Tag: Daniel Macfarlane

“The Lives of Lake Ontario,” a new book by Daniel Macfarlane

Published on August 27th, 2024 by - Blog Posts

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.

Why Do Canadians Seem to Care So Little about Protecting the Great Lakes from Line 5?

Published on October 5th, 2021 by - Blog Posts, News

Dr. Daniel Macfarlane, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability

By Daniel Macfarlane

As a Canadian living in Michigan, I’ve never seen a state or province that identifies with the Great Lakes the way Michigan does: their silhouette adorns t-shirts, water bottles, and bumper stickers everywhere. At the same time, I would say that the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence system is woven into the nationalisms and founding mythologies of the Canadian nation-state, especially in central Canada, in a way that isn’t true of the United States. You might even say that the Great Lakes are in the DNA of the territory now called Canada.

The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River are the historic Canadian heartland—the equivalent of the East Coast of the United States. All three founding nations of Canada (Indigenous, British, and French) crowded the shores of these sweetwater seas and the St. Lawrence River. Nowadays, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin hosts the political, financial, and industrial hubs of Canada, and about half the country’s population.

But if the Great Lakes are so important to Canadians, why do they seem to care so little about protecting them? Specifically, I’m talking about Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline.

Line 5, a hydrocarbon pipeline, runs through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, across the state’s venerated Straits of Mackinac, and then through lower Michigan to Sarnia, Ontario. Built nearly 70 years ago, and in a deteriorating condition, Line 5 daily transports about 23 million gallons of oil and natural gas liquids from the Canadian West.

Line 5 is a ticking time bomb, especially at the Straits, where Enbridge is proposing a tunnel for this decaying and dangerous dual pipeline—but if you read the fine print, it will take a decade to build and taxpayers will be on the hook for the risky endeavor.

If the Great Lakes are so important to Canadians, why do they seem to care so little about protecting them? Specifically, I’m talking about Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline.

In November 2020, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer revoked the 1953 easement granted to the Lakehead Pipe Line, now Enbridge, for the Straits crossing. Enbridge ignored the Governor’s May 12 deadline to shut down Line 5, with backing from the Canadian government, and the matter was sent for mediation. But in early September, the State of Michigan moved to break off this “unproductive” dialogue.

On October 4, 2021, the Canadian government officially invoked a bilateral 1977 Pipeline Transit Treaty that applies to pipelines that cross from one country into the other and back. Governor Whitmer said she was “profoundly disappointed” with the Trudeau government. And she should be, since Ottawa is essentially shilling for a private oil company. 

The status quo is going to end in disaster. Canada is a climate villain, marching itself and the rest of the world to “global weirding.” Backing the likes of Enbridge is not only bad for the planet, it is bad economics. 

In any case, the 1977 treaty is a diplomatic agreement not to interfere with or levy any fees or duties on hydrocarbons that are already flowing—“in transit” to use the treaty language—and should have no applicability on the bigger question of whether a state or province wants a foreign pipeline in their territory. In other words, the intention of this treaty was not to stop a state (or province) from exercising its sovereignty over its own public waters or deciding whether or not to revoke permission for a foreign pipeline crossing its territory; the point was to stop an arbitrary or gouging bait-and-switch where a political jurisdiction acting as the middle man gives consent to a pipeline and then jacks up the price.

Many Canadians have been boisterously loud about stopping new and existing pipelines within Canada. But why are Canadians so seemingly ignorant, or ambivalent, about Line 5? A major reason is certainly that most of the fossil fuels sent through Line 5 ends up in Ontario and Quebec. Of course, Canada is also a type of petro-state, addicted to the profits and efficiencies of fossil fuels; many have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

Just imagine how Canadians would react if the situation were reversed, and the U.S. refused to stop a pipeline that a province didn’t want. Moreover, if Canada is serious about reconciliation, it needs to stop pipelines. Many pipelines in Canada threaten the territories of numerous bands and First Nations, often without their consent and in conflict with the spirit of treaties and agreements.

But the status quo is going to end in disaster. Canada is a climate villain, marching itself and the rest of the world to “global weirding.” Backing the likes of Enbridge is not only bad for the planet, it is bad economics. 

A recent report stated that close to 85% of Canada’s fossil fuels need to stay in the ground if the country wants to have a decent chance of meeting the 1.5 degree Celsius goal in the Paris Agreement.  According to another analysis, building the Line 5 tunnel and continuing the pipeline could contribute an additional 27 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere annually, generating $41 billion in climate damages between 2027 and 2070.

Those climate damages are going to haunt Canada as well as the U.S. Moreover, the models show that a Line 5 spill at the Straits of Mackinac would likely flow into the Canadian part of Lake Huron. Enbridge’s track record doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. I live and teach in Kalamazoo, where in 2010 Enbridge’s Line 6B had a catastrophic failure into the eponymous river. A pipeline rupture would be all but impossible to rectify quickly in the Straits when there is ice cover in winter. 

Just imagine how Canadians would react if the situation were reversed, and the U.S. refused to stop a pipeline that a province didn’t want. Moreover, if Canada is serious about reconciliation, it needs to stop pipelines. Many pipelines in Canada threaten the territories of numerous bands and First Nations, often without their consent and in conflict with the spirit of treaties and agreements.

There are alternatives for getting energy to the areas of Canada served by Line 5. These can be used in the short-term. But, make no mistake, the goal here is not to just shift fossil fuels to a different pipeline. The end game is an energy transition, and a just one at that.  In the long run, stopping Line 5, and other pipelines, could actually be doing Canadians a favor: weaning them off of fossil fuels and their infrastructure, and protecting the Great Lakes and the climate.  What could be more neighborly? 

Daniel Macfarlane is an Associate Professor in the Institute of the Environment 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, and he is the author or co-editor of four books, including Border Flows: A Century of the American-Canadian Water Relationship, and he is completing a book on Canada-U.S. environmental and energy relations.