Lake Erie Rehabilitated

William McGucken

Description

During the 1960s, inland bodies of water in North America and Europe experienced a dangerous transformation. Nutrients were dumped into the lakes, causing chain reactions which severely impacted on lake environments. The excessive increase into inland waters through human activity, known as cultural eutrofication, emerged as a dominant problem. Massive algae blooms drifted in overnourished lakes, depleting oxygen, damaging fish stocks, and transforming the water's ecosystem. In Lake Erie Rehabilitated, historian William McGucken presents a comprehensive account of the most notorious international incident of cultural eutrophication---Lake Erie. With the assistance of the International Joint Commission, Canada and the United States diagnosed phosphorous as the primary cause of the problem and, in a unique cooperative effort, reduced input to the lake from municipal and industrial wastewater plants and agricultural lands. Public pressure and government regulation encouraged the reluctant detergent industry to produce alternative detergents and, finally, reduced the input of phosphorous to targeted levels. Lake Erie is now rehabilitated, but its history over the last three decades demonstrates the importance of maintaining an environmental balance. Meticulously researched and documented, this book will appeal to environmentalists, historians, and readers who seek to understand the Great Lakes ecosystem, environmental issues, and environmental regulation.

Sujets

• Sciences et techniques
• América del Norte
• Freshwater ecosystem
• North America

Informations

• Publié par: University of Akron Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781935603177
• Langue: English

Extrait

LAKE ERIE REHABILITATED
Series on Technology and the Environment
Jeffrey K. Stine, Mixing the Waters: Environment, Politics, and the Building of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway
James Rodger Fleming and Henry A. Gemery, eds., Science, Technology, and the Environment: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective
James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California
Dale H. Porter, The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London




TECHNOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT
JEFFREY STINE AND JOEL TARR
SERIES EDITORS
WILLIAM McGUCKEN
LAKE ERIE REHABILITATED
CONTROLLING CULTURAL EUTROPHICATION, 1960s-1990s





THE UNIVERSITY OF AKRON PRESS
AKRON, OHIO
Copyright 2000 The University of Akron Akron, OH 44325-1703 All rights reserved.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
04 03 02 01 00 5 4 3 2 1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McGucken, William.
Lake Erie rehabilitated : controlling cultural eutrophication, 1960s-1990s / William
McGucken.- 1st ed.
p. cm. - (Technology and the environment)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-884836-57-7 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 1-884836-58-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Eutrophication-Control-Erie, Lake. 2. Detergent pollution of rivers, lakes, etc.-Erie, Lake. 3. Lake renewal-Erie, Lake. I. Title. II. Technology and the environment (Akron, Ohio)
QH 104.5. E 73 M 35 2000
363.739 46 097712-dc12
99-053826

