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

Introduction

1 From the late 1950s, many people in the world’s industrialized nations became increasingly concerned about what they thoughtlessly had been doing, and were continuing to do, to their environments. Local, national, and international environmental groups emerged to lobby legislatures to take, among other measures, actions to curb the pollution of land, air, and water.1 Out of these concerns and actions grew the environmental movement that came to prominence during the 1960s. Historians of the movement see it as having distinct phases, and, despite some differences, they agree broadly on dates and issues. According to Samuel P. Hays, the initial issues in the United States involved “naturalenvironment values” in outdoor recreation, wildlands, and open spaces which shaped debate between 1957 and 1965.2 By the late 1940s, he writes, many Americans “began to find that both their necessities and conveniences had been met and an increasing share of their income could be devoted to amenities. The shorter work week and increasing availability of vacations provided opportunities for more leisure and recreation.”3 Outdoor recreation, Hays explains, grew rapidly as Americans sought out the nation’s forests and parks, its wildlife refuges, its state and federal public lands, and, he might have added, its lakes and rivers for recreation and enjoyment . Hays sees a second phase occurring in the period 1965 to 1972, Introduction during which “concern for pollution took its place alongside the earlierarisen interest in natural-environment areas.”4 To Kirkpatrick Sale, the first of four coherent periods which he discerns in the environmental movement runs from 1967 to the first Earth Day in 1970. He considers this period to be characterized by two principal concerns , the first and not entirely new one being that “nature .l.l. was not there simply for manipulation and exploitation but .l.l. should be preserved and protected and cherished.”5 Regarding the second concern, about pollution, he is more in agreement with Hays. He sees this concern as originating in the fears aroused by the threat of fallout from the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, becoming greatly intensified by Rachel Carson’s publication of Silent Spring, in 1962, and being spurred on by marine spills of crude oil in the English Channel and Pacific Ocean off Santa Barbara, California. Sale continues: “when the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland burst into flames and the nearby Lake Erie was declared a ‘dying sinkhole ’ as a result of sewage and chemicals in the summer of 1969 .l.l. the public outcry was loud and widespread.”6 However, in continuing his account of the environmental movement Sale does not mention the fate of Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes shared by the United States and Canada. Did Lake Erie succumb to the major pollution problem that assailed it and other lakes around the world in 1969, a problem that scientists refer to as “cultural eutrophication”? That is the central question I intend to answer. During the 1960s, the public in North America and Western Europe concerned with environmental issues came to learn and to use the term “cultural eutrophication,” hitherto familiar mainly to limnologists.7 Limnology , the science which studies the physical, chemical, and biological aspects of fresh waters, has flourished during the second half of the twentieth century.8 In speaking of the quantity of plant nutrients contained within a lake, limnologists use the words “oligotrophic,” “eutrophic,” and “mesotrophic.” An oligotrophic lake has a relatively small supply of nutrients , a eutrophic one a large supply, and a mesotrophic lake an intermediate supply. When a lake’s nutrients are being excessively increased by some human activity—as, for example, the disposing of sewage in the lake—the limnologist speaks of the lake as undergoing cultural eutrophication.9 In the 1960s, numerous bodies of water in North America and Europe were 2 Introduction found to be experiencing cultural eutrophication. Public and governmental reaction to that finding was one expression of the nascent environmental movement. Waters undergoing cultural eutrophication prior to the 1960s were not unknown but were certainly not numerous. During the mid-1940s, Arthur D. Hasler of the Department of Zoology, University of Wisconsin, became interested in the effects that deliberate fertilization, that is, enrichment by nutrients, might have on lakes.10 He knew that enriching artificial ponds to increase fish production was a long-established practice in Asia and Europe , and that in North America aquiculturists had also successfully...