Yesterday at the International Water History Association conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I presented a commentary on three papers delivered in the opening plenary session � "Northern Lakes in the Anthropocene"
Here are the papers I commented on:
Nancy Langston, "Lake Superior, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene"
Nicholas Breyfogle, "The People's Lake: Baikal in the Socialist Anthropocene"
Andy Bruno, "A Polluted Pearl of the North: The Story of Lake Imandra"
And here's my commentary:
When I read these fascinating accounts of three lakes, I was reminded of my time as an undergrad student, majoring in ecology and limnology. Back then, I was sure I was going to be a limnologist. There didn't seem to be a more pleasant way of make a living: spending every summer out on a lake, probing its temperature, conductivity, transparency and other variables, working out its chemical behaviour, the ways of life of fish and plankton, the consequences of acid rain and other human impacts. Apart from the sheer fun of messing around with boats, what must have intrigued me so much at the time was just how well lakes could serve as windows into the workings of nature.
I later moved sideways from science into the history of science. But I still kept my interest in lakes. One of the first people I wrote about was the pioneering ecologist Stephen Forbes, of Illinois. He's especially known now for his 1887 essay, "The Lake as a Microcosm," in which he explained why, in his view, lakes are so interesting. As he saw it, lakes are big enough to contain a whole world of ecological relations � a microcosm, in fact � but they are also small enough that a scientist could aspire to completely grasp their workings.
Forbes was an early instance in a continuing history of lakes being of scientific interest. Raymond Lindeman was another; in the 1940s he used a lake to derive basic ideas about ecosystems, generating concepts about energy and nutrient flows that are still central to ecosystem ecology. In a variety of ways, then, lakes have proven to be not just bodies of water, but also windows through which we can expand our understanding of nature.
And the papers we've heard this morning also demonstrate this, through the history of three lakes: Superior, Indrama, and Baikal. Each of these lakes, two of them among the biggest in the world, tell us interesting things about not just themselves, but about the history of nature, and how we know, use, and value it.
And in particular, these lakes provide insights into a number of bigger questions about the history of people and nature. One question is: Why have lakes proved to be, throughout history, of so much interest, attracting so much attention? Part of the answer must relate to their material histories, including their economic resources, their roles as transportation routes, as sources of energy, and even as waste receptacles.
But the lakes we learned about this morning are not just material things � water and fish to be turned into economic benefit. Each of these lakes also have symbolic and emotional dimensions, as evident in, for example, peoples' appreciation for their wildlife and natural beauty, or for the sense of the sublime that they have sometimes inspired, or simply for the sense of place that they have provided to those living nearby.
In fact, I think this combination of material and emotional dimensions provides a clue to our fascination with lakes: that they so often juxtapose the contrasting practical and symbolic dimensions of environments. And in doing so, they often become the site of conflicts, as when a lake admired for its purity also proves to be a convenient place in which to dump wastes or produce power.
Each of these lakes, as we've heard, form juxtapositions of this kind: bringing together things often considered separately: whether these are particular consequences of human activity, such as climate change, contaminants, and the manipulation of flows of water; or the broader desires to exploit or to preserve. These juxtapositions reflect how these lakes have served as meeting places of diverse human activities and their consequences. In doing so, these lakes have adopted their roles as central stages of the Anthropocene itself.
So in a variety of ways, these papers illustrate how and why lakes are a central concern in the environmental history of the Anthropocene. One way they've done so is by exemplifying the relations between local and global change. In Lake Imandra, for example, we see this through its central role in the development of the Kola Peninsula, as well as through the impacts of fishing, transportation, industrialization, and power production, that connected this local environment to global economic change. And we've seen this as well in Lake Superior: how industries developed along its shores, how the lake has to some extent recovered from the worst damages, but how the lake is also now particularly vulnerable to climate change. And Lake Baikal exhibited its own pattern of development and debate: demands that the lake be industrialized, or even partly drained for power production, but also inspiring calls for its protection that echoed across the Soviet Union.
Overall, then, each of these lakes illustrate how each is distinctive, reflecting its local geography and history, and each is also connected to the rest of the world: whether through human activities and ideas, or through climate change, animal migrations, the movements of contaminants, or other factors.
One optimistic lesson from these histories is that it can be possible, through careful action, for lakes to recover at least partly from some of the worst abuses that humans can impose. But these histories also illustrate how it is most often not possible to recover an original, untouched state. One can, at best, arrive at a new state that may be stable, and even productive and attractive, but can in no way be considered pristine. In this way, by demonstrating the indeterminacy of restoration, these lakes magnify the unavoidable uncertainties of the Anthropocene. They also preserve the potential for future juxtapositions of environmental changes, such as, as we may see in Lake Superior, the intertwining of contaminants, climate change, and invasive species.
