Lake Erie Rehabilitated: Controlling Cultural Eutrophication 1960s-1990s

Notes

27 Introduction 1. One student of pollution has defined it as “The introduction by man into the environment of substances or energy liable to cause hazards to human health, harm to living resources and ecological systems, damage to structures or amenity, or interference with legitimate uses of the environment .” See Martin Holdgate, A Perspective on Environmental Pollution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 17. As will be seen, the pollutant that the present study is concerned with is phosphorus in the form of phosphate. 2. Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 54. 3. Samuel P. Hays, “From Conservation to Environment: Environmental Politics in the United States Since World War Two,” Environmental Review 6, no. 2 (fall 1982), 22. 4. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence, 55. 5. Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962–1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 18. 6. Ibid., 19. 7. In 1966, a sanitary engineer observed: “Eutrophication is a new word in the vocabulary of many sanitary engineers and scientists and is destined to become a part of the normal complement of words used by everyone concerned with the broad concept of water resources.” Clair N. Sawyer, “Basic Concepts of Eutrophication,” Journal, Water Pollution Control Federation 38, no. 5 (1966), 737. Concerning his participation in hearings held in 1970 on water pollution in the lower Great Lakes, a limnologist would write: “This revealed to me how poorly informed industrial officials and the public were about lakes. As I sat listening to presentations made by housewives, mayors, high school students, bankers, farmers, marina operators, heads of tourist associations, and high ranking officials from industry and government, I realized the full extent of public ignorance about lakes and eutrophication. No one seemed to have the slightest idea of what ‘limnology’ and ‘eutrophication’ meant, let alone what they were all about.” John R. Vallentyne, The Algal Bowl: Lakes and Man (Ottawa: Department of the Environment, Fisheries and Marine Services, 1974), 2. 8. The fruits of the large research effort to understand cultural eutrophication, beginning in Notes the 1960s, are summarized in B. Henderson-Sellers and H. R. Markland, Decaying Lakes: The Origins and Control of Cultural Eutrophication (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1987). 9. A. M. Beeton and W. T. Edmondson, “The Eutrophication Problem,” Journal of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada 29, no. 6 (1972), 673. On the history of trophic terminology, see G. Evelyn Hutchinson, “Eutrophication, Past and Present,” in National Academy of Sciences, Eutrophication : Causes, Consequences, Correctives. Proceedings of a Symposium (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1969), 17–26. See also Hutchinson’s “Eutrophication: The Scientific Background of a Contemporary Practical Problem,” American Scientist 6, no. 3 (May–June 1973), 269–79. In the late 1960s, the Eutrophication Group of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development adopted the following working definition of eutrophication: “the nutrient enrichment of waters, which frequently results in an array of symptomatic changes, among which increased production of algae and other aquatic plants, deterioration of fisheries, deterioration of water quality, and other responses, are found objectionable and impair water use.” A. F. Bartsch, “Accelerated Eutrophication of Lakes in the United States: Ecological Response to Human Activities,” Environmental Pollution 1 (1970), 133. In 1972, the United States Environmental Protection Agency characterized eutrophication using the following criteria: decreasing hypolimnetic dissolved-oxygen concentrations; increasing nutrient concentrations; increasing suspended solids, especially organic materials; progression from a diatom population to a population dominated by blue-green and/or green algae; decreasing light penetration (in other words, increasing turbidity); and increasing phosphorus concentrations in sediments. Henderson -Sellers and Markland, Decaying Lakes, 10. 10. Arthur D. Hasler, “Eutrophication of Lakes by Domestic Drainage,” Ecology 28, no. 4 (October 1947), 383–92. 11. Surprisingly, Hasler did not discuss the Madison Lakes beside which he lived and which had recently become “notorious” because of their highly undesirable algal blooms that had driven lakeshore cottagers away and resulted in a general depreciation of lakeshore property values. See Clair N. Sawyer, “Fertilization of Lakes by Agricultural and Urban Drainage,” Journal, New England Water Works Association 61, no. 2 (June 1947), 109–127. 12. On the water carriage system, see “Decisions about Wastewater Technology: 1850–1932” and related articles in Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, Ohio: The University of Akron Press, 1996). 13. One contemporary wrote of “the sordid...