Our Water Is Changing and No One Seems to Care

The shoreline you walked as a kid doesn’t look the same. Where there used to be cattails and native grasses, there’s now a 15-foot wall of phragmites choking out everything else. It’s an invasive reed that’s taken over wetlands and coastline across Michigan, crowding out native plants, destroying wildlife habitat, and blocking access to water that’s supposed to be yours.

The woodlot you walk or hunt doesn’t look the same either. Autumn olive has run wild and emerald ash borer has killed tens of millions of ash trees since 2002. If the canopy above your head looks thinner than it used to, that’s why.

Swimming and fishing in the Great Lakes also feels different? Zebra and quagga mussels are a big reason. They’ve filtered so much plankton from the water that the lakes are unnaturally clear. This sounds awesome, until you realize by doing this, they removed the base of the food chain for the rest of the fish. Less plankton means less food for the fish you’re trying to catch. Less at the bottom means less of everything further up.

Michigan is being changed by species that never should have been here. And few people are paying attention.

Zebra mussels came in through ballast water from European cargo ships. Sea lamprey, the parasite that nearly collapsed the Great Lakes fishery, invaded through canals that let them bypass Niagara Falls.

Invasive carp were imported in the 1960s to clean algae ponds in the South, escaped during flooding, and spread to 31 states. Every one of these was preventable. Ships could have been required to treat ballast water decades ago. Carp could have stayed in contained ponds. These weren’t random accidents. They were failures.

And now there are 188 nonnative species in the Great Lakes. About a third are classified as invasive, meaning they cause real ecological or economic damage. That third is doing most of the destruction.

Invasive carp have already genuinely hurt the Mississippi and Illinois river systems. Silver carp launch out of the water and injure boaters. Such carp have been detected within miles of Lake Michigan.

The last major defense is the Brandon Road Lock and Dam near Joliet, Illinois, a $1.15 billion barrier system authorized by Congress in 2020. Electric barriers, underwater sound deterrents, bubble curtains, a flushing lock. All designed to block carp from reaching Lake Michigan.

Construction started in late 2024 after Illinois and Michigan signed on. But the timeline is long. The first deterrents won’t be operational until summer 2028. The flushing lock won’t be done until fall 2031 at the earliest. The engineered channel comes about a year after that.

If carp establish in the Great Lakes, they would dominate the fishery and directly threaten the region’s $5.1 billion fishing industry and billions more in boating and tourism.

The state’s strategy has relied on 22 regional partnerships called CISMAs, Cooperative Invasive Species Management Areas, funded through the state invasive species grant program. They do the on-the-ground work: detection, removal, monitoring, volunteer coordination.

The entire program costs $3.6 million. For a state with 11,000 inland lakes, 36,000 miles of rivers, and four Great Lakes coastlines. That’s what we were spending.

In the 2026 budget, the Legislature cut it by a third.

Each CISMA is guaranteed up to $70,000. After that, less than $1 million is left for every other invasive species grant in the state. The broader DNR budget lost $53 million and 15 fisheries positions were cut. Twenty wildlife management positions are gone.

Legislators will point to competing priorities. But the deeper problem is that Michigan funds nearly all of its conservation work through hunting and fishing license fees, fees that haven’t increased since 2014, while participation declines.

That’s a structural failure, not a budget problem.

There are obvious things Michigan could do. Mandatory ballast water treatment. Dedicated conservation funding beyond license fees. Making sure a $1.15 billion federal barrier gets finished on schedule.

None of it is happening. And not a single legislator who voted to cut this budget will lose a race over it. Most voters don’t even know it happened. Meanwhile, the phragmites are spreading. The mussels are filtering. The carp keep pushing north.

Not because we can’t fight it, but because people in charge decided it wasn’t worth the money.