Fish in the Wrong Place: Aquatic Colonialism
By Oliver Cussen
The environmental history of European empire doesn’t end with decolonisation. The quasi-colonial schemes of the Green...
On the Des Plaines River, just south of Chicago, the United States Army Corps of Engineers is at war with Asian carp.
- The fish were first imported to America in the 1970s to eat up the weeds and algae in catfish ponds and sewage treatment lagoons around Little Rock.
- But they soon escaped into the Arkansas River, and from there into the Mississippi River basin, disrupting food chains and driving native fish species to near extinction.
Their conquest of North America’s waterways has been halted only because the army has for the last two decades maintained a barrier of electric charge across the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which connects the Des Plaines to the Great Lakes basin, home to a fifth of the world’s surface fresh water.
Author's summary: Aquatic colonialism affects ecosystems worldwide.