By Alexandra Vieux Frankel, Doctoral Candidate, York University
“Vote for Water.” These electrified letters glowed against black boxes that volunteers held on a Lake Michigan beach. Each year, at the end of summer, a water advocacy organization in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, hosts a public gathering at a local waterway as a celebratory and sober call to continue the work of protecting water bodies. This same beach had been closed since 2020 to address the hazardous riptide that resulted in multiple drownings and near drownings (Milwaukee County Parks 2024). Lake Michigan (which locals in Milwaukee call “the Lake”) is the source of drinking water and the destination for water filtered through sewage plants. The gathering celebrated the beach’s reopening, mourned the lives lost on the beach, and honored the life the water supports—all of which concluded with the electrified call to vote for water.
I conducted the bulk of my dissertation fieldwork in Milwaukee in 2024, tracing the entanglements of water governance, industrial contaminants in a late-industrial city, and public health. Water governance in the Great Lakes features overlapping and multilayered governmental jurisdictions, numerous treaties, and international commissions—with and without regulatory authority. As a result, fieldwork took me across the Great Lakes region and to Washington, DC, to attend conferences related to policy, advocacy, grassroots work, and environmental cleanups. Anticipation and anxiety over what the 2024 presidential election would bring hung over these events, though often not so explicitly as in the vignette above. More often, exclamations of the wonder of beholding the Great Lakes obfuscated partisan divides: that is, bipartisanship was choreographed around the sublime transcendence of the Great Lakes over electoral politics.
Between September 2023 and 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), alongside Milwaukee city and county and Wisconsin state-level offices, held public meetings across Milwaukee to provide information and elicit feedback on what was projected to be the largest industrial clean up in the Great Lakes region. At an estimated total cost of $450 million, the cleanup aimed to “heal” Milwaukee’s industrial legacy. The EPA would dredge 1.9 million cubic yards of toxic sediment from over 10 miles of Milwaukee’s three rivers and inner harbor and house the contaminated sediment in a new dredged material management facility. These “legacy contaminants” of mercury, lead, PCBs, PFAs, and other toxins, settled in the riverbeds during Milwaukee’s industrial heyday when the rivers were used as open sewers for industrial and human waste (Gurda 2018; 2020). Today, these waterways’ legacy contaminants disproportionately impact adjacent BIPOC communities via toxic exposures to water and soil, as well as subsistence fishing.
At one public meeting on a cold and dark February evening, a frustrated attendee asked what would happen to the funding for the project if Biden were to lose the presidential election. He spoke with so much frustration, questioning the logic of taking on such a large project that relied on cost-sharing with the federal government amid so much uncertainty. The presenters were insistent that funding would be secure because funding for Great Lakes restoration projects have enjoyed bipartisan support for nearly twenty years.
The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) was passed by Congress in 2010 under the Obama administration. The Bush administration passed its predecessor, the Great Lakes Interagency Task Force, by executive order in 2004. The GLRI goes up for reauthorization every four years. In January of 2021, the Trump administration signed the GLRI of 2019 into law with bipartisan congressional support (Jurjonas et al. 2022). Policy research in the Great Lakes region has also shown considerable bipartisanship among constituents on water issues specifically, citing personal connections to water and the importance of water to local economies as translating into support for water quality protections across political divisions (Randall 2021; Maack et al. 2014).
A binational Canadian-US conference held in Washington, DC, in the days leading up to the 2024 Great Lakes Lobby Day reflected these bipartisan sensibilities. Here, bipartisanship was not only guarded but also carefully choreographed. Opening remarks at the conference described the Great Lakes as a “treasure” and an “economic engine” that “bring[s] people together.” Presenters pushed back against any framing of bipartisanship as a buzzword, stressing instead that it embodied a shared commitment to protecting the “health of the Great Lakes.”
Speakers at the conference praised the bipartisanship of the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), which accelerated and made possible the release of additional federal funds for cleanup and toxic remediation efforts in the Great Lakes region (US EPA 2022). Yet, while BIL passed the House with 220 democratic votes and 8 republican (US House of Representatives 2021), and in the Senate with a total of 69 votes, 18 coming from Republicans, only 1 of 5 Republican senators from Great Lakes states voted “yea” (US Senate n.d.). One presenter captured the delicate and contentious dance of bipartisanship by noting that “the President’s [Biden’s] infrastructure agenda is neither Republican nor Democrat. States help everyone. The Great Lakes touch everyone.” But the veneer of this bipartisan choreography cracked as he added, “It’s more important than ever to be bold, not knowing when funding streams will dry up. We need to remediate contaminated sediments,” putting this call for action in alignment more with voting for water than with calls for bipartisan cooperation.
