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SUSTAINABILITY I Jesus College Annual Report 2022
Fate of “our sea”: climate change and the Mediterranean John Cornwell My interest in the state of the Mediterranean, subject of our April 2022 Science & Human Dimension Project workshop, and scheduled conference series for 2023 (see SHDP Report on pages 78-81), was originally roused by an environmental disaster 4,500 miles from the Mediterranean – in North America. Some years ago, flying down towards Toronto airport, I had a view from the aircraft window over Ontario’s great lake, shimmering blue and silver with stretches of golden beaches. In the afternoon fall light the scene was reminiscent of a Mediterranean seascape and beaches. How fortunate, I thought, for the millions of Americans and Canadians living within the watershed of the lake and its 700-mile shoreline shared by the province of Ontario and upstate New York. Yet I was soon to discover that the lake was contaminated. More disturbing, scientists were drawing parallels between the afflicted Great Lakes and the future of the Mediterranean. I was due to lead a series of classes on Samuel Taylor Coleridge at McMaster University. Lake poet and one of the earliest eco-ethicists in the English language, Coleridge was convinced that unspoilt lakes and rural landscapes promote happiness and wellbeing. Coleridge and fellow Lake poet William Wordsworth published a manifesto (Preface to the Lyrical Ballads) arguing that creativity and human flourishing thrive when human passions “are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature”. Coleridge influenced the poet and public intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in turn inspired Henry David Thoreau, whose book Nature celebrates the beneficence of American wildernesses; the importance of their preservation for
future generations. “It is the marriage of the soul with nature,” Thoreau wrote, “that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination”. I was looking forward to exploring Ontario’s “beautiful and permanent forms of nature”; the ancient woodlands of the Niagara Escarpment, the scores of waterfalls and streams amidst glades of native trees; the islands and lagoons where the lake meets the mighty St Lawrence River; the magnificence of Niagara Falls some forty miles south of Hamilton. Yet the scenic beauty and apparent wilderness belied extensive pollution. The lake and its sister Great Lakes, comprising 20 per cent of the planet’s fresh water, were in a poor state. Lake Erie had already been pronounced “dead”. Swimming was dangerous in Lake Ontario; what remained of the fish uneatable. I had a view from my lodgings over the “The Bay”, an inlet from the lake; the surface was obscured by a thick layer of yellow and green sludge giving off a stench like garlic and rotting fish, a consequence of run-offs from local industries. The origins of Lake Ontario tell a dramatic geological story. The basin was carved by an Ice Age glacier displacing a land mass that was pushed south, piling up in central and western presentday state of New York. When the glacier retreated, the lake drained into the Mohawk River; the glacier melted from the St Lawrence valley, leaving the outlet below sea level. For a time, the lake became a bay of the Atlantic until the land reasserted itself. The lakebed to this day tilts southward, causing erosion and inundations along the southern New York shoreline.
