What That Glass of Milk is Doing to Your Favorite Lake
Unless we clean up dairy we’ll never clean up our waterways
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If you were to go looking for a magnificent American body of water worthy of an epic end-to-end swim, Lake Champlain might be it. Carved out of high country by glaciers, fed by Green Mountain brooks and icy Adirondack springs, it stretches 120 miles, forming much of the border between New York and Vermont. It provides drinking water for 145,000 people. But in 2004, when clean-water activist Christopher Swain swam the full length, he was immediately confronted by the truth: Lake Champlain was anything but pristine. “I swam through clouds of manure runoff that were kind of slippery and sticky at the same time,” Swain recalls. “I could smell the fertilizer, when it was pouring down rain. There was this lawn-and-garden chemically smell.” In the northern reaches of the lake, he swam through blue-green algae. In the south, he encountered invasive aquatic weeds that entangled him. At another point, he felt a tingling on his leg, “like a cellphone buzzing in my pocket.” It turned out to be a sea lamprey, an eel-like, parasitic fish, trying to suck his blood.
The stink, the animal feces, the algae blooms, even the lamprey were all “things that didn’t belong here but now had the run of the place,” Swain says. Many could be linked to nutrients that leach from farms upstream and fertilizers flowing from fields and lawns, making their way into streams and eventually the lake. This persistent ooze of waste has been steadily rising over the last century, changing the lake’s ecology and stimulating the growth of blue-green algae, which can prove fatal to dogs and toxic to humans. Beach closures have become an annual summer event in part due to the toxic algae, setting up a conflict between those like Swain who prize Champlain for its recreational opportunities and those who make a living by growing food in the watershed.
In today’s political climate, it might be hard to believe that at one time the country was nearly unified in the fight for clean water. In 1972, Congress overrode President Nixon’s veto and passed what is commonly called the Clean Water Act, one of the country’s most significant environmental laws, which continues to shape water quality to this day. Ohio’s Cuyahoga River no longer…