The Great Lakes Lobby event took place in the Rayburn Building across the street from the Capitol whose perimeter was marked by tall fences. Politicians, staffers, and Great Lakes–focused non-profit workers who’d traveled to DC to push their representatives to support Great Lakes funding, meandered through a crowded room and white marble balcony with paper coffee cups and plates of cold buffet eggs in hand. The event began with a call to put differences aside and work together. One Congressman added, “The Great Lakes connect us as communities. I love these waters. Thank you for coming to Washington to fight for them.” A member of the Great Lakes Congressional Taskforce emphasized the binational cooperation that’s central to Great Lakes governance, noting “water doesn’t know international boundaries. What they [Canada] do and what we [United States] do affects us all.” As he rushed to conclude his comments—joking that he should speed things up because the Senate has arrived—he added that safeguarding the Great Lakes “can’t happen unless there’s bipartisan support in both houses.”
No one mentioned the 2024 election, nor the first Trump administration’s attempts to gut the GLRI and Clean Water Act. The proposed 2019 budget would have slashed funding for the GLRI from $300 million to $30 million (Geist 2018). In 2017, Trump both rolled back the Obama administration’s Clean Water Rule and limited the scope of waterways that could be protected under the Nixon-era Clean Water Act (Snider 2017). These shrinking protections were then cemented under the Supreme Court decision Sackett v. EPA, which redefined which waterways and forms constituted “Waters of the United States.” Although the second Trump administration, in its first 100 days, has worked to dramatical reconfigure the machinations of federal governance, confidence in bipartisan support for the Great Lakes restoration and economic policy persists (e.g., Henry 2025)—albeit alongside shock at the contraction and reconfiguration of the EPA’s work (Drugmand 2025).
This choreography of bipartisanship across the event drew simultaneously on an instrumentalizing imaginary of the Great Lakes and on invoking senses of awe. Representatives at the conference and Lobby Day event described the shock of their colleagues from western states upon beholding the Great Lakes for the first time, one explaining, “He said, ‘Wow. That’s a big lake. I can’t see across!’ And I said, ‘that’s why we call it “great,” like the ocean with no salt.’” A congressman from New York state added at the Lobby Day event, “I’m grateful to be here in this bipartisan gathering. I make sure my colleagues see Lake Ontario: ‘Oh my God, it’s like an ocean!’ [And I say] We call it the Great Lakes for a reason.” But the reason goes unstated. The “greatness” is apparent in the experience of awe at beholding a lake so big it cannot be seen across.
Experiences of awe gesture to the sublime. In the Kantian tradition, the sublime is a response to beholding objects of nature (Kant 2000), which contrasts with subsequent articulations of technological sublimes that are imagined as signals of human “triumph over nature” (Nye 2022, 18). Kant situates the sublime in contradistinction to beauty: where beauty charms, the sublime moves (Kant 2003). Perhaps most significantly, this sublime is transcendent and terrifying: It exposes the limits of human representation and reason. Neither controllable nor discernable, the sublime elicits “the exhilarating feeling of delight [that] metamorphoses into a flirtation with dissolution” (Morley 2010,13). The wonder the Great Lakes inspired became a medium through which partisanship could be transcended—that part of life and matter beyond the reach of electoral political legibility—and thereby create space for bipartisan discourse. Yet, it is important to remember that for Kant, the sublime was universal (M. Shapiro 2018): only the masculine Western subject had the education and capacity to “derive delight from the terror and conceptual abyss of the sublime” (Battersby 2007, 202).
Choreographies of bipartisan support embody a kind of freshwater sublime that hinges on the transcendent greatness of beholding the Great Lakes and their mundane materiality. Much like the conundrum of the sovereign king who is simultaneously “immanent and mortal” (Gilmartin 2012, 410), a freshwater sublime reveals Great Lakes waters to be beyond partisan representation while still deeply embedded in partisan electoral politics. The latter tend to coalesce around shared understandings of the Great Lakes as critical to the US economy—although the conference was technically bi-national, the rhetoric and substance were dominated by US-based issues and politics—and reference to the Lakes’ greatness. The importance of steel manufacturing, tourism, and fishing to the region was registered in monetary terms. Great Lakes advocacy organizations often note at conferences and on webinars that for every $1 invested in the Great Lakes through the GLRI there is a $3 return. Awe unfolded alongside the many economizations of human and more-than-human life in the Great Lakes.
