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Chapter III: The Polluting of Lake Erie
- The University of Akron Press
- Chapter
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the polluting of lake erie began long before the 1960s, and eutrophication was not the lake’s first pollution problem. By the early twentieth century, conditions in the Great Lakes had deteriorated to such an extent that Canada and the United States were compelled to launch the first of what would prove to be several joint inquiries into pollution problems. Until the 1960s, the prevailing view was that, because of the self-purifying nature of water and the vastness of their waters, the Great Lakes could not be seriously affected by human activities. As scientific evidence emerged that would undermine that view, a public aroused by its own observations began to protest the deterioration of Lake Erie. The Great Lakes of North America are a group of five freshwater lakes lying on the border between the United States and Canada.1 They have existed in their present configurations for about ten thousand years, since the end of the last ice age.2 Together they comprise the largest contiguous body of freshwater in the world, with a combined surface area of 95,000 square miles. Lake Erie is the fourth largest of the lakes, with a surface area of 9,730 square miles.3 It is about 242 miles long with an average width of about 43 miles, and is the shallowest and southernmost of the lakes. It is believed that when Lake Erie became known to French explorers in The Polluting of Lake Erie 36 C H A P T E R I I I the late seventeenth century, its basin had been relatively unaltered by its small native populations.4 During the first half of the eighteenth century, the French developed the fur trade in the Great Lakes area, establishing a fort and trading post at Detroit; but their dominance in the area was ended by the British during the Seven Years War (1756–1763). Following the Revolutionary War, the boundary between American and British territories , running along the middle of Lake Erie, was established by the Treaty of Paris (1783). The effective settlement of the Lake Erie Basin began at this time. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the construction of canals boosted commerce within the basin: from 1825, Buffalo, at the western end of Lake Erie, was connected to Albany on the Hudson River by the Erie Canal, thereby connecting Lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan to the Atlantic Ocean; from 1829, a canal to Lake Erie brought Lake Ontario into this system; and in 1833, Cleveland, followed by Toledo in 1845, became connected by canal to the Ohio River and hence to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. From the 1850s, the newest form of transportation, the railway, further facilitated commerce between the Lake Erie Basin and other regions of the United States and Canada. Also, ships and railroads facilitated the rapid settling of the Great Lakes area in the second half of the nineteenth century. In cutting forests and draining swamps to create farmland, settlers transformed the basin lands of Lake Erie. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the extensive hardwood forests had been cut and the great Black Swamp of northwest Ohio cleared and drained.5 While the Canadian section of the Lake Erie Basin remained primarily agricultural, its U.S. counterpart developed both agriculture and industry, most importantly the iron industry. Iron ore from the Lake Superior region was shipped to various centers on the shores of Lake Erie, including Cleveland and Detroit , to be smelted by coal brought in by rail from southeastern Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Between 1855 and 1942, the annual amount of iron ore shipped from the Lake Superior region to Lake Erie ports rose steadily from 1,449 to 92,076,781 gross tons.6 According to Harlan Hatcher, “The key to the development of Lake Erie was the wedding of coal and iron ore.”7 During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lake Erie’s port cities were booming. The populations in 1850 and 1930, respectively, were for Detroit, 21,019 and 1,568, 662; Toledo, 3,829 The Polluting of Lake Erie 37 [54.242.75.224] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:37 GMT) and 290,718; Cleveland, 12,034 and 900,429; and Buffalo, 42,261 and 573,076.8 Much of the burgeoning load of industrial and domestic wastes from these and other municipalities in the Lake Erie Basin was disposed of...