Melvin J. Visser is a product of the Great Lakes Basin. Mel was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, went to Michigan Tech in Lake Superior’s Keweenaw Peninsula for his Chemical Engineering education and spent his professional career at what was before a series of global mergers The Upjohn Company, a major manufacturer of pharmaceutical chemicals in Kalamazoo Michigan.
While in college, Mel married into a commercial fishing family and worked on a Lake Superior gill net tug in the busy and stormy November herring runs. He fell in love with the rugged lake and spent many vacations canoeing its rocky shores and hiking the Keweenaw Peninsula, the Pictured Rocks, and Isle Royale.
Mel’s first career at Upjohn involved the optimization of chemical processes. It proved to be a wonderful opportunity to learn the behavior of chemicals in the controlled environment of manufacturing equipment such as reactors, stills, adsorption columns, and crystallizers. His second career was to head the unit responsible for compliance to the newly developing environmental laws and regulations. This gave Mel access to Great Lakes environmental leaders who taught him in no uncertain terms that chemicals in the environment were devastating the gulls, cormorants, eagles and trout of Lake Superior.
An early retirement in 1995 left Mel with an unsolved dilemma. PCBs were banned in 1978. Their levels in Lake Superior dropped to 50% of their peak and then stayed constant. Why? With Mel’s understanding of the behavior of chemicals, this phenomenon was an impossibility. There had to be a continuing major source.
Mels post retirement response was to volunteer in Michigan and U.S. EPA efforts to understand and clean the lakes. This path proved unsatisfying, so two trips were made to the Arctic to plug into international research focused upon the surprising and devastating presence of PCBs and pesticides in a pristine environment. Assimilating the Arctic research allowed an understanding of Lake Superior’s continuing toxicity and the cause of the sorry state of all our northern waters. The book, Cold, Clear and Deadly had to be written.
