Something fishy

It doesn't take a geographer, or even a biologist, to tell you that the handling of the Asian carp invasion has been weird. Dale Bowman of the Sun-Times agrees in his latest column. He documents a number of catches in Chicago lagoons that show that the carp already has been present in town since perhaps 2003. A glance at a map shows that there were a lot of holes (e.g. interconnected waterways) in the Army Corps' plan to deter the fish. The new plan to poison a section of the Ship and Sanitary Canal, days after evidence of the carp was found on the Calumet River, a different waterway altogether, reinforces the idea that this is a big boondoggle. The carp continue to outpace us, and it's only the Great Lakes that are at stake.