My first glimpse of Lake Superior, in all its lore-and-song-inspiring glory, is a blurry one from the backseat of a taxi driving through Thunder Bay.
Superior, or Gitchigumi, which means Great Lake in Anishinaabemowin, is the largest of those lakes, and the second largest lake in the world, containing 10 per cent of the planet’s fresh surface water. Those are daunting statistics for a body of water that looks, even fleetingly, more like ocean than lake — a graveyard of shipwrecks as vast as Austria.
The collaborative’s five newsrooms — Bridge Michigan, Circle of Blue, Great Lakes Now, Michigan Public and The Narwhal — are funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
Last fall, on an unexpectedly warm day, it was glimmering shades of blue: a blanket of waves that faded into the sky, punctuated only by the iconic island known as (and perfectly shaped as) the Sleeping Giant.
“It wasn’t always like this,” my taxi driver, Robin Doherty, says as he watches me take in the water from his rearview mirror.
As he recalls, once upon a time, for many, many years, Thunder Bay’s shoreline was a grayish-black, scattered with logs and big, foamy blobs of chemicals — the result of more than a century of dumping by the paper mills that once defined the largest city in northern Ontario. Doherty, a lifelong resident, worked in one of those mills for 15 years. He started at the age of 19 in the wood room, where tree trunks were hauled in and cleaned — or “debarked” — in eight-foot-long drums and chipped, and then sent farther into a 13-story mill to be ground into a fine pulp and eventually made into paper.
“At any given time, you’d see some dead fish on the shoreline, lots and lots of dead guppies,” Doherty says. “If you went for a swim, you’d have to shower immediately after you came out because you’d have this slime all over you.”
I respond with an elongated “ew” that makes Doherty laugh. Back then, the color and quality of the lake didn’t deter beachgoers or swimmers. “What else were you going to do?” Doherty asks both casually and rhetorically. Thunder Bay was a booming, industrial town; a slimy Lake Superior was just the cost of those riches.
Back then, there were few policies to stop the mills from polluting the water, and a lot of disregard for what should’ve been done. Nobody was regularly checking the breakwalls built in the water between the mills and the lake. A bad rainstorm would crack them, and carry the restricted contamination into the rest of the lake like “a big oil spill,” Doherty says. The smallest of holes in the wall would create a stream of black effluent that traveled all along the shoreline, carrying dead fish with it, to beaches that were at least a 15-minute drive away.
A lot has changed in the last 40 years. In recognition of the damage created by industry, Thunder Bay was declared an “area of concern” in 1987 under the Canada-U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement — a program designed to address environmental degradation that had built up and been ignored for decades. It was one of 43 such areas across both countries, targeted for cleanup and restoration efforts that would bring back nature to the shorelines of all five Great Lakes. Both countries created funding streams worth hundreds of millions of dollars to facilitate this remediation, and made space for a huge collaborative effort that brought together scientists, First Nations and policymakers.
In Thunder Bay, this focused effort helped usher in stricter environmental regulations in the mid-1990s that regulated industrial dumping into Lake Superior. It also inspired what conservationists describe to me as “a culture of restoration” — forcing the city to rethink its development plans to prioritize water quality and shoreline health and reintroduce nature to an industrial town.
If you drive up and down the road that separates the city from the lake and look close enough, you can see this evolution in all its nuances. You can catch glimpses of the success of restoration efforts in places like Fisherman’s Park, where life has come back to the land, with fields of wildflowers pouring toward the shoreline, growing between still functional grain towers and shipping docks. And you can see, and even feel, how history still has to be reckoned with less than 2 kilometers away in North Harbour, where the lake bottom remains lined with pulp sludge.
As new industries and governments take shape, efforts to bring Thunder Bay’s shoreline back to a state of good health are even more critical. U.S. President Donald Trump is in office with an anti-environment agenda, slashing funding for restoration programs across the Great Lakes and threatening to cut the agreement that gave way to the area of concern program. And the lithium industry is knocking on the city’s door, with an eye on the same site where a paper mill once stood.
There’s a desperate desire among those who have rallied over decades to keep the Thunder Bay waterfront what it has slowly become and find renewed value in a more accessible and clean waterfront that is bringing back nature, people and businesses.
On the meandering drive from the airport to the city, along the winding shoreline of Lake Superior, Doherty points out the sites of what was, what is and what will soon be. There are the train tracks that once hauled paper products to the rest of the province, and now sparingly (but soon increasingly) carry minerals and manufacturing materials. There’s the port where all of this, plus grain and more, is loaded onto humongous ships bound for much farther away. But now, there’s also a boardwalk connecting people to the lakes to watch industry and nature alike. There’s an overhead pedestrian bridge bypassing the train and road, giving easy access to the water. And as of 2023, cruise ships now berth in Thunder Bay as well, as part of a Great Lakes tour, attracted by the pristine shoreline.
