Озеро Онтарио находится в критическом состоянии из-за антропогенного воздействия и требует срочной защиты

On a summer stay in one of the many tall towers on Toronto’s waterfront, I watched Lake Ontario change shades as the clouds rolled in. Steely grey with whitecaps as the storm approached, a roiling black when the squall struck, and variegated shades along a spectrum of azure and cyan after the sun re-emerged. At times like these, entranced by this resplendent water body, it is hard not to feel like it is my lake. Folks new to the Great Lakes sometimes ask if there is a tide or taste it to see if it is salt water; in their defence, these “sweet-water seas” look like the ocean, the horizon a meeting of water and sky. Despite the ocean-like appearance, this is assuredly fresh water—“no salt and no sharks,” as the bumper stickers say. Even though American water narratives disproportionately stress the scarcity of the wet stuff on account of the arid west, a dearth of water is hard to imagine when looking across any of the Great Lakes. Lake Ontario alone has more surface fresh water than all the American Southwest put together. Lake Ontario is the fourteenth largest lake in the world by surface area and the eleventh largest in volume. It has a surface area of 18,960 square kilometres (7,340 square miles), an average depth of eighty-six metres (283 feet), and a maximum depth of 244 metres (802 feet). The lake is longest east to west, but it is wide enough in the north–south direction that you cannot see from shore to shore—that is, unless you are at the narrower western end, where you can discern the top of the tallest downtown Toronto buildings on a clear day from the opposite shore (the tourist towers of Niagara Falls, as well as the mist plume from the waterfall, are, in turn, visible from the observation deck of the CN Tower). Google Maps will tell you that it takes about eight hours to drive around the whole lake, provided you are going at freeway speed and excepting the time it takes to cross the international border. Incidentally, the fastest time to swim across Lake Ontario was just a shade under fifteen hours (since teenager Marilyn Bell made the first recorded cross-lake swim in the 1950s, from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Toronto, almost seventy others have repeated her marathon crossing). Whether Lake Ontario is viewed from a Toronto tower, an Oswego fort, a boat offshore of Kingston, or a cottage by Rochester, it is a view of abundance. This liquid lavishness has fostered economic, cultural, and political systems built on expectations of abundance and growth. And this water wealth is more than partly responsible for the amity—United States president Donald Trump’s recent attempt to unilaterally rename Lake Ontario as Lake America notwithstanding—that has characterized the past two centuries of the Canada–US relationship, promoting co-operation rather than the conflict that tends to result from scarcity. The border separating Canada from the US, and Ontario from New York state, is out there in Lake Ontario, somewhere, equally invisible from up close or far away. To the water and the biotic life within, as well as the precipitation and climate above it, the border is imperceptible. That border, nevertheless, matters. The word “Ontario” may be derived from Kaniatarí:io or Oniatarí:io, Iroquoian terms that can be translated as “lake of shining waters” or “beautiful lake,” though there remains debate about this etymology. Lake Ontario’s surface is around 245 feet (seventy-six metres) above mean sea level. This makes it the lowest of the five Great Lakes—and by an appreciable margin, as the water surfaces of the other Great Lakes, including Erie, are more than twice as many feet above sea level. To get from Lake Ontario to the level of the upper lakes, one has to climb over 300 vertical feet, no small task if you need to move a boat, let alone any cargo. Lake Ontario is also the lowest in the sense that it is the first of the Great Lakes encountered when moving up the St. Lawrence from the Atlantic. This orientation explains how Lake Superior received its name: not from its obvious grandeur and size, which many might assume, but from the French word “supérieur” for upper, or highest, lake in the Great Lakes chain. Lake Ontario is the “lowest” in another way still: the extent to which it has been brought low by human degradation. It seems, anecdotally speaking, the least appreciated of all the Great Lakes. Lake Ontario is shared by two subnational political jurisdictions, Ontario and New York state, with the surface area of the lake split almost evenly between the two. The Lake Ontario watershed is home to about 11 million people (9 million Ontarians and 2 million New Yorkers), a figure that has grown by 40 percent in the past two decades. Lake Ontario was the first of the five lakes heavily settled by Europeans, and it now has the largest lakeside population of any of the trans-border Great Lakes (only Lake Michigan, entirely in the US, has a larger population close to the water). If population growth continues to follow projections, Lake Ontario will be the most populated Great Lake