It looks like no one is listening. That’s bad.

The subject is Asian carp. They’re the flying, ravenous ecosystem crushers that are knocking at the door of Lake Michigan.  They invaded the Mississippi River system back in the 1970s, and parts of that system, especially in Illinois, are virtually devoid of anything else. They’ve made their way into Chicago’s shipping canal and are just a fallible electric barrier away from Lake Michigan. If they make it through and establish themselves, they’ll take a serious bite out of Lake Michigan’s plankton, which are already in peril because of quagga mussels.

When the plankton become carp food, there’s no telling what will happen to Great Lakes fisheries. Lake Huron’s salmon population already collapsed because of a plankton shortage. Is Lake Michigan next? What about Lake Erie’s walleye? We’re talking big bucks from recreational and commercial fisheries from Minnesota to New York.

The good news is that there’s a pretty simple way to keep Asian carp out of Lake Michigan: Close the locks on the canal. The bad news is that the people who can do that — the Army Corps of Engineers and the Obama administration — don’t wanna. They say the loss of commerce would be too great a cost. That canal moves about two trainloads of stuff each day.

The administration is patting itself on the back for putting $78.5 million toward studying the problem, which sounds great. But most of that money was already earmarked for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, and furthermore what good is a study that’s taking place as the problem steadily gets worse? By the time that study concludes anything those carp could be doing laps around Mackinac Island.

That canal should not even exist. It was put there in the 1920s when Chicago residents got tired of watching their turds bobbing in Lake Michigan and decided to reverse the flow of the Chicago River and send their crap down the Mississippi River. I am not making this up. Now those two massive systems — the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River — are swapping spit like lovestruck teenagers. Zebra mussels go one way, Asian carp go the other. Goodness knows what other ecological disasters lurk.

Yet the Army Corps and the Obama folks don’t want to heed the cries rising from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Ontario — all of which stand to lose their shirts if the carp get through. What are they afraid of? Fixing something?

Look, we get that it’s a bad economy and probably not the best time to change the way cargo moves through Chicago. But sorry. This is a much bigger, longer reaching problem than that. And pretty soon it’s going to be too late to fix.

And then we’ll spend the rest of our lives wishing we had. Close the locks already.

Luke Haynes, 13 (Detroit News photo by Dale Young)

If the future of hunting is in the hands of the Haynes family of Vicksburg, Mich., it’s all good.

They’re the ones who produced Luke Haynes, one of the three lucky winners of the first Pure Michigan Hunt. Luke is 13 years old, and winning means he’ll go to the front of the line for Michigan elk, bear, antlerless deer, turkey and waterfowl drawings this year. You can read more about Luke’s prize in today’s Detroit News.

Plans are in place for the News — and yours truly — to tag along on all of Luke’s Pure Michigan hunts beginning in April with the spring turkey season. We’ll chronicle Luke’s challenges and successes as he and his dad work their way through Michigan’s game species.

I met Luke on Thursday, along with parents Scott and Kelly and sisters Katelyn and Linsey, and it’s hard for me to imagine a better ambassador for hunting and outdoor sports. Luke is bright, friendly and funny, not at all averse to looking adults in the eye and answering their questions — even folks he’s just met. I have a 13-year-old of my own, and I can tell you many members of that species would rather stab themselves in the neck than carry on a conversation with an adult.

Above all Luke is passionate, and he comes by that honestly. Everyone in his family — mom, sisters, dad — hunts. Luke just turned 13 on January 6, and already he has killed a double-bearded gobbler and an 8-point buck. He hunts rabbits and squirrels behind his home in Kalamazoo County every chance he gets. He started tagging along with Scott on hunts as a toddler strapped in a backpack.

It may seem to Luke like he’s just going hunting. But in a lot of ways he’s sending a very important message to a society that is increasingly concentrated on pavement and learns about nature through electronic devices sealed inside the weatherproof boxes we call home.

There’s another generation coming up that knows how to do it the other way. And its face will look a lot like Luke Haynes.

You’ve gotta love the Internet.

You open up your e-mail, and there sits a picture, sent by a friend or a friend of a friend, of a giant fish, a monster buck or some mythical creature.

Then come the details. Where, when, how. And that, of course, is how you  can tell they’re bogus. I got this picture today, Feb. 2, 2010. Here’s what the body of the e-mail said:

“Big Fish !!

“This Sturgeon was caught on the Black River at South Haven Michigan last
week.

“It weighed out at over 1,000 lbs and measured out at 11′1′. It was 56′
around the girth,
“And took over 6 and a half hours and 4 dozen beers for the 4 guys taking
turns reeling.”

Now, I know some hardy souls, folks who pooh-pooh the very notion of winter. But I can assure you that not even they would jump into Lake Michigan in short sleeves in January to show off a fish.

Because they can’t. It’s frozen.

Now, let’s assume that I’m being a little too niggling. Maybe the fish was caught last summer, that the e-mail went out a week later and is only now getting to my inbox. OK, fair enough.

But the e-mail claims the fish weighed 1,000 pounds. Uh oh. Problem. The type of sturgeon that lives in Lake Michigan is, fittingly enough, the lake sturgeon. They get big. Really big. But a thousand pounds? Half a ton? Hardly. According to the International Game Fish Association, the all-tackle world record lake sturgeon was a 168-pounder caught by Edward Paczkowski on the Georgian Bay in northern Lake Huron in 1982.

That’s a mighty big fish. And now we’re to believe that one SIX TIMES that size was caught in Lake Michigan, but no one heard about it until an e-mail circulated? Remember that in the summer of 2009, a world-record brown trout was taken from the Manistee River and made news everywhere from Newaygo to New Zealand. The angler who caught it, Tom Healy, was swamped with phone calls and interview requests from around the world. Yet a sturgeon that would have beaten the world record by 800 pounds wasn’t worth mentioning? And it was caught by “four guys”?

Ahem. You see my point. Now, let’s assume that it wasn’t a lake sturgeon but a white sturgeon, the really big kind that inhabit the Pacific coast. The world-record white sturgeon was 468 pounds, still less than half the size of our supposed Lake Michigan fish.

And we’re to assume that a saltwater white sturgeon grew to twice the world record size in fresh water more than 2,000 miles from home?

Yeah. And I’ve got a bridge for sale.

My guess is that the guys pictured were showing off a big shark, and some clever soul inserted a sturgeon in the picture via Photoshop.

And then told a real whopper.