Steven B. Zwickel
26 July 1997
"I merely advise!" is what I tell the students working on the Wisconsin Engineer magazine. After all, I am just the Faculty Advisor.
OK, sometimes I meddle a bit, but only when I want to get the staff to make a decision they have been avoiding for a while.
From time to time, I offer up an idea for an article that I think might interest our readers. When a topic catches my fancy, I try to interest the writers in it: sometimes they like my ideas, sometimes they don't. I tried to interest them in a great story about algae, but they turned up their noses at it. Since no one else wanted to write it, so I decided to write it myself.
A few months ago (before the staff cleaned up the office) I was putting away some old copies of the Wisconsin Engineer when I came across the issue that would have been out on the day I was born. In it, Charles E. Manske, CE '50, wrote an article that semester on "Those Pesky Algae" in which he discusses how the Madison lakes fill up with smelly, slimy micro-organisms every summer.
One section of Manske's 1949 article grabbed my attention:
"Offensive odors from Lake Mendota have been known to occur as early as the 1850's. At one time during that period the stench became so obnoxious that several residents of Langdon Street were forced to move."
Fast-forward to July, 1997, where the Wisconsin State Journal has just run a three-part series on the algae "problem" and the plans that are being made for cleaning up the lakes. Something is wrong with this picture.
I am not a limnologist (scientist who studies the properties of lakes and ponds), but there is a gap in the logic here. The lakes have been smelly and choked with algae since before Europeans settled here. The algae grew long before pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers even existed. The algae are the original natives to these lakes—they belong here and it is we who are the intruders.
The lakes are supposed to be smelly and gooey. The idea that we should be doing something to "clean them up" goes against nature. Why do we spend millions of dollars (The Lake Mendota Priority Watershed Project will cost $12 million over a 10-year period. Wisconsin State Journal, Mon., July 14, 1997; p. 1B) to change the way Mother Nature does things? The answer is primarily economic, but asking how to deal with lake algae also raises issues of aesthetics and quality of life.
Property values and taxes are the economic factors here. ( "Abundant algae is smelly plague" Frank Hutchins, Wisconsin State Journal, Mon., July 14, 1997; p. 1B). According to the Wisconsin State Journal, an economist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has estimated that the value of lakefront property would increase by $2.6 million if the algae were exterminated and the lakes were "cleaned up." People who own property on the lakes pay higher taxes for the privilege of being near the water. Therefore, the argument goes, they deserve to have lake weeds cut and algae controlled at public expense.
Manske notes that "work is being done by the mechanical engineering department on the development of machinery for the removal of weeds from the lake after cutting." Wisconsin Engineer, Nov. 1949 p.26
The algae grow in such abundance, the experts tell us, because they feed on chemical runoff from Dane County farms. Efforts have been underway for years to get the farmers to use less fertilizer and to be more diligent about controlling runoff. In 1949, Manske noted that studies of run-off had been done and that researchers were seeking ways to solve the "problem" of lake algae. All these efforts to clean up the lakes over the past 50 years have resulted in failure.
I have a suggestion. Let's try leaving the natural ecology of the lakes alone and see what happens. Let's stop banging our heads against the wall and stop flushing our tax dollars down the storm sewers. Call off the DNR and give back control over the Madison lakes to Mother Nature. Let her do what she does best, restore the balance among all living things. The water may become clearer, which would be great. Or, it could stay the way it is, in which case we have lost nothing.
NOTE: DNR in medical parlance stands for "do not resuscitate"—curiously similar to what I am suggesting be done with the lakes!
There is a possibility that the lakes, left to their own, may become so overgrown and choked with algae and weeds that they "die." This would be unfortunate, but death is also part of life and we ought to be mature enough to accept this. Death is probably more "natural" than the endless cycle of cutting, spraying, and treatment with chemicals that the lakes are now subject to.
What about the property owners? They spent (and continue to spend) a lot of money to live next to the lakes. Don't they deserve nice clean water for swimming, boating, fishing, etc? People who choose to live next to a lake or a river, like those who live on a mountainside, in a river valley, or in a desert, have no right to complain when the lake, river, mountain, or desert acts like a lake, river, hill, or desert. From time to time, disaster strikes and insurance companies and government agencies dole out money to right nature's wrongs.
Indeed, it sometimes seems that, if it were not for handing out disaster aid and getting into a chopper to fly over the latest flood, fire, quake, or drought for a photo op, Congress and the President wouldn't have much to do. But, let those who live by the lakes make peace with Mother Nature as she is and forego pathetic attempts to change her. The smell and the slime go along with the property—it's a package deal and you can't order parts separately. (And, of course, all the millions of dollars that are not spent on cleaning up the algae could be passed along to lakefront property owners as a form of tax relief.)
Return stewardship of the Madison lakes to Mother Nature and trust her to do the right thing. It is time for us to grow up and let algae be algae.
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