The sublime is not inseparable from economy. Filippo Menozzi proposes a “blue sublime” in which the ocean becomes a material and allegorical figure of capitalism’s obliteration of space, “reducing the globe to pure temporality” (2020, 5). Capitalism’s expansion paradoxically depends on the geographic space that it aims to transcend, leading to what Menozzi describes as “its ultimate limit and point of breakdown” (2020, 6; emphasis in original). This dialectic parallels the Kantian sublime as the power of the sublime objects reveals not only the impossibility of their representation but also “physical incommensurability” with human bodies (ibid.). The blue sublime is therefore not only about the vastness of oceans but about the terror: the limits of grasping the “totality of capital” (2020, 2), the destruction of the oceans, and the horrors colonial expansion and Transatlantic Slave Trade they facilitated and bore witness to (Sharpe 2016).
Experiences of and encounters with the sublime are highly contingent on historical, military, and technological regimes and arrangements (Masco 2004). The blue sublime is important for thinking about how the settler colonial occupation of the Great Lakes is imbricated in electoral politics and choreographies of bipartisanship. Colonial settlers hoped to transform the Great Lakes into a second Mediterranean, rich in commerce (Egan 2017). Decades later, the Great Lakes watershed became critical to the transportation of industrially manufactured goods, machinery, and grain, while simultaneously being conscripted as a repository for industrial waste. In 1959, the St. Lawrence Seaway opened the Great Lakes to international trade as well as non-native species, many of which are now reviled and labeled “invasive” (Egan 2017; Murphy 2013) and are targeted in Great Lakes Restoration Initiative programming.
Restoration itself is an intervention in time—one that might transform the terror of the sublime into pure pleasure, recrafting Great Lakes ecosystems in time. Choreographies of bipartisanship in Great Lakes policy gesture toward this pure temporality: the awe of the Great Lakes, beyond rationalization and discernibility, leaves temporality as the object to manage. In this way, choreographies of bipartisanship hinge on the impossibility of figuratively and materially apprehending the sublime of the Great Lakes and on the temporal dimensions of settler colonial imaginaries of restoration. Put another way, narratives of bipartisan collaboration work to remediate environmental damage through bringing about shifts in time, but without instigating shifts in settler colonial occupation, which both sides of the aisle continue to benefit from.
The paradoxically ordinary quality of Great Lakes waters complicates bipartisan configurations of the sublime in the Great Lakes. In DC and at regional conferences, the Great Lakes were routinely introduced as the world’s largest freshwater resource, supplying drinking water to over 40 million people in Canada, on sovereign tribal lands, and in the United States. Yet, as a substance that flows through taps and toilets, Great Lakes water also becomes quotidian, mundane, and potentially profane, albeit still vital. The bipartisan rendering of the Great Lakes gestures to a sublime that is out there, a public spectacle and a protected commons. Yet, for Milwaukee activists and advocacy organizations, it is also something inside, circulating through infrastructures, homes, and human bodies, making it essential to life and also deadly. This dimension of the freshwater sublime parallels Nicholas Shapiro’s chemical sublime, which moves the sublime from transcendent spectacle to an embodied attunement to “indistinct and distributed harms” (N. Shapiro 2015, 379). The chemical sublime critiques the masculinity of Kant’s sublime and draws attention instead to the indiscernible and unrepresentable in chronic, quotidian experience. It is this kind of attunement to embodied harms that animates the exhortation above to vote for water. In other words, that call to vote for water in Milwaukee recognizes that the waterways relied on for freshwater, fish, and recreation are not only sources of wonder but are also lived as a shared materiality embroiled in systemic and environmental violence.
Invocations of the sublime in lobbying and policy settings made Great Lakes bipartisan politics possible. Awe created space for the articulation of bipartisan discourses and became the foundation of bipartisan choreographies, exposing the limits of rationalizing bipartisanship in economic terms. Instead, attention to the sublime reveals how Great Lakes economies unfold in relation to global capitalism’s and settler colonialism’s reconfigurations of space and time. In this way, the awe of the sublime transcends partisan divides and enables claims of sovereignty over the Great Lakes. But this was a Kantian sublime, a spectacle made to seem universal and out there. Voting for water similarly highlighted a more-than-instrumentalized approach to Great Lakes electoral politics—but it was a sublime characterized by attunement to embodied harms, reverence, and gratitude. Both out there and inside, a freshwater sublime mediated partisan and bipartisan renderings of the Great Lakes, reproducing US sovereignty in distinct and overlapping ways. In the current moment, it remains to be seen how such a sublime can move those who behold, live with, and govern the Great Lakes next, if at all.
References
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