In The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes, Lynne Heasley illuminates an underwater world with a ferocious industrial history. Despite these pressures, the great lakes remain wondrous and worthy of care. From its first scene in a benighted river, where lake sturgeon thrash and spawn, this powerful book takes readers on journeys through the Great Lakes alongside fish and fishers, scuba divers and scientists, toxic pollutants and threatened communities, oil pipelines and invasive species, and Indigenous peoples and federal agencies.

With dazzling illustrations from Glenn Wolff, The Accidental Reef helps us know the Great Lakes in new ways and grapple with the legacies and alternative futures that come from their abundance of natural wealth. Suffused with curiosity, empathy, and wit, The Accidental Reef will not fail to astonish and inspire. As John Hartig puts it, “Heasley leads the reader to see, know, and understand these freshwater seas from different perspectives [which are] essential to developing a stewardship ethic.”

Lynne Heasley is a professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She is also the author of A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley and a coeditor of Border Flows: A Century of the Canadian-American Water Relationship.

Lynne’s book The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Lynne at lynneheasley.com and you can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

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