At Easter, While visiting my parents' home on the shore of Lake Erie, I was struck by how much humans can do to preserve and even restore the environment. It sometimes happens when enough people appreciate the problem and set their minds to doing something about it. A disaster is usually what it takes to wake us up. That's exactly what happened in Lake Erie, and that's why my parents' lakeshore property is such a beautiful place to visit today.
Not that it was ever ugly. It captivated my family when I was one, in 1965, the year my parents bought a small two bedroom cottage on a half-acre lot. The house was set far back from a steep bluff overlooking the beach. Eventually my parents acquired several adjoining properties totalling several acres and had a large addition built on the house. We moved to live there permanently when I was eight.
Poison in paradiseI learned to swim in Lake Erie. Ironically it wasn't a safe place for swimming in those days. The pollution was so severe that Erie was declared a dead lake in the 1960s.
One of my earliest memories is attending Expo '67 with my family in Montreal. I spent that entire summer building Expos on our beach at home. To make the pavillions I used bits of plastic and other trash I found along the shore, everything from cigarette holders to practice golf balls, and many things both unmentionable and indescribable to a three-year-old. This was an era when anyone could dump anything practically anywhere without care or impunity.
When rivers burnedOn June 22, 1969, a fire erupted on Ohio's Cuyahoga River, which drains into the far side of Lake Erie. It happened when debris and oil floating on the surface burst into flames. This wasn't the first such fire. They had been happening since 1936. But this one caught the attention of American national media.
It raised an uproar of concern, and sparked the beginning of water conservation. One of the most significant outcomes was a joint effort by Canada and the United States to clean up the Great Lakes.
The Great Lakes Information Network is part of the legacy of this social and political action.
One of the worst problems was an overload of nutrients, particularly phosphorous, from fertilizers. The source was runoff from residential and agricultural property where fertilizers had been broadcast. It stimulated rapid growth of algae and other plants, which consumed the oxygen then died and decayed. Fish suffocated and the water stank. Our beach was always covered with dead fish and mats of seaweed
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