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.