“Henry Regier: The right person at the right time for ecosystem thinking in the Great Lakes”
If it is true that each generation stands on the shoulders of the one preceding, then our generation is indebted to Henry Regier for significantly elevating today’s, and tomorrow’s, Great Lakes fisheries and aquatic ecosystem science and policy community.
It seems self-evident now that limnology and fisheries management are inextricably connected. But not so long ago, practitioners of the two scientific disciplines rarely communicated, or if they did, had trouble understanding each other. That is the divide Henry Regier did so much to bridge, and the Great Lakes are better understood and thus managed because of his work.
I met Henry long after he had earned his reputation as one of the leading ecological scientists in the Great Lakes community. A generous host and natural mentor, he shared memories and witty observations about his life, his career, and the history of Great Lakes fisheries and aquatic ecosystem management and policy in general.
One of the key topics we discussed was what he called, The Great Laurentian Spring of 1968-1993, during which the people most engaged in Great Lakes science and management made globally-recognized breakthroughs in the understanding of these complex, but connected ecosystems. As a result, they devised cooperative relationships among scientists, management institutions, universities, and the public attacking Great Lakes problems and promoting positive solutions for both the Great Lakes ecosystems and the people that depended on them for their food security, livelihoods, and sense of well-being. In characteristic ‘Regier’ language, Henry later defined this spring as a “multi-stranded epistemic network and shared ecosystem praxis…a promising beginning.”
Henry was modest about his role in what was more than a promising beginning. Henry was critical in that spring; he didn’t just have a front-row seat – he appeared on the Laurentian Great Lakes “stage” as both a member of the binational Great Lakes Fishery Commission (GLFC) and the International Joint Commission’s (IJC) Research Advisory Board (now the Science Advisory Board). Teaming with other scientists such as Jack Vallentyne and George Francis, he did much to pull these agencies and their conceptual frameworks together to confront the deterioration of the world’s biggest freshwater system.
He was the right person working at the right time to promote the linkage of fisheries management with the “biological, chemical, and physical integrity of the Great Lakes Basin ecosystem,” a phrase inherent in the U.S.-Canada Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA), and the ecosystem approach of the 1978 version of the Agreement. He bridged not only science divides, but the divide between science and management and the public!
Through his work and teachings, Henry insisted that fish and the quality of the water in which they live are part of a single, complex system. What Henry did with that notion helped reshape our understanding of fisheries management but, more broadly, environmental or ecosystem management. In essence, Henry saw clearly that to have a healthy, more productive environment, we – as those people who manage, govern, live and work in, and study the Great Lakes – needed to view these magnificent bodies of water and the resources they support as being part of a coupled human and natural system (CHANS); a perspective that was 20-30 years ahead of his time (Liu et al., Citation2007).
By the early 1970s, Henry was advocating explicitly for an interdisciplinary, more holistic approach to managing fisheries and uniting classical limnology and ecological studies with the production and health of fisheries ecosystems, including their structure, function, and then-recent developments concerning the effects of major anthropogenic stresses on fish communities. He posited that holistic, synergistic fisheries theory and management practices needed to be directed at the ecosystem and community level if we were to be successful in saving the overall biodiversity of these lakes and their health and productivity that was derived from well-functioning aquatic systems. Henry was a systems thinker, making connections to impacts and effects we observed in the present to causes based on past activities. As such, these lakes and their biota have been greatly enhanced in the past 60 years – at least far more than they were before Henry came on to the scene.
A report that Henry co-authored in 1979 seems especially prescient. It embodies physical-chemical-biological ecosystem management but also institutional ecosystem management, promoting the use of a CHANS approach to managing fisheries and aquatic ecosystems years ahead of most of the scientific and management communities. GLFC Report Number 37 (1979) which I expand on in the next paragraph, is striking even four decades later in these days of restoration parlance.
The report analyzed an array of ecosystem stressors from overfishing to invasive species to wetland loss to toxic waste. It concluded that “comprehensive ecosystem rehabilitation strategies for the Great Lakes are in general feasible to develop”; Henry gave us hope — he was always the optimist given his curiosity of how systems worked and how they could be manipulated for certain outcomes that were scientifically-based and achievable. Henry promoted, wisely, that one should start to implement change first for smaller ecosystems such as bays and harbors, and tailor the change to the particular conditions and stresses impacting particular areas. Once this is done, we can then assess whether to adopt additional basinwide rehabilitative measures to include those being carried out for fisheries by the GLFC and for water quality improvements by the IJC and their partners; providing benefits to all living in the Great Lakes basin and beyond.
This approach was influential in the creation and gradual rehabilitation of Areas of Concern under the 1987 GLQWA. Just as significant, this nurturing of a partnership between a fishery management agency and one charged with oversight of Great Lakes water quality is typical of Henry.
By the time I entered the realm of Great Lakes environmental policy in the early 1980s, the ecosystem-approach that Henry and others helped insert in the GLWQA was accepted wisdom, whereas not long before it was considered, at best, a controversial scientific breakthrough and, at worst, a fool’s errand. In the end, the acceptance of this elevated view of fisheries and aquatic ecosystem management has been a testimony to Henry’s intellect, patience, kindness, and widespread influence in both the scientific and management communities.
In recent years, Henry has continued to advocate an interdisciplinary ecosystem-and holistically-based approach to the problems of the Great Lakes, including a most titanic type challenge. He wrote me to say, “Could the four senior commissions in our Great Laurentian Basin – IJC, GLFC, Great Lakes Commission, and Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative – be urged to mount joint hearings on the subject of climate change as it relates to our basin? What kind of critical discontinuities, i.e., points of no return, to our basin's ecosystems may be expected as climate events become more spasmodic related to temperature, wind, and rain? Or have such thresholds been crossed already on large issues, and are we lagging in search for adaptations to unstoppable permanent transformations?” Henry’s vision and passion is still, and has been, forever undimmed.
Henry did more than span science and policy gaps and gaps in governance. He was also a popular presence within the Great Lakes community, taking time to school students of both formal and informal curricula in the history of the ecosystem principle as applied to the Great Lakes. He did that for me, and I am the richer for it. And we are all richer for the contributions he has made as a scientist, critic, educator, policymaker and human being in the Great Lakes ecosystem. Hail Henry, and thank you for never giving up on us and the future!
FLOW, For Love of Water
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Traverse City, MI 49684, USA
References
- Liu, J., Dietz, T., Carpenter, S.R., Alberti, M., Folke, C., Moran, E., Pell, A.N., Deadman, P., Kratz, T., Lubchenco, J., Ostrom, E., Ouyang, Z., Provencher, W., Redman, C.L., Schneider, S.H., Taylor, W.W., 2007. Complexity of coupled human and natural systems. Science 317, 1513–1516.
- GLFC (Great Lakes Fisheries Commission), Francis, G.R., Magnuson, J.J., Regier, H.A., Talhelm, D.R. (Eds.), 1979. Rehabilitating Great Lakes Ecosystems. Technical Report 37. Ann Arbor, MI.