![]() ![]() And among the assembled experts there was hardly a ripple of surprise. The water shortage is already such that one conservation authority got up at an agriculturalists’ conference in Toronto early this year and suggested that the United States might one day invade Canada to get posses. As scientists worried about Erie dying this summer, New York City suffered an acute water shortage the rich farmlands of the Ottawa valley suffered a crippling drought and economists and politicians in the American west pressured Washington for more urgent consideration of plans to divert Canada's Arctic rivers south. With a sea two hundred and fifty miles long and in places fifty-seven miles wide, he has said, in effect, “It’s so big and I'm so small I can't possibly harm it, whatever 1 do!”īut in the past decade even laymen have growm aware that not only Lake PIrie, but all North America’s water resources are being wasted. It is equally a paradox that Erie's illness can largely be blamed on man's otherwise laudable humility in the presence of natural magnitude: faced Erie drainage basin, where some ten million people live the population of the Canadian basin is more than one million. It is a paradox of nature that the lake is dying because its waters are becoming over-rich in mineral nutrients - notably nitrates and phosphates, from wdiich detergents are made - contained in industrial and municipal wastes and in fertilizers washing from farmland to lake. But the lake would have livedįor eons of time - perhaps even survived the human race - if man had not polluted it and speeded up the aging process to the point that Erie today is like a child with Progeria, that rare disease which accelerates the life cycle so the victim may die of old age at ten. This kind of death would have happened anyway in some immeasurably distant tomorrow since Erie was dying to begin with, just as we all start dying at birth. at times and in parts it's already dead in the biologists’ definition of death because for a large part of the year, particularly in high summer, pollution steals the oxygen from twentysix hundred square miles of lakebed, so that only the most primeval forms of life can survive there. YouĬan, of course, swim in it anywhere, but in a disturbingly large number of otherwise desirable beaches you can only do so if you don't mind the smell or the algal slime or the floating sewage, oil, debris or dead dogs, cats, rats and fish.īut as a lake, a geological entity whose life is measured in the quality of its fish and its natural beauty and splendor, Lake Erie is dying. You can still sail a boat on it bask in the sun by it buy a cottage alongside it: still drink it (though the cost of purifying its water is increasing), or even swim in it if you choose your spot carefully. It’s hard to talk of the death of a Great l ake when it's patently still there, 9,930 square miles of gleaming inland sea with about a thousand miles of shoreline roughly divided between Ontario in Canada and five states in the U. For a while this was The Great Mayfly Mystery, and when that was solved everyone knew that Fake Erie was in its death throes. But the first sign of trouble to which anyone paid much attention was the disappearance of the mayfly first, and temporarily, in 1953 and then, for good, in 1956. IT ALL TOOK PLACE so slowly it's hard now to reconstruct just when and how it happened. And we may have already passed the point of no return By smothering it with pollution, man is making it an odorous, slime-covered graveyard. Instead, it’s becoming a 10-thousand-square-mile dead sea. Lake Erie might have outlived the human race.
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