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Thus the problems of the Great Lakes are not solved because the beach at Storing State Park on Lake Erie is officially opened again for the first time since 1961, or because the Cuyahoga River, while gray and sulky looking, is relatively free from oil and jetsam, or because the water treatment plant in Chicago is having fewer taste and odor problems. Says EPA's Swain: "We still have a long way to go before we solve the problems of toxic substances. Then there is a whole series of new environmental issues." Among them: sodium from the salt used during the winter on Midwestern roads, which drains into the lakes and may be an important element in feeding the undesirable blue-green algae. Also, Congress is considering extending winter navigation on the lakes.
That would benefit the U.S. steel indus try and the economy of several ports. But environmentalists fear that disruption of the lakes' whiter ice cover would cause damage to fish and plant life. The energy crisis has made state governments less resistant to suggestions that gas and oil explorations— with their potential for pollution— be undertaken in the Great Lakes basin. (Canada already takes natural gas from Lake Erie.) These problems are not insoluble, but they will require a subtlety of technology and policy quite different from the massive input of dollars that cured many of the lakes' ills during the 1970s. "Basically I'm optimistic," says Robert Boden of the EPA's Great Lakes National Program Office. "We are reaching a state of finetuning of the Great Lakes ecosystem."
And that's definitely progress.