7/21/97

KUFM/KGPR

T. M. Power

Playing with the Future of Flathead Lake

Any one who has visited Flathead Lake this summer is aware of the dramatic increase in the murkiness of the water and the slime of algae clinging to the shoreline and docks. While our chief rival among western mountain lakes, Lake Tahoe, seems to have halted the decline in water depth clarity at around 70 feet, this summer Flathead Lake ‘s clarity seemed to be plummeting towards a dozen and a half feet or less.

This is very serious business. Flathead Lake is both an irreplaceable natural jewel and at the center of one of the most dynamic regions of the Montana economy. The Flathead Valley is not only the fourth largest regional economy in the state but one of the fastest growing, third behind only the Bitterroot and Bozeman areas. As with both of these other areas, it is the Flathead Valley’s natural amenities that are energizing this economic growth. In that sense, threatening Flathead Lake not only risks a central part of Montana’s natural heritage but also threatens our economic vitality.

Although part of this year’s problems is tied to unusual weather patterns, the long term culprits behind Flathead Lake’s declining water quality are human carelessness and human error.

The carelessness is associated with the ongoing flow of nutrients into the lake as a result of human activities on the surrounding landscape. Although upgraded sewage treatment plants in the Flathead have reduced the nutrient loads from that source from 17 percent to less than 2 percent, about 30 percent of the nutrients reaching the lake still come from human activities. These include the impact of logging and lumber road building, the flow of agricultural fertilizers and wastes, and the diffused impacts from individual residences and businesses.

The human error involved in the Flathead Lake water quality saga is tied to the introduction of the opossum shrimp into the Flathead Lake watershed by the Montana Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks. The opossum shrimp were intended to provide feed for the kokanee salmon in Whitefish and Swan Lakes. Unfortunately, when the shrimp migrated into Flathead Lake they did the opposite, they destroyed the kokanee salmons food and, with it, the Flathead’s kokanee fishery. A multi-million dollar, five year effort to re-establish that fishery has had to be abandoned as hopeless. As those opossum shrimp continue to gobble up the zooplankton that once fed the kokanee, the larger zooplankton that fed on the algae and helped keep the lake algae population under control, are disappearing too. Hence the blooming algae.

The moral of this sad story is not encouraging. First, we should keep in mind this scientist-initiated ecosystem catastrophe as we listen to the ongoing enthusiastic promotion of "ecosystem management" by the US Forest Service and the timber industry. We are being told that nature cannot take care of itself anymore; that human management is needed over almost every single acre of our forested mountains. The implicit assumption is that we know enough about ecosystems that we can manage them towards human objectives. This arrogant assumption is what led to the introduction of the opossum shrimp into the Flathead watershed. Clearly, we do not know enough to engage in these types of manipulations. We should approach ecosystems primarily with humility and caution rather than with an arrogant activism.

The second moral of the sad Flathead Lake story is that we have about run out of easy targets for environmental regulation, namely large industrial plants, municipal sewage systems, etc. The remaining large sources of pollution are the actions taken by you and me and the small businesses we work for. Bringing these diffused sources of pollution under control is going to take a different frame of mind. We are going to have to begin to regulate ourselves and our own behavior. But that is a touchy business. None of us want more and more government policing of our lives and economic activities. Yet we do have to collectively change how we are behaving. And we have to do it relatively quickly. We know already that just passing more laws and regulations will not work, and besides, the political tone of the times would not allow them to be passed anyway. That means we have to work locally to change behavior and incentives, reinforcing that, where necessary, with legal structures. A new definition of appropriate private behavior has to be developed and informally, as well as formally, enforced. That will be difficult, but not impossible. Over the last several decades, our individual and collective sense of how we should be treating the environment has changed significantly. We simply need to accelerate that in the Flathead with analysis, information, and volunteer activity so that we all know how it is we are directly contributing to the damage being done to this crown jewel of the vast mountain ecosystem that makes up northwest Montana. We cannot undo our past mistakes; there is no excuse, however, for continuing in the environmental carelessness that threatens to turn Flathead Lake into a slimy, murky mess.