In Ernie Stensgar’s Plummer, Idaho, office sits an heirloom older than any human, a relic passed down from his great-great-grandparents: a set of four 150-year-old gathering baskets, handwoven from Inland north-west reeds.
Built to last, the receptacles still haven’t frayed, despite age. They’re not museum exhibits, either. Stensgar uses them to collect mountain huckleberries, prairie plants and water potatoes from nearby Coeur d’Alene Lake, sacred water to his people. Like his ancestors, he plans to pass them along when it’s time.
“I’m the oldest one in the family, so I got to give it to the next [generation] when I pass,” said Stengsar, a tribal council member and former chairman for the Schitsu’umsh, or Coeur d’Alene Tribe.
But the tribe worries that Coeur d’Alene Lake, unlike the baskets, is so defiled by mine waste and vulnerable to a looming ecological catastrophe that future generations may not be able to enjoy it.
Recently, people have flocked to north Idaho partly because of the idyllic lake. Last year, the Wall Street Journal declared Coeur d’Alene, a community on its north shore with top-shelf resorts and the world’s first floating golf green, the nation’s “hottest housing market”.
This good news carries terrifying baggage. Increased human activity – logging, road building, home construction – drives excess phosphorus into the water.
Phosphorus is natural, even essential, to ecosystems, but too much kills lakes. Algae eat phosphorus – and too much phosphorous makes algae proliferate in colorful plumes. They die, sink and rot, depleting oxygen in the water. Unabated, this phenomenon creates “dead zones”, like in the Mississippi River Delta.
In Coeur d’Alene Lake, sediments laden with toxic heavy metals compound the problem. Millions of tons of lead, arsenic and cadmium are trapped by a highly oxygenated layer of bottomwater. When the oxygen diminishes, the toxins will dissolve into the water, where each summer children frolic.
Such a disaster would putrefy a vital resource the tribe has communed with since before anyone remembers and mangle the regional economy.
“The lake has a pierced heart,” Stensgar said, thumping his chest with a fist wrapped around a nonexistent knife.
Bob Steed, a water manager with Idaho’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), predicted “we’re 50 or 100 years away from seeing that type of stuff” – like massive algae blooms and dissolution of heavy metals – “in Coeur d’Alene Lake.”
Still, Idaho officials admit the lake’s future depends on limiting phosphorus. “There’s a variety of different [phosphorus] sources,” said Jess Byrne, head of DEQ, requiring “a variety of different solutions”. One of the DEQ’s strategies to restore local environments involves working with landowners on a voluntary basis. Governor Brad Little recently reserved $22m in public funds for these projects, which include riverbank stabilization and storm- and wastewater projects.
But phosphorus is not a future abstraction for the tribe, which considers existing efforts insufficient and wants more centralized solutions. Algae now chokes smaller lakes nearby, like Fernan Lake. Dr Dale Chess, the tribe’s lead limnologist, samples Coeur d’Alene Lake water monthly and says the time for action is now.
“There’s already too much phosphorus in the lake,” Chess said.
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For a century, mining severely damaged Coeur d’Alene waters. An eponymous river snakes through Idaho’s Silver Valley. Starting in 1883, valley miners flushed tailings of toxic metals, including lead, arsenic, cadmium and zinc down the river, into the lake.
The water is healthier now, thanks to a rigorous cleanup. In 1983, EPA listed the Silver Valley under its Superfund program, removing toxins. People swim here again. In 2002, the agency turned attention to the remaining watershed. The site now includes the lake and is the second largest of more than 1,300 Superfunds nationwide.
Idaho rejected a lake cleanup, however, insisting it would hurt tourism. Then governor Dirk Kempthorne said, “There is a stigma to [the label] Superfund.” The feds relegated lake management to the state and the tribe, which reluctantly blessed the compromise.
EPA spokesman Bill Dunbar said the agency was anxious to “get this bad stuff out of” the lake, even if it meant “leaving the state and the tribe and the local governments to figure out a lake management plan”.
But Rebecca Stevens, a lake manager for the tribe, said this decision devastated the Schitsu’umsh.
“The creator put them here to protect the lake and all the bountiful resources surrounding it,” she said. Stensgar sent EPA letters saying the agency should reconsider, noting the compromise yielded no federal money, and characterizing the plan as an “unfunded mandate”.
By contrast, Kempthorne and federal officials celebrated EPA’s decision at a Coeur d’Alene photo op, drinking a toast of untreated Coeur d’Alene Lake water and declaring it pristine. Stensgar, who attended the event, threw the water from his glass over his shoulder.
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After this jubilee, the tribe suspected the state’s and EPA’s bureaucratic strictures might let the lake continue suffering.
When it began its negotiations with Idaho over the plan, the tribe said it should mandate firm action, such as mandated phosphorus limits, if chemicals in the lake reached certain “trigger” levels. But, according to Stevens, the state wanted softer language saying triggers would spur more analysis, rather than regulations.
Trying to reconcile this, EPA told the tribe it would become involved in lake management after a decade if trigger limits were reached and phosphorus was not effectively curtailed. So the tribe reluctantly acquiesced to Idaho’s wishes. The ultimate lake management plan, implemented in 2009, said the triggers would only require the state and the tribe to commission further investigations of lake pollution, not to impose strict limits, if the triggers were met.
In 2016, phosphorus trigger levels were exceeded at several sampling sites, and the tribe demanded Idaho limit phosphorus. It didn’t, and phosphorus continued increasing. EPA did not step in. Protesting this inaction, the tribe withdrew from the plan in 2019.
Since then, the tribe has continued its own management program on the southern third of the lake, which it owns. (The tribe still cooperates with the state in educating Idahoans about lake pollution and works with landowners to limit phosphates entering the lake.)
In 2020, Little asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to study lake pollution, hoping NAS would say how long the lake will last. Byrne said this commission, the state’s funding of lake restoration projects, and the failed lake management agreement illustrate Idaho’s commitment to the lake.
“Governor Little and his administration are engaged and committed to ensuring a healthy Coeur d’Alene Lake,” said Madison Hardy, a spokeswoman for Little, in a statement.
But the state’s outlook focusing on just how much it can pollute the lake before it gets much worse strikes Stevens as perversely flirting with danger and forgetful of current problems in the lake, like near obliteration of some native fish.
“I do not want to be sitting here two years from now arguing about information and what we’re gonna do and continue to kick the can down the street,” Phillip Cernera, the tribe’s former head of lake management, told NAS in 2021. “We can’t wait for the catastrophe to occur before humans take any sort of proactive measures.”
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Coeur d’Alene Lake’s debacle echoes the climate crisis. An infuriatingly simple solution – stop poisoning the environment – is made improbable by a tangle of conflicting interests and incentives, ineffectual governance and socioeconomic behavior. It seems overwhelming.
Stensgar places some hope in courts, where the tribe has historically succeeded.
The tribe invokes “time immemorial” when describing how long it has navigated local waterways to hunt, gather and conduct intertribal commerce. Those fundamental activities may be difficult now, but the tribe continues them anyway.
“One time, a guy said, ‘It sounds like you want all your land back,’” Stensgar said. “We said, ‘We do!’ He said, ‘You want all your water back.’ ‘We do. We want Lake Coeur d’Alene. We want everything back.’ Yes. That’s what we want. That’s the goal.”
If it owned the entire lake, the tribe would protect it in ways DEQ and EPA can’t. Meanwhile, it awaits the NAS report, hoping it’s not too late to save the lake.
