Lake Ontario is the only one of the Great Lakes that Michigan does not border. Receiving the waste of the other four Great Lakes and the impact of industrial development in its own watershed, Lake Ontario faces special challenges. In his new book, The Lives of Lake Ontario, Daniel Macfarlane explores the checkered environmental history of Lake Ontario.
Macfarlane is an Associate Professor in the School of the Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. He is also a senior fellow at the Bill Graham Center for Contemporary International History, University of Toronto, and President of the International Water History Association. His research and teaching focus on the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin. We asked him several questions about the book.
Why a book on Lake Ontario?
Part of the reason is practical. I’d previously written books about the river (Niagara) that goes into the lake and the river (St. Lawrence) that goes out of the lake. By virtue of producing those books, I realized I had already done a lot of the research necessary for a book on Lake Ontario.
Until I moved to Michigan, it was also the Great Lake I spent the most time at – it is a waterscape I cherish, so researching and writing about a place I love seemed very appealing (and it gave me the excuse to keep going to this lake during our frequent visits to family and friends in Ontario). Additionally, I always liked the idea of a book focused on one Great Lake, partly as a step towards a book on the environmental history of all the Great Lakes, though I think I’m now going to write a book about Lake Michigan first, since that is the lake I’ve been closest to for the last decade.
Relative to the other four Great Lakes, is Ontario undervalued, underexamined and/or underprotected?
Yes, I think so. First, I argue that it is now the most degraded Great Lake – and thus arguably the most underprotected, though I’d suggest that all the Great Lakes are drastically underprotected. It is the furthest downstream of the Great Lakes, and therefore gets the cumulative pollution of the upper lakes. Not to mention the pollution that comes from the Niagara River, the region with likely the most toxic and industrial inputs out of all the Great Lakes basin, plus the effluent of the Golden Horseshoe.
I also think it is the most undervalued Great Lake. Most people who live around it don’t seem to love it or engage with it in the same ways folks do with the other Great Lakes; in fact, people frequently leave Lake Ontario to go vacation at other lakes. That said, I’m not sure Lake Ontario is underexamined compared to the other Great Lakes, and that is because the Great Lakes as a whole are drastically underexamined, especially in the American environmental history and water history literature. The Great Lakes are an area of water abundance, but water scarcity narratives about the arid southwest often dominate discussions about water. But Lake Ontario alone has more surface freshwater than the entire U.S. southwest.
How would you rate the performance of the federal, provincial and state governments in recent years in protecting and restoring Lake Ontario?
Terrible. There’s no sugarcoating it. We’re failing Lake Ontario (and the rest of the Great Lakes) at every governmental level. Have there been some victories and successes? Sure. The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements and Areas of Concern programs, for example, or the spending pulses from the Great Lake Restoration Initiative in the United States. The 2008 Great Lakes Compact and the companion agreement with Canada are better than what we had before to protect against diversions out of the basin. Indigenous voices have been better incorporated, though there is still a long way to go in that regard.
But the failures are much more pronounced. We never kept up the funding that led to initial success in cleaning up Lakes Ontario and Erie. Not only have we failed to maintain funding and regulatory enforcement, but because we’ve been bedeviled in recent decades by a whole host of problems that weren’t even on the radar in the Cold War era – new chemicals like PFAS; climate change, agriculture, and other forces combining to bring back eutrophication problems; saturating the water and aquatic life with plastics, and so on. I could make a pretty good case that Lake Ontario (and the Great Lakes in general) is now in the worst ecological condition it has ever been – worse even than in the lead up to the first Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1972.
In the book, you discuss re-engagement with the lake by the public. Do you think this will be enough to assure a healthy Lake Ontario in years to come? If not, what else is needed?
I argue that, for much of the twentieth century, people and cities metaphorically and literally turned their back on Lake Ontario. Lately, we’ve seen signs of people turning back toward the lake. That is undoubtedly a positive, since people who care about Lake Ontario will fight to protect it.
I think there is today a greater willingness to protect the Great Lakes than ever before, and people are sensitive about directly hurting the lakes. If we see raw sewage or garbage being dumped into a lake, we say something. The problem is we all hurt the lakes indirectly without realizing it just by living the average North American lifestyle – hopping on an airplane and burning carbon dioxide; single-use plastics that end up in the water and bioaccumulate in organisms up the food chain; buying food sourced from factory farms and unsustainable agriculture, causing runoff that poisons the lakes; purchasing products whose production or supply chain involved myriad chemicals that leach into the lake; and so on. We say we love the Great Lakes, and we mean it, but so many of our day-to-day actions actively hurt them; the problem is that many of those impacts are very difficult, almost impossible, to avoid given the ways our current society and economy is structured.
I’m a firm believer that in order to adequately protect the lakes and our environments we have to change those larger structures – our political and economic systems – but I’m also a firm believer that those larger structural changes result from individual actions and stories multiplied many times over (including the way we vote and spend our money). I doubt that we can get a healthy Lake Ontario or wider Great Lakes without major societal shifts in North America.
