Mitigation, Adaptation and Water Thinking
About Carrie Saxifrage’s new book The Big Swim, Maude Barlow wrote, “Trying to understand what we are doing to the planet based solely upon facts and statistics fails to engage the heart, where all true commitment forms. Carrie Saxifrage knows that real change comes from the head and the heart working together and gently pulls us along on her journey to a deeper place of understanding.”
Carrie will read from The Big Swim on April 4, 7 pm at McNally Robinson Bookstore. Her schedule for readings in other cities is at tinyurl.com/kjxxwxfFirst, let’s celebrate water. Nothing is more satisfying than a drink when you are dehydrated, how water spreads across the tongue and to the sides of the mouth, the way in which the sensation of wetness gives way to a satisfaction that in that thirsty moment is better than anything else you could imagine. Our bodies recognize water for what it is: a necessity, a birth right. Humans aren’t alone in this. Ecosystems lie at the heart of the world’s water systems, full of diverse and intricate lives. Water is everyone’s birthright, everyone’s life force, on this uniquely watery planet.
Some experts note, “Climate mitigation is about carbon and climate adaptation is about water.” We must mitigate carbon, which means substantially reducing fossil fuels, and fast. But the reality is that we will have a lot of adapting to do – managing water – no matter how strongly we mitigate.
In Canada, we are relatively lucky when it comes to water because there are enormous threats to this birthright worldwide: drought, the depletion of ancient aquifers, inequitable water distribution, the attempts of corporations to control access, pollution, and immense water withdrawals for industry, including agriculture. Many people already live with water scarcity: 1.6 billion, according to the World Bank. The number is expected to rise to 2.8 billion by 2025.
But despite being the second most water rich nation in the world, some people in Canada lack safe drinking water. The Shoal Lake 40 First Nation has lived with a boil water advisory for 17 years, the result of infrastructure to supply clean water to the City of Winnipeg. Such advisories are in effect for over 1,200 Canadian communities.
As climate change intensifies threats to water supplies, societies and ecosystems get destabilized. A recent study links Syria’s civil war, which spawned the Islamic State, to a four year drought. Civil unrest is erupting over water shortages in major cities in Brazil, such as Sao Paulo. Even Kenya, a relatively stable African government, is stretched by drought and could fail. People are only a part of the suffering. Many lineages from the magnificent and intricate diversity of life on Earth will go extinct. The 2014 report by the International Panel on Climate Change notes that major extinction events occurred in the past during slower rates of climate change then presently underway and additional stressors, such as habitat fragmentation, are now at play.
A necessary psychological change is underway as people come to grips with reality: climate change is irrefutable, caused by fossil fuels and we must stop using them to prevent suffering on an even more massive scale. Most experts see an effective price on carbon as the way to spur enough renewable energy development to save us, and this should be our top political priority. Consider this: all the technology we need for a stable future exists. It’s already being implemented and will be built at the pace we need as soon as we have an effective price on carbon. We must implement this tool on a global scale to mitigate carbon.
Adaptation and water, on the other hand, play out on the local level. Water management is in every community’s future. Fortunately, water can inspire us. We can find places where our engagement builds connections and feels meaningful. Part of adaptation is cultivating our relationship with water so that we will protect it, and protect ourselves from it, near our homes.
Lakes are an appealing place to do this. Many of us have a lake we love, and many of those lakes now host recurring algal blooms, the result of nutrient loading and changing weather. We can work to keep our lakes drinkable and swimmable. It feels good to take steps, even small steps, to protect water, especially bodies of water that we love. Annabel Slaight helped found Ladies of the Lake and the Ontario Water Center to look after Lake Simcoe. She put it this way: “If you don’t love something, and have the opportunities to love it, you won’t look after it and won’t demand that it be looked after.”
