During my lake association’s fireworks show over the last long weekend, I heard loons calling back and forth. Were they reacting to the noise of the fireworks?—Duke McGilliam
Yes. “Loons don’t like them,” says Doug Tozer of Birds Canada. “The calls they give are likely stress/alarm calls in response. They do the same thing to any other loud noise, like incoming float planes and big boats.” Loud noise affects their ability to hear properly, and it probably scares them. Okay, so fireworks aren’t good for loons (or other birds, or other wildlife). Obviously. But…just how bad are they?
When it comes to loons, “fireworks are not likely to cause a population level impact,” says Kathy Jones, also with Birds Canada and the volunteer manager for the Canadian Lakes Loon Survey. “But there are growing concerns about the individual pair impact.” For example, do fireworks frighten adult loons enough to make them abandon their chicks? “We don’t know,” admits Jones. “But one would think that the risk does exist, depending on how close the parents and chicks are to the fireworks.”
Now you’re probably feeling torn. You love a good fireworks display. But you also love loons. If your lake association’s on board, there are alternatives to traditional fireworks. Light shows, for example, “have the same brilliance but do not create noise or put pollutants and chemicals into the environment,” says Jones. You could also investigate “quiet fireworks.” Certain communities in Canada—Banff, Canmore, and Halifax, for example—have started using them. (Keep in mind, these fireworks aren’t silent—they’re just not nearly as loud.) Some U.S. organizations have started to use a series of drones outfitted with LED lights as a fireworks alternative.
One straightforward (and inexpensive) way a community—or an individual cottager—can reduce the impact of fireworks on wildlife is to limit how frequently they celebrate with fireworks. Ask yourself: “How often should fireworks be used at a lake?” says Jones. Every day of the holiday weekend? Only certain holiday weekends? Once a year, on Canada Day, ringing in Victoria Day and the New Year with only glow sticks and sparklers?
As with any situation where you’re weighing human interests against environmental impact, “careful thought should be taken with fireworks,” says Jones.
Got a question to Cottage Q&A? Send it to answers@cottagelife.com.
The Great Lakes cover nearly 95,000 square miles (250,000 square kilometers) and hold over 20% of Earth’s surface fresh water. More than 30 million people in the U.S. and Canada rely on them for drinking water. The lakes support a multibillion-dollar maritime economy, and the lands around them provided many of the raw materials—timber, coal, iron —that fueled the Midwest’s emergence as an industrial heartland.
Despite their enormous importance, the lakes were degraded for well over a century as industry and development expanded around them. By the 1960s, rivers like the Cuyahoga, Buffalo, and Chicago were so polluted that they were catching fire. In 1965, Maclean’s magazine called Lake Erie, the smallest and shallowest Great Lake, “an odorous, slime-covered graveyard” that “may have already passed the point of no return.” Lake Ontario wasn’t far behind.
In 1972, the U.S. and Canada signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, a landmark pact to clean up the Great Lakes. Now, 50 years later, they have made progress, but there are new challenges and much unfinished business.
I study the environment and have written four books on U.S.-Canadian management of their shared border waters. In my view, the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement was a watershed moment for environmental protection and an international model for regulating transboundary pollution. But I believe the people of the U.S. and Canada failed the Great Lakes by becoming complacent too soon after the pact’s early success.
The Great Lakes-St Lawrence River Basin spans nearly half of North America, from northern Minnesota to New England. International Joint Commission
Starting with phosphates
A major step in Canada-U.S. joint management of the Great Lakes came in 1909 when they signed the Boundary Waters Treaty. The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement built on this foundation by creating a framework to allow the two countries to cooperatively restore and protect these border waters.
However, as an executive agreement, rather than a formal government-to-government treaty, the pact has no legal mechanisms for enforcement. Instead, it relies on the U.S. and Canada to fulfill their commitments. The International Joint Commission, an agency created under the Boundary Waters Treaty, carries out the agreement and tracks progress toward its goals.
The agreement set common targets for controlling a variety of pollutants in Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and the upper St. Lawrence River, which were the most polluted section of the Great Lakes system. One key aim was to reduce nutrient pollution, especially phosphates from detergents and sewage. These chemicals fueled huge blooms of algae that then died and decomposed, depleting oxygen in the water.
