even given surviving Native American tribes new voices in regional deliberations, almost 180 years after they were defeated in the international scramble for control of the Great Lakes. Though its troubles are compounded by unexpected economic decline, the Great Lakes area really continues to struggle with the same age-old problem of balancing the claims of competing jurisdictions and contradictory uses for the region’s great natural assets.