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1984.
For Natalie and Elliot as they embark upon their academic careers
The Great Lakes represent the finest fresh water resource that this Nation has. The lakes are in trouble and the one that is in the most trouble is Lake Erie.
It seems to me that if we can lick the water pollution problem in the next few years on Lake Erie, we can lick the problem nationwide.
-U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall,
Cleveland, June 1996
Contents
List of Illustrations
Series Preface
Preface
Introduction
1. Cultural Eutrophication: An International Problem
2. Eutrophication of Ontario Waters
3. The Polluting of Lake Erie
4. The Lake Erie Enforcement Conference
5. The U.S. Government, the Detergent Industry, and Eutrophication
6. The International Joint Commission s Reference on the Lower Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River
7. Canada s Regulation of Phosphorus in Detergents
8. U.S. Opposition to Detergent Phosphate
9. Concerns about NTA Use
10. U.S. Reversal on Detergent Phosphate
11. Control of Eutrophication under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1972
12. Phosphorus Control under the 1978 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement
13. Control of Phosphorus from Nonpoint Sources
14. Toward Phosphorus Target Loadings
15. Lake Erie Eutrophication Controlled
Notes
Index
Illustrations
List of Figures
Figure 1.1.
Vollenweider s total phosphorus loading and mean depth relationship
Figure 6.1.
State of eutrophication for a number of lakes in Europe and North America
Figure 12.1.
Estimates of phosphorus loading to Lake Erie versus time
Figure 15.1.
Reported municipal phosphorus loadings to Lake Erie
Figure 15.2.
Total phosphorus loadings to the Great Lakes (metric tons/year)
Figure 15.3.
Spring mean total phosphorus trends for open lake, 1971-1992
List of Tables
Table 1.1.
Permissible loading levels for total nitrogen and total phosphorus (biochemically active) (g/m 2 . year)
Table 6.1.
Input of total phosphorus to Lakes Erie and Ontario in 1967
Table 15.1.
Trophic status of the Great Lakes
List of Maps
Map 3.1.
Lake Erie s basins and bathymetry
Series Preface
This book series springs from public awareness of and concern about the effects of technology on the environment. Its purpose is to publish the most informative and provocative work emerging from research and reflection, work that will place these issues in an historical context, define the current nature of the debates, and anticipate the direction of future arguments about the complex relationships between technology and the environment.
The scope of the series is broad, as befits its subject. No single academic discipline embraces all of the knowledge needed to explore the manifold ways in which technology and the environment work with and against each other. Volumes in the series will examine the subject from multiple perspectives based in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.
These studies are meant to stimulate, clarify, and influence the debates taking place in the classroom, on the floors of legislatures, and at international conferences. Addressed not only to scholars and policymakers, but also to a wider audience, the books in this series speak to a public that seeks to understand how its world will be changed, for ill and for good, by the impact of technology on the environment.
Preface
This book is an outgrowth of two of my previous books. In the earlier one, Scientists, Society, and State: The Social Relations of Science Movement in Great Britain, 1931-1947 (1984), I show that, during the 1930s, British scientists debated the question of who in a democratic society is responsible for the uses to which science and technology are put. During the summer of 1938, they concluded that not only scientists and engineers but all members of society share this responsibility. Accepting that as a sound conclusion, the question then becomes how this responsibility is met in actual practice.
By the time that book was published, I had developed an interest in environmental issues, especially ones involving the interaction of technology and the environment. In particular, I became interested in the controversies concerning pollution by synthetic detergents, new technologies introduced during the second third of this century. A synthetic detergent consists of a mixture of chemical compounds, principally of an active cleaning agent, also called a surfactant, and a builder, which enhances the action of the surfactant. The most successful of the first surfactants, alkyl benzene sulfonate (ABS), was effective not only in washing machines, but also, unfortunately, in sewage treatment plants and receiving waters, often rivers, producing large quantities of undesirable suds wherever it went. I deal with this problem and its solution in Biodegradable: Detergents and the Environment (1991).
Whereas ABS created a pollution problem by itself, the most effective of the first builders, phosphates, were but one of several contributors to a more serious environmental problem, namely, the enrichment of lake waters by phosphorus, which emerged as a worldwide problem during the 1960s. I explore the occurrence and control of the problem here by considering the most notorious case of enrichment, certainly in North America, that of Lake Erie. In doing so, I have engaged in traditional historical research, seeking out and critically examining voluminous relevant documents, from archival materials to published primary sources to other scholars work.
I am indebted to numerous librarians and archivists in Canada and the United States for their assistance, particularly librarians at the University of Akron and the offices of the International Joint Commission in Ottawa and Windsor, Ontario, and archivists at the Public Archives of Canada, the U.S. National Archives, and the University of Vermont. I am also indebted to the University of Akron for a research grant to explore the topic and later for a semester s leave to bring the study to completion, and to the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., for a grant supporting research for my chapter on Canada s regulation of phosphates in detergents. I am grateful to the editor of Environmental History Review for publishing an earlier version of the material in that chapter. Numerous other individuals have helped in various ways, for which I am most grateful. I must single out for special thanks my wife, Emilia, for her constant support and Professor William Doemel of Wabash College, who had begun researching the same general topic and, several years ago, generously shared his research materials and thoughts with me.
LAKE ERIE REHABILITATED
Introduction
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 natural-environment 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, during which concern for pollution took its place alongside the ea