Metronatural: Inventing and Taming Nature in Seattle - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 117

in the lake was over nine feet in 1938 but dropped to less than three feet
by the early 1950s. 111 Thick mats of algae began to appear, and public
health offi cials had to shut down swimming areas due to health risks.
The notion of “eutrophication” entered the public lexicon as scientists
at the University of Washington began to characterize how the infl ux of
nutrients from untreated sewage volumes in the surrounding cities to the
lake resulted in an overly enriched ecological system. 112 The deteriorat-
ing water quality of Lake Washington became a highly visible symptom
of the unintended effects of urban growth in the region. Findlay writes:
“The region's identifi cations with its natural resources—nurtured for so
long by railroads and other boosters—came to have new implications:
calls for preservation rather than exploitation of those resources became
stronger. Continued growth, especially unmanaged growth, came into
question. Overcrowding and pollution threatened the good life that was
the trademark of the Pacifi c Northwest for so long.” 113
It was during this time—a decade before environmental pollution would
emerge as an issue of national importance—that the Promethean approach
would be discredited in Seattle. There was widespread acknowledgment
that the dilemma of nature had not been solved by engineering improve-
ments. Kaika describes this downfall of the Promethean Project: “From
tamed and controlled (the prerequisite for development), nature is now
the source of crisis, a potential impediment to further development.” 114
The rationalization of the landscape in the early twentieth century had the
unanticipated effect of massive population growth that created undesirable
environmental pollution. But unlike the social inequity and land instability
issues described previously, the deterioration of Lake Washington was a
highly visible problem that would spur residents and the government into
action to redefi ne the relationship between Seattleites and nature.
A Regional Approach to Protect Water Quality
Beginning in the 1950s, Lake Washington became a living laboratory
for University of Washington scientists to determine the causes and ef-
fects of adding nutrients to a large water body and to devise strategies to
reverse the impacts of pollution. This “pioneer whole lake experiment”
was an unprecedented synergy of scientifi c and public awareness of an
environmental problem at the time. 115 Political activists in Seattle recog-
nized that water pollution was tied to larger problems of urban growth
that would require a coordinated, large-scale effort to resolve. Just as
there was a concerted effort in the fi rst half of the twentieth century to