The citizens of Toledo,Ohio, have embarked upon their modern summer ritual: stocking up on bottled water. For the second straight year, or an huge algae bloom has settled upon Lake Erie,generating nasty toxins fair where the city of 400000 draws its tap water.
It's a kind of throwback to Toledo's postwar heyday, when the Rust Belt's booming factories deposited phosphorus-laced wastewater into streams that made their way into Lake Erie, and feeding algae growths that rival today's in size. But after the decline of heavy industry and the advent of the Clean Water Act,there's a modern main source of algae-feeding phosphorus into the beleaguered lake: fertilizer runoff from industrial-scale corn and soybean farms. (Background here.) Continue Reading »
Source: motherjones.com