The waterfront, once dominated by industrial workers and factories, is now frequented by fishermen and dog walkers, sunrise watchers and waterfront festival goers, plus birds and bees.
There’s an obvious ripple effect at play: as nature comes back to the shoreline, so do people and so does industry, creating a renewed blue economy that is rooted in clear, clean water.
For someone like Doherty, the transformation is palpable and hopefully permanent. “Ever since the mills shut down, it’s 1,000 per cent better,” he says. “You don’t see dead fish around. You don’t have that slime on your body anymore.”
The best place in Thunder Bay to see industry and nature collide is Fisherman’s Park, tucked between a loading dock, a grain elevator and the train tracks that cut the city from the lake. A viewing platform was set up in the shadow of the elevator just last year — the perfect spot to sit in the morning sun and watch the ships roll in and away.
“Here, you can see the industry that put us here,” Jessie McFadden, wildlife biologist with the local conservation authority, says.
A few decades ago this was a shipyard. Then a saw mill. Then an abandoned property, mowed all the way to the lake’s edge. The Lakehead Region Conservation Authority — one of the smallest of the public environmental agencies in the province and with one of the largest watersheds to protect — fenced it off from quad enthusiasts, so nature could creep back uninterrupted. By 2023, the empty lot was a full-fledged park — one of just a handful of places close to downtown Thunder Bay where you can get right up to the water.
In the sunrise glow, it feels like a fairy meadow spread out before us. McFadden spent the past year harvesting seeds that grow in abundance in northern Ontario, and likely grew here before industry took over. Golden flowers now flicker in the light as a result. The common tansy looks a bit like a flattened dandelion — it smells nice but is taking over most of the park (“We don’t like it,” McFadden says). The black-eyed Susan, a small sunflower-like native plant, is welcome competition for it. The golden rod is McFadden’s favorite (“Everytime I see one, there are several bees on it,” she says), with their long green stalks and fluorescent yellow flowers towering over the others.
In the middle of this meadow is a man-made fish pond and streams that connect the pond to the mouth of the Current River nearby on Lake Superior. The pond was designed to give fish easier passage across the watershed.
“This area is on its way to becoming something,” McFadden says as she runs her hands through the flowers she planted with help from volunteers.
Fisherman’s Park is one of five projects along the 28-kilometer area of concern at Thunder Bay’s shore. To put that in context: Lake Superior has 2,938 kilometers of coastline connecting Ontario, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, so this one project is focused on about one per cent of the lake’s shoreline. But it all flows together.
“They’re all small projects but collectively they all end up having a big impact on the water quality here,” Tammy Cook, head of the Lakehead Region Conservation Authority, tells me at Fisherman’s Park. The goal is for each transformed site to become a permanently protected space, and so "ingrained in people’s hearts and minds.” That public appreciation is critical because the work isn’t necessarily complete once nature comes back.
“Hopefully, every little piece will connect people to the water and have the hidden purpose of protecting the water,” she says.
That idea is codified in the very structure of the area of concern. At the time the program was created, taking an ecosystem approach was a relatively new concept. For each of the 43 areas of concern, the Canada-U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement set 14 ecological benchmarks for success, including a robust fish and wildlife habitat, clean drinking water and safe beaches. Each one is what Mark Chambers, the senior program coordinator of the areas of concern program at the Canada Water Agency, describes as “a sliver or a slice of the state of a healthy ecosystem.” In Thunder Bay, 11 of these markers were considered impaired.
When the pulp and paper industry largely shuttered in the early 2000s (barring a handful of remaining mills farther north of Thunder Bay), the damage to both the shoreline and the water was visceral. Some of the industrial pollution faded through natural processes over time, but nature couldn’t clean up everything without help.
Groups in and around Thunder Bay, came together to write a remedial action plan that sets out agreed-upon priorities. This area of concern was different from others across Canada and the U.S. because of the sheer number of people involved in the effort: three levels of government, a First Nation, a conservation authority, multiple advocacy groups, a university, developers and industry. As mundane as it sounds, a foundation of policy and procedure needed to be set to ensure everyone had “something to rally behind for many, many years,” Chambers says.
That long list included removing industrial rubble along the more developed parts of the waterfront and turning them into nature corridors with walking trails. But the cleanup started with vacuuming creosote from the water. The wood preservative used on railroads and telephone poles had long been released into the water and stayed there for years, which resulted in an increasing number of fish with tumors in the affected lake area. Removing it meant this number dropped from 7.1 per cent in the late 1980s and early 1990s to just one per cent in 2013, and near zero today, per a federal study and Chambers.
The remedial action plan also incorporated plans to address contamination and erosion in Fort William First Nation, just south of the city along the shoreline, within the area of concern. “We used to have a gathering place where kids could go swimming, and we haven’t been able to go into that water for over a decade,” Robert Pierre, the nation’s economic development officer, says. “People would go into the water and come out with red dots on their legs.”
