New Book – The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History

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Daniel Macfarlane. The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024.

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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 reemerged. At times like these, entranced by this resplendent waterbody, it is hard not to feel like it is my lake.

Later, I came across a diary entry from the writer Anna Brownell Jameson, drafted almost two centuries earlier, that reflects much the same experience and sentiment, though unaided by a perch aloft a condo tower: “This beautiful Lake Ontario! – my lake – for I begin to be in love with it, and look on it as mine! – it changed its hues every moment, the shades of purple and green fleeting over it, now dark, now lustrous, now pale … every now and then a streak of silver light dividing the shades of green: magnificent, tumultuous clouds came rolling round the horizon.”

For anyone who has seen Lake Ontario from an aerial or elevated view – say the CN Tower or the Burlington Skyway – it is hard not to be struck by the water. H2O as far as the eye can see. Folks new to the Great Lakes sometimes ask if there is a tide, or taste it to see if it is saltwater; in their defence, these “sweetwater seas” look like the ocean, the horizon a meeting of water and sky. 

Despite the ocean-like appearance, this is assuredly freshwater – “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 freshwater than all the US Southwest put together.

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 that has characterized the last two centuries of the Canada–United States relationship, promoting cooperation rather than the conflict that tends to result from scarcity.

The border separating Canada from the United States, 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 when it comes to Lake Ontario’s environmental history.

From on high, Lake Ontario appears pristine. Get closer, and things look different: polluted water, fluctuating levels, impoverished biodiversity, imperiled 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.

Lake Ontario’s surface is around 245 feet (76 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” of the Great Lakes in another way still: the extent to which it has been brought low by human degradation. Lake Ontario seems, anecdotally speaking, the least appreciated out of all the Great Lakes.

The Lives of Lake Ontario is a transborder environmental and water history of the easternmost of the Great Lakes. I focus on how human societies and this inland sea have mutually altered and shaped each other. As the book’s title suggests, Lake Ontario supports many different forms of life, human and more-than-human. It has been integral to the political, economic, industrial, and cultural lives of different societies: Indigenous nations, settler Euro-Americans, modern North American countries.

People see the lake in multiple, often contradictory, ways: supplier of sustenance, quencher of thirst, receptacle of waste, font of industry, means of transportation, place of recreation, repository of identity, and so on. Because it has been so altered over time by both human and nonhuman forces, Lake Ontario itself has had, figuratively speaking, a number of different lives. This book seeks to uncover and foreground those many lives.

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Daniel Macfarlane

Daniel is an Associate Professor in the School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. He is an editor for The Otter-La loutre and is part of the NiCHE executive. A transnational environmental historian who focuses on Canadian-American border waters and energy issues, particularly in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin, Daniel is the author or co-editor of six books on topics such as the St. Lawrence Seaway, border waters, IJC, and Niagara Falls. His book "Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations" was published in summer 2023. His newest book is "The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History" (September 2024). He is now working on a book about Lake Michigan and hopes to eventually write a book on the environmental history of the Great Lakes. Website: https://danielmacfarlane.wordpress.com Twitter: @Danny__Mac__

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