within a few decades. Most of the residents in the watershed are concentrated in the Golden Horseshoe that runs from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Oshawa, encompassing St. Catharines, Hamilton, Burlington, Mississauga, Toronto, Scarborough, Pickering, and other communities. In fact, there are more Canadians living in the Lake Ontario watershed than in the rest of the Great Lakes combined. In the past few centuries, Lake Ontario became the most politically and economically important Great Lake, at least from a Canadian perspective. The Lake Ontario–St. Lawrence system tied together the territories that initially formed the country of Canada while also furnishing a fluid connection to the imperial centre, Britain. Lake Ontario, along with the two principal rivers that flow in and out of it, forms the Canadian heartland, and in many ways, the lake directed the resource exploitation and economic trajectories of Canada and Ontario. All of Canada’s historical capitals, and those of the two biggest provinces, Ontario and Quebec, are intimately connected to the Lake Ontario–St. Lawrence system. Canada’s largest city and urban conglomeration, Toronto and the GTA, grew into the contemporary industrial and financial hub of the country because of Lake Ontario. Similarly, Ontario derives not only its name but much of its economic and political clout from the lake. Lake Ontario has served as both a bridge and a barrier between Canada and the US, facilitating interactions and trans-border integration in some ways while impeding them in others. Though Lake Ontario was central to the evolution of the Canadian nation-state, it was much more peripheral to the national imaginary of the US. Likewise, Ontario identifies more strongly with Lake Ontario than the state of New York does. Even though it is the Great Lake that looms largest in the Canadian consciousness, by the twentieth century, Lake Ontario became seen mostly as a passive backdrop or a resource to be appropriated, rather than a dynamic waterscape supporting essential relationships between the natural world and the human enterprise. Lake Ontario is the Great Lake most affected by human-built control works, which include dams and water regulation infrastructures in its major tributary and distributary. The lake’s water levels, water quality, and biological diversity changed dramatically over the past few centuries, especially since the mid-twentieth century. New environmental regulations in the second half of the century achieved only mixed results. Lake Ontario became the most degraded of the five Great Lakes. Limited improvement in lake conditions in recent decades, and the ongoing emergence of new and unforeseen problems, point to a recurring theme: Lake Ontario’s remarkable resilience juxtaposed with its apparent vulnerability. From on high, Lake Ontario appears pristine. Get closer, and things look different: polluted water, fluctuating levels, impoverished biodiversity, imperilled habitat. Around a quarter of Canada’s population, as well as its major financial and industrial sectors, now resides in the Lake Ontario watershed. Consequently, over time, Lake Ontario has become seen as a working lake, a quotidian place to be used for utilitarian purposes, like cooling power plants, dumping garbage, and flushing sewage. A side effect of abundance is that the resource can be taken for granted. Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it can result in something just as destructive: indifference. Negligence, disdain, avarice, hubris—all have contributed to the abuse of Lake Ontario. Public access to Lake Ontario has been increasingly controlled over the past two centuries through zoning, infrastructure, and governmental measures to regulate fishing, recreation, transportation, industry, and pollution. Some of this benefited the lake, particularly those regulations aimed at protecting it, such as the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements (GLWQAs) or domestic water pollution and water treatment measures. But some of this—restricting Indigenous fishing practices, reserving waterfronts for private profits and industrial activities, polluting the lake for economic development—was also about controlling people and their access to amenities and resources. Humanity sought to regulate Lake Ontario, but the lake also became a means of regulating people. Over the past century and a half, human impacts have changed Lake Ontario so much that it is almost impossible to keep track of, let alone fully catalogue, each and every modification. In the nineteenth century, we cut down forests, dammed tributaries, dug canals, and obliterated fish species. In the twentieth, our impacts only expanded: pollution, toxics, invasives, urban sprawl, larger canals, hydroelectric dams, and climate change. Those impacts truly intensified in the middle of the twentieth century. The period since then, or perhaps starting even earlier, has been called the Anthropocene, in reference to humanity’s role as the primary driver of changes to earth systems. (Incidentally, the sediments of Crawford Lake, a small but deep water body near the head of Lake Ontario, has been proposed as the official “golden spike” marking the onset of the Anthropocene.) The period since the Second World War has also been dubbed the Great Acceleration because of the dramatic and simultaneous surge in many human trends and activities—population growth, consumption rates, energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, etc.