AND THE LAKE

BY BEN HEWITT

When I was a young boy, my family would spend one or two days each summer at a camp on the shores of Vermont’s Lake Champlain. What I remember most is a jut of rock protruding into the water; I’d stand on its jagged edge and cast into the lake. it was deep and black, and I didn’t catch much of anything beyond the occasional perch. Still, I’d stand there for hours, casting and reeling, casting and reeling, captive to the rhythm of the pole, the whir of the outgoing line, the water lapping at the rock. Unaware that even then—this would have been nearly 35 years ago—Lake Champlain was headed for trouble.

Like many contemporary environmental woes, the troubles with Lake Champlain were long in the making but seemingly sudden in appearance. There are a lot of reasons for Champlain’s challenges, but most revolve around one central fact: The lake is besieged by phosphorus, which creates blooms of cyanobacteria (aka blue-green algae), which in turn contain substances known as cyanotoxins. These toxins have been known to kill fish and dogs and can be extremely harmful to humans if ingested. Additionally, the algae blooms block sunlight from reaching plants at the lake’s bottom, and when the cyanobacteria die off, the process consumes tremendous quantities of oxygen, resulting in the death of aquatic wildlife. The presence of blue-green algae has an economic impact, too: Popular beaches in and around Burlington are frequently closed, and real estate values have been hurt in the areas where outbreaks are most common—because as it turns out, a water view isn’t quite so appealing when the water is covered by a mat of toxic algae.

While the problem of blue-green algae has been understood and documented for decades, only in the past handful of years has it become widespread and acute enough to get public and political attention. This has led to an environment rife with fingerpointing, since the phosphorus at the center of the problem has many sources—fertilizer from lawns, golf courses, and other maintained green spaces; dysfunctional septic systems; wastewater treatment facilities; dairy farms—and not everyone agrees how to distribute the burden of cleaning up the lake and mitigating future runoff. The debate has become so fraught with tension that armed game wardens were dispatched to help maintain order at an October 2017 meeting about water quality issues at Lake Carmi, another Vermont lake that’s experienced high levels of blue-green algae. Because Carmi is close to Lake Champlain and is subject to phosphorus runoff from many of the same sources, it’s considered to be a canary in the coal mine.

To better understand the issues facing Lake Champlain and, I hoped, glean some historical context, I drove to Malletts Bay in Colchester last fall to meet James Ehlers, executive director of Lake Champlain International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the health of the lake that provides drinking water to some 200,000 people.

It was late September, but the region was in the middle of a stretch of summerlike weather; the heat had provoked an outbreak of cyanobacteria, closing numerous beaches in the Burlington area. Ehlers, a fit-looking 49-year-old Navy veteran who answers his phone by barking his surname, had recently announced his candidacy for the 2018 Vermont governor’s race; he was running as a Democrat with a focus on water quality. We met at a small diner near the Malletts Bay boat access and ate omelets while Ehlers delivered an impressive oratory on the past, present, and potential future of the lake he loves.

The first thing to understand, according to Ehlers, is that Lake Cham- plain’s current condition is rooted in centuries of human activity. This began with the arrival of European settlers, who, taking note of the towering forests lining the lake, began sharpening their axes. These were impressive trees— white pine and oak, mostly—and the profusion of logs being floated across the lake turned Burlington into the third-largest lumber port in the country.

By the mid-1830s all the prime trees surrounding the lake had been harvested, which accomplished two things: First, it exposed thousands of acres of land, from which soil eroded into the lake and its tributaries, covering the rocky river bottoms that provided habitat for spawning salmon (it’s rumored that in the late 1700s and early 1800s, local officials would issue warnings about salmon runs, because the jumping fish would spook horses). Second, it allowed the expansion of Vermont’s wool industry, which had been growing steadily over the previous few decades. And while sheep offered a way out of the now-broken forest economy, their incessant grazing exacerbated erosion.

Eventually, competition from other states and countries heralded the demise of the wool industry, and Vermont farmers refocused their affection on the humble bovine, aided by the advent of refrigerated railcars that opened milk markets in Boston and beyond. And this, according to some, was the nail in Lake Champlain’s coffin.

The problem, said Ehlers, lies in the simple fact that the average dairy cow produces approximately 115 pounds of manure a day—which means that the 36,000 cows in Franklin County alone (Franklin serves as a watershed for the lake) are creating over 4 million pounds of phosphorus-rich waste daily. Couple this with the regular application of phosphorus-based fertilizers to feed the crops grown for these cows, and you begin to sense the magnitude of the issue.

“The truth is that nature can deal with the pollution; it’s building a system to deal with it as we speak,” Ehlers said, as he sipped coffee. “It’ll be a swamp, and it’ll trap everything. The mosquitoes will like it, the snowshoe hare will like it, the moose will like it.” He paused. “I just don’t think the humans will like it very much.”

I left my visit with Ehlers feeling a little overwhelmed. The challenges facing Lake Champlain seemed too big and intractable, too entrenched in well-established institutions. It didn’t help that I’d recently learned that the cost to clean up the lake—something mandated by the EPA under the Clean Water Act—was expected to exceed $2 billion over 20 years, and while some of the money would come from the feds,

Vermonters would be on the hook for an estimated $25 million annually. Unsurprisingly, the debate over where this money would come from quickly became contentious. Should all Vermonters be compelled to pay, or only those directly responsible for the pollution? And what of the dairy farmers, already under severe economic stress due to low milk prices? These farms were responsible for an estimated 40 percent of the phosphorus entering the lake; did that mean farmers should shoulder 40 percent of the cleanup? Satisfactory answers to these kinds of questions seemed in short supply.

So I was more than a little intrigued when my friend Luke Persons turned to me one day and said, “I’m going to save Lake Champlain.” We were riding in his truck, an old Dodge diesel that rumbled impressively, so at first

I thought I’d misunderstood. “You’re going to what ?” I asked, lifting my voice above the clamor.

“I’m going to save Lake Champlain!” Luke repeated, louder this time. I turned to look at him. Then he added, “God willin’ the creek don’t rise.” he home of Luke and Terri Persons is a log house situated just off the crest of a small knoll at the edge of Deadman’s Swamp, in the northern Vermont town of Walden. It is not a particularly swampy swamp, and I find it quite beautiful and peaceful—especially as seen from the glassed-in porch off the rear of the house, which is where Luke likes to relax in his recliner, an insulated coffee mug filled with Jim Beam and Coke close at hand.

He was grinning, and I grinned back, and then the truck shifted down a gear to climb a hill, and the cab filled with noise.

Luke is 58. He has a wily mop of gray hair that is slowly receding from his forehead. He also has a gray beard that descends from his face in a frayed “V” shape. He has thick eyebrows and a long nose, and he smiles a lot, by which I mean the man is always smiling. And when he smiles, his eyes squint, but not quite so much that you can’t see the twinkle. In this way—with the beard, the smile, the twinkle, and, let’s be frank, the ample stomach region—he cuts a vaguely Santa Claus–ian figure.

Luke Persons did not graduate from high school. He did not attend college. He was raised on a dairy farm a half dozen miles from here, and when young Luke complained to his mother about the oatmeal she’d serve for dinner when things were tight, she’d just look at him sternly and say that nothing would be tougher. He reads incessantly, favoring long works of historical nonfiction, and particularly those in which the focus is battle. He has been with Terri since he was 21 and she was 16 and pregnant with the first of their two daughters.

To make a living, he drives a dump truck, hauls equipment, does some

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