These papers, and these lakes, also speak to two classic questions of the Anthropocene, and of environmental history. The first is: "How did we get here?" And the second is: "Where are we going?" Lake Imandra and Lake Baikal provide opportunities to ask the first question, by looking back, reconstructing a history of human and environmental change, in part through evidence that the lakes themselves provide. And Lake Superior provides an opportunity to ask the second question, by looking ahead, and sketching the future of climate change and its consequences.
In their responses to either of these two questions, these papers present histories of the past, or of the future. Lakes are perhaps particularly suitable as the basis for either kind of history because, as these papers show, they are places that themselves bring together the past and the future. In fact, past and future exist side by side in these lakes: in the traces of past occurrences, whether of glaciation or human events; or in the lingering effects of human impacts, such as the presence of persistent contaminants. In effect, they show how lakes can function as time machines, enabling us to travel both backwards and forwards in time, reconstructing past environments, or speculating about future conditions.
These questions about where we have been, and where we are going, take on a particular importance in northern lakes. This is, I think, because lakes in the north so readily embody the unexpected paradoxes and contradictions that typify the Anthropocene. Northern lakes, like northern places generally, are often considered more remote from industry, and so more insulated from our impacts. Lake Superior provides an example: it has often been seen as outside history: distant, unchanging � particularly when compared with the lower Great Lakes, Erie and Ontario, which accumulate the impacts of human activities throughout the Great Lakes. Lake Baikal, once celebrated for its purity, is another example.
But while northern lakes are in a sense more insulated from humans, they are also often more fragile, more readily disrupted. Nutrient-poor, oligotrophic northern lakes, like Lake Superior, can be especially sensitive to nutrients. Fish populations in northern lakes can be easily overfished because they grow so slowly, and take so long to replace themselves.
In part because of this fragility, northern lakes can also exemplify the history of the landscapes that surround them. In northern Canada lakes have served for millennia as sources of food and other essentials for Indigenous communities. More recently, they served as travel routes for explorers and fur traders, opening up the region to colonialism and integration into trading empires. In the last century, lakes became sites for the imposition of industrialization, forming new environmental, economic and cultural relationships, with lakes redefined as transport routes, sources of commodities, and waste disposal sites for mines and other industrial activities.
Lakes became the sites at which industry erased some links between humans and nature, while creating new relationships. Throughout this history, lakes served as openings in the landscape that were essential to imposing a new industrial order. They also became windows through which this transformation and its consequences could be observed.
Since the Second World War the role of northern Canadian lakes as industrial sites has been accentuated by their transformation by hydroelectric dams, often flooding the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples, and releasing toxic substances, especially mercury, which are still contaminating the fish and food supplies of local communities. In this way, lakes became sites where industrial society has interacted with local communities at the most intimate level, through their food. These outcomes illustrate how lakes have juxtaposed traditional indigenous uses of the environment, and the demands of modern industrial society, and so accentuated the impacts of industry on Indigenous societies.
Several decades ago a particularly powerful instance of this theme common to all these papers � that is, the juxtaposition of the local and the global � took place on the shores of the biggest lake in northern Canada, Great Bear Lake. Back in the 1930s, the local Dene people were hired to carry, on their backs, ore from a mine newly established at the lake. They carried this ore along some of their traditional portage routes, to sites where they could load larger boats that would eventually carry the ore to distant places, where it would be refined.
This was hard work, of course, but the most difficult part of the job was what the Dene were not told: that the ore they were carrying was pitchblende, which was then taken and refined into uranium, which was then used in the Manhattan project to construct the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the close of World War II. This pitchblende, of course, was highly radioactive. In the decades that followed, an unknown, but likely substantial number of Dene died of cancer induced by the cargo they carried on their backs. And some of the uranium in those bombs, of course, was later spread far and wide as fallout, ultimately serving, in the opinion of many scientists, to signpost the advent of the Anthropocene. It's a powerful story of environmental injustice, illustrating the consequences of juxtaposing the most powerful technology of the 20th century alongside the far older practices of walking and carrying.
This episode on the shores of Great Bear Lake also illustrates, as do the histories of lakes that we've heard this morning, how northern lakes epitomize the unpredictability of the Anthropocene � the consequences of unexpected combinations of the local and the global, and of the past and the future.
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