—and the resulting impacts on planetary biogeochemical systems. Both concepts appear valid when viewed through the prism of Lake Ontario’s modern history. Even seemingly minor or imperceptible alterations to lake environments can cumulatively lead to cascading changes across trophic levels, making it difficult to tease out cause and effect. Sometimes these changes are not so slow: tipping points are reached and, suddenly, the lake is coated with green algae while the beach is littered with dead fish. The state of the nearshore area improves for a few years while the deep-water zones decline; then it flips. One fish species disappears; another thrives. Then we introduce a new chemical or pollutant to the mix, allow in a foreign species, or stock a new fish, and everything shifts again. We are lucky that Lake Ontario is so resilient and adaptive. But there are nonetheless limits and repercussions. The health of this sweet-water sea has improved in recent decades. But that does not mean it is healthy, considering how bad of a state it had been in previously. Even though the first dramatic regulatory steps to address pollution were taken during the 1970 to 1990 period, the lake’s ecosystem health was nevertheless still degraded by half during this era, according to one scientific study. The 2022 State of the Great Lakes report gives Lake Ontario’s overall status a rating of “fair” and “unchanging to improving.” Drilling down into the specific indicators that constitute Lake Ontario’s ranking, most are “fair,” while a number—such as coastal wetland plants, Cladophora frequency, hardened shorelines, and impacts of invasive species—garner a “poor” rating. Even “fair” is not necessarily a safe-enough state for human or ecological health, and only small pushes are needed to move the lake into clearly unsafe status. Perhaps the best that can be said nowadays about Lake Ontario is that, for the most part, it does not seem to be getting too much worse. Yet, in recent years, the lower Great Lakes have shown signs of reverting to some of the problems that instigated the first GLWQA. For example, Lake Ontario has seen a rise in toxic algal blooms. Some of the causes or amplifiers are new, such as climate change. Human waste remains a contributor: sewage overflows from storms as well as chronic undetected leaks. For example, in Hamilton, two recently discovered sewage leaks are estimated to have released a combined 400 million litres of waste water into Lake Ontario since 1996. In addition to sewage discharges from a climbing urban population, leaking septic systems in rural regions are a widespread but often unrecognized problem. All that said, when it comes to aquatic nutrient loading, agricultural runoff, which adds excessive nitrogen, is now the bigger culprit than urban waste, which primarily adds phosphorous. Phosphate levels in Lake Ontario have gone down since the 1980s, while nitrate levels have gone up. The over-application of crop fertilizers results in nitrogen and phosphorous finding their way into tributaries and then to Lake Ontario; higher inputs of chemicals from pesticides and herbicides also result. And new chemicals keep appearing on the horizon. Both the Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau governments pledged to increase spending on Great Lakes water quality. But such spending pulses look sufficient only when compared to the efforts of the Trump administration—regardless of the attention it has given the matter of renaming the lake—to gut environmental protections in general and for the Great Lakes specifically. Even hundreds of millions of dollars more in funding for Great Lakes cleanup will not be enough, especially when those same governments simultaneously promote the types of economic growth, consumption, and fossil fuel use that threaten the lakes to begin with. The end results of the two nations’ efforts are not so different. Both countries, and Ontario and New York, are failing Lake Ontario. The life of Lake Ontario, and the many forms of life that depend on it, are in jeopardy. Lake Ontario is the most anthropogenically altered, and stressed, of the Great Lakes. The majority of contaminants in it still come in through the Niagara River, which underlines the fact that protecting the lake also requires protecting the rest of the Great Lakes basin. Given that the lake remains so impaired in many ways, even though 2022 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the first GLWQA, we still have a lot of work to do. Now would be an opportune time for Canada and the United States to recommit to protecting this magnificent water body. Lake Ontario is telling us we need to change—will we listen to the lake? Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History by Daniel Macfarlane, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024.