Canadian lakes were a revelation to me when I first moved here two decades ago: the clear greenish water shafted with light, the bubbles trailing from my fingertips and the water’s gentle hold. Two lakes on Cortes Island, BC are in the center of the community and I use them to get places. Friends tell stories about me stripping down to swim home from parties and meetings. After every swim, I’ve emerged cooler, more collected and happier person, grateful to my watery friend and therapist. Last spring the lakes at the center of our community on Cortes Island, BC had their first algae bloom. The water turned brown and smelly. The fish died. No one knew if it was safe to swim.
Nearly every province has many lakes that have had recent algal blooms. To name a very few: in BC, Elk Lake near Victoria and St. Mary’s Lake on Salt Spring Island; in New Brunswick, Irishtown Reservoir and Lake Utopia; in Manitoba, Lake Winnipeg and Dauphin Lake; in Nova Scotia, Lake Torment and Lake Ainslie; in Alberta, Lac Ste. Anne and Pigeon Lake; in Saskatchewan, Lac la Loche and Boundary Reservoir; in Ontario, Lake Ontario and Three Mile Lake.
No list is complete without poor Lake Erie, once the poster lake for successful clean up. The trend goes beyond Canada: A recent study in Europe and North America found a 60% increase in algal blooms in low elevation lakes over the last two hundred years.
According to David Trew of North Saskatchewan Watershed Society, each lake is unique in its particular combination of characteristics. Some, like the lakes in the Alberta and Saskatchewan prairies, have naturally high internal nutrient loads from the fertile soil surrounding them. Alpine lakes, and the ones on the Canadian Shield, do not. It’s natural for lakes to “age” – to gradually become eutrophic, with less oxygen and more plants, until they become meadows. The primary driver of premature eutrophication is nutrient flows, especially phosphorus, with nitrogen also playing a role. These nutrients come from farms, lawns, storm water, septic systems, golf courses, logging and development along the shoreline.
Each lake has its own unique community of algae and bacteria. This helps explain why a lake near Victoria BC bloomed in December, a New Brunswick lake bloomed in September, my Cortes Lake bloomed in May and many if not most lakes bloom in July.
The shape and depth of the lake, matters. Shallow lakes warm quickly and wind can easily suspend the nutrients at the bottom. Some lakes have strong in and outflows, so excess nutrients get flushed through. Others move slowly or not at all.
Climate change increases nutrient flows with floods and intense rainfall. Longer periods of no ice and warm waters favor algal blooms. So do wetter springs and longer, drier summers. Warmer temperatures make the algae more efficient at grabbing nitrogen out of the atmosphere. According to Alyre Chiasson, of University of Moncton, such conditions can put vulnerable lakes over the edge.
The lake conditions created by climate change favor cyanobacteria, or blue green algae. For the record, cyanobacteria spent billions of years as the only life form on Earth, making the oxygen that made us and other complex life forms possible. But in this story, they’re the villain. Some of them, some of the time, create toxins that damage the liver and nervous system, cause skin irritation, gastroenteritis and/or respiratory distress. Chronic, low dose exposures can cause liver tumors and endocrine disruption. Puppies mucking at lake edges are especially vulnerable.
With the right conditions, cyanobacteria reproduce explosively and create toxins. When this happened in Lake Erie in 2014, Toledo, Ohio’s water system for 500,000 residents was shut down. The toxins can only be removed by charcoal filtration and chlorination. Boiling can force the bacteria to release more toxins. Out of caution, municipalities close water bodies to drinking and recreation when any kind of cyanobacteria is present.
It’s hard to remedy algae blooms once they really take hold. According to Vicky Burns of the Save Lake Winnipeg project, phosphorus gets trapped in sediment where it remains until the lake conditions are suitable for a bloom. Lakes with strong flows through them have a better chance of recovery. But there are no big success stories out there. Annabel Slaight told me, “I used to think you could fix a lake. I don’t think so anymore. All you can do is create the conditions in which a lake can heal itself.”
