Onondaga Lake: The Most Sacred, Then the Most Polluted
Near Syracuse, New York
Onondaga Lake sits just northwest of the city, a few miles long, shallow, rimmed by industrial shoreline. To the Onondaga Nation, it is one of the most sacred places on this continent. This is where the Peacemaker came to present the Great Law of Peace. This is the lake where the Grand Council's spiritual history began.
For most of the twentieth century, it was also the most polluted lake in the United States.
The degradation started with the salt industry, which fouled the lake's shores and tributaries through the nineteenth century. Then, in the early eighteen eighties, the Solvay Process Company staked out the eastern shore to manufacture soda ash. The Solvay process generated roughly fifty percent more waste material than product. The most convenient place to dump it was directly along the lakeshore, where the company built sprawling waste beds that still define the landscape.
In nineteen forty-six, Allied Chemical, which had absorbed the Solvay Process Company, began a mercury cell production process at its plant on the lake's south shore. Between nineteen forty-six and nineteen seventy, one hundred sixty-five thousand pounds of mercury were discharged into Onondaga Lake. The fish died. The swimming beaches closed. By the nineteen eighties, fewer than nine species of fish survived in the water.
The lake was designated a federal Superfund site in nineteen ninety-four. After years of legal proceedings, Honeywell International, which had inherited Allied Chemical's liabilities, agreed in two thousand seven to a four-hundred-fifty-million-dollar cleanup: dredging more than two million cubic yards of lake bottom, capping four hundred seventy-five acres of contaminated sediment. Dredging was completed in twenty fourteen.
Today the lake holds more than sixty fish species. The Onondaga Nation, which filed its own land rights action against New York State in two thousand five asserting jurisdiction over their traditional territory including the lake, lost that case in federal court in two thousand ten. The court ruled that restoring the Nation's rights would be, in the court's words, too disruptive to the people of New York. The lake is cleaner now than it has been in a century. The Nation that considers it sacred still does not own its shore.