Like national water pollution laws enacted at the time, these efforts focused on point sources—pollutants released from discreet, readily identifiable points, such as discharge pipes or wells.
This profile view of the Great Lakes shows that Lake Erie is much shallower than the other lakes. As a result, its waters warm faster and are more vulnerable to algal blooms. NOAA, CC BY-ND
Early results were encouraging. Both governments invested in new sewage treatment facilities and convinced manufacturers to reduce phosphate loads in detergents and soaps. But as phosphorus levels in the lakes declined, scientists soon detected other problems.
In 1973, scientists reported a perplexing find in fish from Lake Ontario: mirex, a highly toxic organochloride pesticide used mainly to kill ants in the southeast U.S. An investigation revealed that the Hooker Chemical company was discharging mirex from its plant in Niagara Falls, New York. The contamination was so severe that New York State banned eating popular types of fish such as coho salmon and lake trout from Lake Ontario from 1976 to 1978, shutting down commercial and sport fishing in the lake.
In response to this and other findings, the U.S. and Canada updated the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1978 to cover all five lakes and focus on chemicals and toxic substances. This version formally adopted an ecosystem approach to pollution control that considered interactions between water, air and land—perhaps the first international agreement to do so.
A tour of the Great Lakes and the nature in and around them.
In 1987, the two countries identified the most toxic hot spots around the lakes and adopted action plans to clean them up. However, as scholars of North American environmental regulations acknowledge, both nations too often allowed industries to police themselves.
Since the 1990s, studies have identified toxic pollutants including PCBs, DDT, and chlordane in and around the Great Lakes, as well as lead, copper, arsenic, and others. Some of these chemicals continued to show up because they were persistent and took a long time to break down. Others were banned but leached from contaminated sites and sediments. Still others came from a range of point and nonpoint sources, including many industrial sites concentrated on shorelines.
Many hazardous sites have been slowly cleaned up. However, toxic pollution in the Great Lakes remains a colossal problem that is largely unappreciated by the public, since these substances don’t always make the water look or smell foul. Numerous fish advisories are still in effect across the region because of chemical contamination. Industries constantly bring new chemicals to market, and regulations lag far behind.
Nonpoint sources
Another major challenge is nonpoint source pollution—discharges that come from many diffuse sources, such as runoff from farm fields.
Nitrogen levels in the lakes have risen significantly because of agriculture. Like phosphorus, nitrogen is a nutrient that causes large blooms of algae in fresh water; it is one of the main ingredients in fertilizer, and is also found in human and animal waste. Sewage overflows from cities and waste and manure runoff from industrial agriculture carry heavy loads of nitrogen into the lakes.
One way to address nonpoint source pollution is to set an overall limit for releases of the problem pollutant into local water bodies and then work to bring discharges down to that level. These measures, known as Total Maximum Daily Loads, have been applied or are in development for parts of the Great Lakes basin, including western Lake Erie.
But this strategy relies on states, along with voluntary steps by farmers, to curb pollution releases. Some Midwesterners would prefer a regional approach like the strategy for Chesapeake Bay, where states asked the U.S. government to write a sweeping federal TMDL for key pollutants for the bay’s entire watershed.
Climate change is now complicating Great Lakes cleanup efforts. Warmer water can affect oxygen concentrations, nutrient cycling and food webs in the lakes, potentially intensifying problems and converting nuisances into major challenges.
It will be challenging for the U.S. and Canada to make progress on this complex set of problems. Key steps include prioritizing and funding cleanup of toxic zones, finding ways to halt agricultural runoff and building new sewer and stormwater infrastructure. If the two countries can muster the will to aggressively tackle pollution problems, as they did with phosphates in the 1970s, the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement gives them a framework for action.
Every winter when Lake Suwa in Japan freezes, locals believe that the Shinto male god Takeminakata crosses the frozen lake with his dragon to visit the female god Yasakatome. He leaves only his footsteps on the ice in the form of a sinusoidal ice ridge called the omiwatari.
