Daniel Macfarlane, The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History, Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024. 288 pgs. ISBN 9780228022237.
Reviewed by Sebastian Lundsteen Nielsen
I have never been to Lake Ontario or to Canada, and I have no specific attachment to North America other than through my upbringing saturated by North American cultural hegemony. Although I have never physically been to Lake Ontario, I have encountered it through scholarship on the relationship between Toronto and Lake Ontario.1 More broadly, critical thinking from Canada have been hugely influential to environmental history and the subfields of discard/waste/pollution studies.2
While their work speaks into specific contexts attending to the logics and reasonings embedded in the structures governing pollution, e.g. racial capitalism or settler-colonial, allows a method of “unlikely comparison” to see similarity and differences.3 And here MacFarlane’s contribution provides a space to think across geographical, technical, social, cultural, and political landscapes.
With this disclaimer, I aim to give the reader a sense of the perspective from which I have read and engaged with Daniel MacFarlane’s monograph, The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History. Over the past decade, MacFarlane has built an impressive oeuvre exploring the fluid borders between the U.S. and Canada through the lenses of environmental, energy, and water histories. The Lives of Lake Ontario is the latest addition to this body of work, focusing on the relationship between the lake and its inhabitants.
But how does one write about a vast temporal and spatial entity given the various ontological and epistemological implications of analytical entry points? Lake Ontario is not easily categorized and confined, but constantly in motion: seeping and leaking, dissolving, vaporizing, transgressing borders, disappearing and returning. Furthermore, the different ways of knowing the Lake depend on one’s situatedness – in a kayak or from a high altitude, Canadian or US territory, Indigenous or settler colonial, scientific or environmentalist. MacFarlane tackles this challenge by approaching Lake Ontario from multiple angles.
The introduction provides key information, illuminating the physical attributions, the tributaries and watersheds, atmospheric impacts, political jurisdictions and population. The first chapter, “Glaciers and Empires,” presents a deep history before proceeding by introducing various Indigenous peoples and their relationships to the environment. It ends by touching on how settler-colonial presence disrupted the area. The second chapter examines the ecological consequences of colonization – a form of terraforming in which the thirst for resources and drive for optimization radically transformed the environment and destructive effects ripple. The next chapters describe the built environments and infrastructures, such as ship development, canals, the rise of industrial activity, including hydro power plants, and the added ecological degradation (p. 69).
After providing a solid foundation in the first half of the book, the second part vividly displays how the increasing urge to manage the environment and control resources was supported by technological and scientific expertise, creating fantasies of unbounded resources. This perspective, embodied in energy mega-projects, mirrored a Promethean hubris – an unhinged commitment to economic growth and energy abundance engendering new paradigms considering the scale and impact resource extraction. The megaprojects “generated a broader belief in the efficacy of government intervention, and transnational co-operation (…) to provide the expertise and financial resources to make these engineering megaprojects happen” (p. 110). The scale of these megaprojects had significant impacts on Lake Ontario and those who lived nearby, directly affecting First Nations reserves, while turning entire areas into sacrifice zones as a result of extensive flooding (pp. 121–122).
In chapter 7 “Pollution and Protection,” MacFarlane presents a long-term perspective on pollution and the regulatory practices aimed at managing Lake Ontario. The growth and acceleration of industrial activities intensified pre-existing environmental issues stemming from colonialism and early industrialization. Through the history of the International Joint Commission’s (IJC) efforts to address the environmental degradation of Lake Ontario, MacFarlane highlights how consumer society and booming industries contributed to the accumulation of waste dumped into the lake. However, regulatory measures often prioritized certain businesses by allowing pollution within certain limits rather than preventing it altogether (p. 146). Following Liboiron et al. who notes that “toxic harm can be understood as the contravention of order at one scale and the reproduction of order at another” (emphasis in the original)[4], water as a disposal site for toxic waste allowed the continuation of industrial production, which came at the expense of those who lived near the lake or depended on it.
Throughout the chapter, MacFarlane illuminates how the management of pollution in Lake Ontario was marked by functionalist logics that privileged businesses. Consequently it isolated the symptom from the cause leading to inadequate understandings of pollution in Lake Ontario through “assimilative capacities” and “ecosystem approaches” (150-153). Despite a declensionist environmental narrative, MacFarlane finds fragments of hope, noting that recent regulations are promising but lack adequate support and funding. He concludes with a call for “stronger transnational commitment and a societal prioritization of environmental and human health over economic growth,” while acknowledging that this remains far from reality (p. 164).
While the accumulation of industrial harm can feel inevitable, potentially leading to a sense of resignation, chapter 8 “Levels and Regulation,” powerfully illustrates the challenges of creating a “predictable and orderly aquatic environment” (p. 167). MacFarlane argues that Lake Ontario cannot be easily divided into neat categories (p. 171), and that changes in one location inevitably have consequences elsewhere. He notes that fluctuating water levels are a contentious issue, not only due to the intensifying impacts of climate change but also because regulation cannot serve all interests.
Throughout the book, Lake Ontario is depicted as both resilient and fragile. In his conclusion, MacFarlane reiterates this duality, pointing to the ways in which some lives—both human and non-human— thrives, while others are destroyed. Although I appreciate MacFarlane’s efforts to offer a hopeful outlook and integrate alternative ways of knowing and relating to the environment, I would have appreciated a more critical reflection. For instance, a closer examination of themes introduced in earlier chapters might add depth to statements like “We are the victims of our own success in some ways” (p.189), without specifying who this “we” might be and what is deemed “successful.”
Overall, the book offers a comprehensive environmental history of Lake Ontario, which I found insightful. Readers interested in national and regional history may find it informative, while scholars interested in broader environmental history will likely appreciate its examination of the lake’s history, ecology, industrialization, and environmental impact over time—though there is room for additional critical analysis.
Feature Image: NASA MODIS satellite image of Lake Ontario. Accessed November 14, 2024.
Notes
1 Michelle Murphy has written about Toronto and Lake Ontario and living-being in the ongoing aftermath of chemical pollution. Murphy shows how water, and thus life, has been severely disrupted by industrially produced chemicals, exposure is deeply entrenched in unjust structures in “Alterlife and Decelonial Relations” and “Re-imagining Chemicals with and against technoscience” while Astrida Neimanis have written about contamination, queer multispecies erotics and places we fall in love with in “Bad Ecosex at Windmere Basin.” See: Michelle Murphy, “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations,” Cultural Anthropology 32 (4)(2017): 494–503; Michelle Murphy, “Reimagining Chemicals, With and Against Technoscience,” in Reactivating Elements, edited by Dimitris Papadopoulos, María Puig de la Bellacasa, and Natasha Myers, Duke University Press, 2022: 257–79; Michelle Murphy, “Chemical Futures and Environmental Data Justice,” UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies 21 (October 2022):45–48; Astrida Neimanis, “Toxic Erotics and Bad Ecosex at Windermere Basin,” Environmental Humanities 14 (3)(2022): 699–717.
2 Here I am thinking about Max Liboiron, Eve Tuck, and Zoe Todd.
3 Anand, Nikhil, Bethany Wiggin, Lalitha Kamath, and Pranjal Deekshit. “Enduring Harm: Unlikely Comparisons, Slow Violence and the Administration of Urban Injustice,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 46, no. 4 (July 2022): 651–59.
4 Liboiron, Max, Manuel Tironi, and Nerea Calvillo. 2018. “Toxic Politics: Acting in a Permanently Polluted World.” Social Studies of Science 48 (3): 335.
Sebastian Lundsteen
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- Review of Macfarlane, The Lives of Lake Ontario - November 25, 2024