In some places (Australia, Western Europe), a substance called Phoslock has been used to permanently bind phosphorus in lakes. It has been tried in Lake Simcoe, ON and Irishtown Resevoir, NB. In Canada, there’s reluctance to treat the symptom and not the cause.
The increasingly widespread nature of algae blooms makes it a national matter. According to Vicky Burns of Lake Winnipeg, voluntary action is important but not enough. We need regulations and legislation that set standards for the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen in sewage effluent, agricultural run-off, industrial run-off and other sources. “We have a very long way to go before we achieve that,” she wrote. “One example is that that federal government is rolling out new sewage treatment regulations and there is no reference in them to phosphorus.” According to David Trew of North Lake Saskatchewan, nutrient sources to lakes arising from land management and septic systems have fallen through the legislative cracks.
The citizen stewards and scientists I spoke with all gave the same solution for individual lakes: stop loading the lake with phosphates. They recommend a team approach: scientists, local and provincial governments and citizens. According to David Trew, the task in its simplest terms is to: 1) understand the quantity and source of nutrient loads; 2) create a “phosphorus budget”; and 3) create and implement a watershed management plan to meet that budget.
The 2014 Sturgeon Lake Management Plan on the Kawartha Conservation web site provides a model in terms of process and content. The plan was funded by the local municipality. The first three years of its development were dedicated to science-based assessments of the lake and its watershed and capturing the key values of stakeholders. The plan was crafted in the fourth year, with input from both a science and a community panel. It links specific measures to its phosphorus targets, such as conducting 10 to 20 agricultural improvement projects each year (things like streamside vegetation buffers and improving manure storage and fertilizer application) to achieve a phosphorus loading target of 2,000 kg/year. It also focusses on the municipal Official Plan to strengthen land use planning through measures such as development setbacks and by-laws to enhance shore line vegetation and retain lake side forests.
For those who don’t love management plan meetings, here’s the best thing about lake stewardship: it requires lots of data, and collecting data means canoeing around in all kinds of weather with old and new friends, with plastic bottles and a secchi disc (picture a heavy record album divided in quarters that are painted black and white so when you drop it over the side of the canoe you can still see it for awhile). That’s my favorite kind of contribution, the one that takes me out there to the place I love, where I get to see which ducks are on the lake that week and maybe a muskrat or a beaver. The provinces have lake experts who can advise citizen samplers and there are province-wide lake stewardship groups to provide guidance as well.
Lake stewardship is a community builder, because communities rally for their beloved lakes. Last summer on Cortes Island, we held a fund raiser to help pay for testing the lake, the “First Ever Nine Lake Swim.” Four of us swam every lake on the island, about six miles altogether. We were greeted by the community at the end of it and had a feast at the restaurant up the hill. Children put on the puppet show they had worked on all day in which the spirit of the lakes arose from beneath a blue table cloth to rap to us about phosphates, and lake creatures pled for us to be more careful. We raised $13,000 for lake sampling and solutions. The Ontario Water Centre is a large scale model for a potent combination of fun, science, planning and action.
I’m one of those who avoid meetings, but I’ll be a part of the watershed planning ones for my lakes. Researching this article has brought me around: lakes are very specific beings with very specific needs and creating the conditions for ours to heal will require both evidence and planning. It’s also a good exercise to establish strong community-government working groups in preparation for the more difficult adaptation issues that may arise in the future. Annabel Sleight of Lake Simcoe assures me that even meetings can build comradery.
The Ontario Water Centre Website mentions “water thinking,” so I asked Annabel about this. She described water thinking as remembering water as you live, appreciating it, and learning to act like it, to flow through the cracks when there’s an obstacle. The Chippewas of Georgina Island have influenced her. “They see a different relationship to nature,” she told me. “It’s less like a responsibility to be stewards, as if that is some kind of obligation of life, and more like being in in tune with nature and part of the natural system. That way you draw strength from it. I draw strength from water all the time.”
Contributor: Carrie Saxifrage, Author of The Big Swim