In 1397, Shinto priests began celebrating and recording the appearance of the omiwatari. They used the direction of the cracks left by the omiwatari to forecast the agricultural harvest for the upcoming summer. In the first 250 years of the ice record, Lake Suwa froze every year, except for three years during which time the region saw widespread famine. Since the turn of the millennium, however, the lake has only frozen seven times.
If the ice cover in northern lakes continues to decline at the same pace, it will have severe ecological and cultural consequences.
Lakes in the Northern Hemisphere are losing their ice cover faster than ever. (Midge Eliassen), Author provided
Lakes losing ice at rapid rates
Ice duration was more than two weeks shorter per century, on average, since the Industrial Revolution, with lakes losing up to 34 per cent of their total ice cover. In the past 25 years, the loss of ice escalated with lakes losing ice six times faster than any other period in the past 100 years.
Around 15,000 lakes, including Lake Suwa and the North American Great Lakes — Lake Michigan and Lake Superior — are beginning to remain ice-free in some winters. Lakes situated at lower latitudes and in some coastal regions, where winter air temperatures hover around 0 C (the freshwater freezing point) in addition to large, deep lakes in colder regions, are most sensitive to experiencing ice-free winters.
Large, deep lakes, such as the North American Great Lakes, require sustained cold temperatures to sufficiently cool their waters to allow ice to form, as deeper lakes take longer to cool in autumn due to their immense thermal mass.
Larger lakes with a longer fetch — the area over which the wind blows — also tend to freeze later because they are more sensitive to increased wind action breaking up the initial skim of ice on the lake surface.
Why does ice loss matter?
Lake Superior is one of the fastest warming lakes in the world. Since 1867, it has lost over two months of ice cover. By removing the “lid” of ice, evaporation rates can increase in Lake Superior, as well many other lakes across the Northern Hemisphere, further affecting water availability. As lakes transition to becoming ice-free and the physical barrier between the lake surface and the atmosphere is removed, the potential for evaporation to occur year-round increases.
Less ice cover, warmer temperatures, and increased storm events deliver more nutrients to the lakes, leading to widespread summer blue-green algal blooms, also known as cyanobacterial blooms, which were once thought to be implausible in the cold, deep and pristine waters of Lake Superior.
In some lakes, algal blooms are becoming particularly thick, decreasing the amount of sunlight that reaches deeper waters. With less sunlight, photosynthesis is reduced, ultimately leading to a decrease in the concentration of dissolved oxygen available to support aquatic life.
Some fish communities rely on long winters. For example, following short winters, Lake Erie yellow perch produced smaller eggs and weaker young fish that were less likely to survive to adulthood. Fish life stages most sensitive to temperature changes in the earlier part of the open-water season include embryos and spawning adults. Furthermore, an earlier start to summer (i.e., due to earlier ice loss) can cause mismatches in the timing of critical activities, such as spawning and foraging, often with widespread ramifications across the food web.
Reducing greenhouse gases and slowing down climate change is the only way to save lake ice cover, and protect the local ecology and culture that depends on it. (Johanna Korhonen), Author provided
Our research has shown that the global decline of lake ice cover in recent decades can only be explained by increased greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution. There is no magic solution beyond limiting greenhouse gas emissions to slow climate change and ultimately preserve lake ice cover.
For northern communities, ice cover provides a way of life in the winter. Countless Canadian kids have learned how to skate and play hockey at nearby lakes, local ponds, and backyard ice rinks, just as hockey legend, Wayne Gretzky, did in Brantford, Ont. Warmer winters are contributing to shorter outdoor ice hockey and skating seasons.
Ice fishing tournaments are increasingly cancelled, with widespread consequences for local economies. For example, the winter ice fishing season in Lake Winnipeg alone generates over $200 million each year.
The ice ridges on Lake Suwa form an integral part of the community’s spiritual traditions and culture. (Satoe Kasahara), Author provided
Finally, for the Shintos living in Suwa, protecting ice cover is essential to preserving the spiritual traditions maintained by generations of Shinto priests. At current rates of greenhouse gas emissions, climate projections predict that the lake will rarely freeze in the very near future, and following 2040 will never freeze again.
However, slowing climate change and limiting temperature increases below 1.5 C will allow Takeminakata to periodically cross the frozen lake to visit Yasakatome as he has done for centuries.
