By Natalie Bardan

$1 billion from President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will be dedicated to restoring Lake Ontario and the other Great Lakes: Superior, Michigan, Huron and Erie.

The majority of the funding will be used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to clean up 22 of the remaining 25 Great Lakes’ “Areas of Concern” (AOCs) by 2030. AOCs are the most severely degraded sites in the Great Lakes, due to pollution and other factors. 

Eric Hellquist, a self-described “Great Lakes watershed biologist,” is an associate biological science professor at SUNY Oswego who is happy about the new law. 

“It’s very good news,” Hellquist said. “Committing this sort of money to specifically go to these areas of concern, I think, is a very good thing. The pollution problems are very complicated and require tremendous investment of engineering and infrastructure to remediate the damage that’s been done.” 

Hellquist collaborates on research work about plastic pollution washing up on Lake Ontario’s shores. He also teaches a class at SUNY Oswego called ‘Great Lakes Environmental Issues’ with two other professors. 

 “The Great Lakes are under a tremendous amount of stress. Lake Ontario is considered neck and neck; most people consider it a little bit more impacted than all the other Great Lakes, in terms of ecological stressors,” Hellquist said. 

Unregulated industrialization at the western side of  Lake Ontario and agricultural development at the southern and northern ends are the major sources of water pollution according to Hellquist. 

“You look at the lake on any given day and it looks beautiful, and you think ‘oh it’s this pristine ecosystem,’ but it’s not,” Hellquist said. “It’s highly compacted and degraded by urbanization, industrialization and agricultural impacts too, fertilizers and runoff.” 

Dr. Nicholas Sard, an assistant biology professor at SUNY Oswego, studies questions related to the conservation management of fish in the Great Lakes and uses environmental DNA to detect rare species. He shared Hellquist’s enthusiasm for cleanup of the lakes. 

“I absolutely believe it’s necessary,” Sard said of the funding. “It’s no surprise that conservation priorities in the United States and broadly across the world are just broadly underfunded.”

Sard said he anticipates the funding will be used to address AOCs, help regulate water levels in wetlands that border the Great Lakes and restore these wetland habitats. 

Hellquist described the Great Lakes as a stairway, with each lake feeding into the one below it. 

“Lake Ontario is at the bottom of the watershed,” Hellquist said. “Whatever happens above, eventually gets to Lake Ontario.” 

The National Ocean Service defines a watershed as “a land area that channels rainfall and snowmelt to creeks, streams and rivers, and eventually to outflow points such as reservoirs, bays and the ocean.” 

In addition to issues with watershed pollution, Sard said there are Lakewide Action and Management Plan (LAMPs) for each of the Great Lakes that examine and evaluate several water-quality related objectives. 

Lake Ontario continues to struggle with LAMP objectives involving freedom from harmful substances that negatively impact the lake and freedom from aquatic and terrestrial invasive species. 

“I’m sure they’ll be using some of that money to help prevent new invasive species from being established in the Great Lakes,” Sard said. 

Hellquist said the shifting baseline hypothesis, which he explained as a process “where we get used to degradation and think that it’s normal and acceptable, and our baseline shifts,” can be used to understand society’s growing tolerance of increased pollution. 

“It’s always easier to keep pollutants out than to get them out once they arrive,” Hellquist said. 

“I’m really happy to see a strong signal from the Biden administration that the Great Lakes are an incredible resource and that we, particularly the states that border the Great Lakes, really need to keep these bodies of water as pristine as possible,” Sard said. 

Both Sard and Hellquist emphasized the importance of both the Great Lakes cleanup funding and the continued conservation of the Great Lakes in order to prevent the need for continuous restoration and future cleanups.

“The Great Lakes are an invaluable ecosystem and anything that we can do to restore the quality of the Great Lakes through time is a good thing,” Sard said. “It’s so important that we make an effort to not spoil those resources.” 

Kailee Montross | The Oswegonian