“An ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure”
- Benjamin Franklin
What do you get when you gather over 700 lake scientists at Lake Tahoe for a week? The Annual North American Lake Management Society Conference! I just spent a week with the best minds from around the globe working to restore and protect lakes. I heard talks about lake restoration techniques and success stories, citizen-led efforts, and the current threats impacting our lakes. If you are a lake lover like me, we are in good hands!
But even though we have scientific techniques for fixing our past mistakes, it’s expensive and time consuming. I listened to many talks where it cost over $5 million dollars to clean up lakes. Some lakes were so filled with sediment and runoff that they needed to be dredged out. Some lakes near cities had raw sewage pumped into them before the Clean Water Act of the 1970s. So now those lakes need to be treated with chemicals to keep the nutrients on the bottom of the lake. We didn’t know what we didn’t know back then.
But today we are still impacting our lakes, and we know what causes it. The impacts are in smaller incremental ways that add up. We’re adding impervious surfaces like roads, driveways, and roofs that increase the amount of rain runoff entering our lakes. We are also removing natural vegetation buffers like trees, shrubs, and grasses. These plants filter the runoff before it reaches the lake. It’s a one-two punch to lake water quality.
Protection is much more cost effective than fixing it later, and we can’t always rely on the lake scientists to fix it for us. We need to be a part of the solution. Keeping our lake lots as natural as we can will save so much money in the long run.
The easiest way to start protecting your favorite lake is to stop mowing all the way down to the lake. It costs nothing. To add plants, shrubs, and trees, contact your local Soil and Water Conservation District for advice and cost-share funding.
Lake scientists like me choose this specific career path out of passion for lakes. I would bet everyone who lives or recreates on a lake does it out of passion for the lake too. Let’s all work together to protect our lakes so we don’t have to pay to fix them later.
Moriya Rufer is a water quality professional with 20 years experience working with lakes in northern Minnesota.
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