Climate Change, Contaminants, and the Future of Lake Superior

Lake Superior is one of the fastest warming lakes in the world, leading to enormous changes in its ecosystems and human communities. How might changing climates affect the mobilization of contaminants in the Lake Superior basin? How might those contaminants affect resiliency toward climate change? And what can we do about it?

The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements

By the 1960s, the failures of research and cooperative pragmatism to control Great Lakes pollution were becoming painfully evident. In 1972 Canada and the United States signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. The agreement was groundbreaking in its focus on cleaning up existing pollution and preventing new pollutants, but the International Joint Commission has no authority to force the two nations to implement recommendations. Therefore, when Canada or the United States refuses to abide by the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (in its various revisions), very little happens in response—besides calls for more research.

Mining, Toxics, and Environmental Justice for the Anishinaabe

In 2011, a company named Gogebic Taconite (GTAC) formed in order to develop the largest open-pit mine in the world—just upstream of the Bad River Band’s reservation on Lake Superior. Owned by Cline Resources Development (a company largely focused on coal), GTAC announced that, even without experience in iron mining, it would mine and process Wisconsin’s taconite ore body to take advantage of Asia’s building and steel commodities boom. The mine would have been sited just upstream of the reservation boundary, and the waters flowing out of the mine site would have contaminated water, fish, and Indigenous communities living downstream. After a multi-year battle, the tribe managed to stop the mine.

The Postwar Pollution Boom

For fifty years, paper towns along Lake Superior boomed: Marathon, Terrace Bay, Thunder Bay, Ontonagon, Munising. But the human and environmental costs of intensive pulp production began to emerge soon after World War II. Anishinaabe communities were displaced from forests, suffering intense poverty and social displacement. First Nations communities in Grassy Narrows, Ontario, suffered mercury poisoning from the chlor-alkali plants needed for paper bleaching. Dioxin and PCBs created poison legacies that still confound the region. The paper and pulp industry brought three decades of economic growth that benefited many—but certainly not all—of the people living in the Lake Superior basin. Yet the pollution legacies from that boom era have persisted far longer than the economic benefits.

Mining Pollution Debates, 1950s Through the 1970s

By the late 1950s, the taconite boom that Reserve Mining Company stimulated was having a profound effect on the region’s economy, just as the pulp and paper boom had stimulated the Canadian economy along Lake Superior. Towns thrived; new cars filled the parking lots where well-paid union workers toiled in the taconite facilities. Schools improved, funded by abundant tax receipts. Harms to the lake from the taconite boom were subtle and hard to pin down whereas the benefits were clear to see: jobs for miners and economic development for the region. Throughout the 1950s, as evidence accumulated that taconite was causing pollution problems, state agencies continued to insist that the industry was harmless. Only after scientists found that asbestos had been mobilized from taconite disposal into the drinking water and bodies of urban residents distant from the disposal site did the federal and state governments question the risks from taconite.

Ecological History of the Lake Superior Basin

The cumulative ecological changes from the fur trade, mining, logging, and farming on Lake Superior were profound. While contemporary observers understood that these rapid changes might cause problems, it was rare to recognize that Lake Superior’s geological context and history made the watershed particularly vulnerable to sudden ecological change. After the retreat of the ice, the Canadian Shield’s thin soils and high resistance of its rocks to weathering had ensured that Lake Superior was biologically unproductive and slow to accumulate sediments. Lake Superior’s geographic context meant that its waters were very cold, and that coldness shaped its ecology in profound ways. Lake Superior’s enormous size, which made planners hope that dilution might be the solution to pollution, actually worked against them. Lake Superior is large enough and cold enough that when thermal bars form, as mentioned above, they hold pollution where people and fish are more likely to encounter it.

The Mysteries of Toxaphene and Toxic Fish

Toxaphene offers a case study on the history of toxic contamination in Lake Superior fish. How did chemicals such as toxaphene make their way into fish in the postwar era? How did governments and communities around the Great Lakes struggle to comprehend and then control these toxics? This chapter explores the intersection of human culture with the pollutants that have made their way into water bodies — and the bodies of fish and the people who eat those fish — everywhere. Fish is a healthy source of protein that we’re encouraged to eat, and eating fish is also of great cultural significance to people, particularly tribal communities, throughout the Great Lakes region. But the potential toxicity of fish today forces people to make difficult trade-offs: How much fish do you eat when it’s culturally important? How much do you eat when you’re pregnant?

Taconite and the Fight over Reserve Mining Company

Iron was a key component of steel, and steel was essential for industrial and military purposes. Postwar concerns about iron depletion led American mining interests to promote technologies and tax incentives to exploit taconite ore bodies. As the Reserve Mining case shows, taconite required expensive new processing technologies to be profitable, while creating new environmental consequences, particularly concerning finely ground tailings and the use of water. As taconite iron ore mining boomed in the Lake Superior basin in the three decades after World War II, faith in cooperative pragmatism began to clash with new industrial developments and new understandings of pollution mobility.

Industrializing the Forests, 1870s to 1930s

How did the pulp and paper industry—an industry that was intended to solve rather than create environmental problems in the Lake Superior basin—become the source of the region’s greatest pollution problems? As trees grew back on cutover lands, a new industry developed to exploit them. Aquatic pollution from the industry created a new set of pollution challenges that soon dwarfed the conservation problems presented by the lumber industry. Pulp mills and regulators tried to manage pollution from growing industries, but their models did not account for the complexity of nearshore habitats, limnological conditions, bumpy shore bottoms, shoals that catch currents carrying sediments, or fish with minds of their own.