Such experiences led to the nation’s foray into examining and strengthening the health of the lake, conducting their own environmental monitoring programs and restoration efforts, from replanting trees and shrubs to partnering with other groups to remove chemicals from their shores.
The work has not been without its challenges. Climate change has fueled bigger storms and moved toxic water around more forcefully. More extreme rainstorms have eroded the shoreline, pushing it back 1.5 meters. That made the remaining shoreline more unstable and in desperate need of restoration. So, the nation stepped up its efforts; supported by federal funding and fellow conservation partners, they have planted droves of native trees and shrubs to stabilize the shore, which also improves fish and coastal habitat conditions. They’re seeing vast improvements.
“We’re starting to see people fishing on the rivers again,” Pierre says. “My brother lives on the lake and he’s starting to see a lot of smaller fish along and near the shore, which he hasn’t seen for 20 to 25 years. That's a huge success.”
Combined, the remediation efforts across the Thunder Bay area of concern have cost more than $165 million, funded by various levels of government and also industry. The remediation effort at Fisherman’s Park, for example, has been financially supported by the operator of the dock and grain elevator there. The results of this and other collaborations are evident across the shoreline. Beach closures were lifted in 2021 after the water was cleared of E. coli bacteria and industrial contamination. No tumors were found in a selection of fish recently sampled in the once-contaminated area. And new wastewater systems are in place to ensure sewage from up-and-coming residential or industrial buildings don’t run off into the lake again.
“Without the emphasis of being an area of concern, the contamination may still be in Lake Superior,” Cook says. “It may have just been overlooked and not had the public push to get the restoration done.”
Today, Thunder Bay only has two benchmarks left to meet in order to be delisted as an area of concern: increasing fish and wildlife habitat, and clearing mercury from North Harbour to restore the population of benthos, or organisms that live on the lake bottom, like clams, snails and crayfish.
The first one is already being addressed. The various groups working together have created a habitat strategy for each of the sites they are remediating, starting with Fisherman’s Park. Here, a steadily growing fish population has been given a path from the lake to the manmade pond. From there, they can climb a fish ladder, which was put in service in 1991 and bolstered in 2021, to get to an artificial lake enclosed by a dam, designed to help them spawn.
Such projects indicate to Chambers that there is a “life after delisting” Thunder Bay as an area of concern, and many of those who have worked on remediation for years are already dreaming about it, even as the finish line seems so far away.
The main thing keeping them from it is North Harbour, and it’s complicated.
The old practice of the mills was to dump large volumes of wastewater into the lake and contain it as best they could with breakwalls so it didn’t spread widely. The problem is that pulp, the main ingredient of paper, has mercury in it, which doesn’t go away on its own and can’t be destroyed.
In water, pulp disintegrates like a mass of tissue paper. You can see these very fine and thread-like blobs all over North Harbour, just a few minutes drive down the tracks from Fisherman’s Park. The toxic material has sat here for years, muddying a shallow lake bed that spans 20 football fields. If you poke a stick into this part of the lake, dark blobs bubble up between logs wedged all around the marshy shoreline.
“It’s really a nightmare to deal with,” Tim Hollinger says. “You can’t just put a blanket of gravel and sand to trap it and bury it. You actually have to remove it.”
Hollinger, who is the remedial action plan coordinator for the area of concern, is leading the clean-up of this area, which is presently a cinematic mess. A ravaged paper mill looms above the water. Several windows of the long brown brick building are shattered, revealing vestiges of a different time. A calendar from 2008, the year the mill closed, is pinned to one of the office walls, boxes and boxes of fading scrap paper everywhere, chunky calculators with broken or missing buttons scattered around the perimeter. The surrounding area looks like the aftermath of an explosion: mountains of wire and rubble create a barrier between the mill and the water, which here is a darker grayish-blue.
Hollinger is working with a developer who owns a significant part of the North Harbour lands on both the plan and funding to clean this all up. The idea is to section off a portion of the property to create a new wetland and creek for public and conserved space, and to host a brook trout nursery. The immense scale of this project means there is no timeline yet, but it’s a private-public partnership that could serve as a model for future conservation work across the Great Lakes.
Studies are underway to quantify how much mercury will need to be removed; current estimates suggest 400,000 cubic meters of pulp were deposited over 90 years. The idea is to literally vacuum it out and store it in a purpose-built facility nearby, forever isolating the mercury away from Lake Superior. The impacts of moving that amount of water is still unclear.
“What we’re doing is very new to Thunder Bay,” Hollinger says. “This is rehab for the environment.”
The significance of the work weighs in Hollinger’s reflections on the site. He has helped create a public advisory committee of residents and experts to ensure everything is considered, including, “What does the site look like 20 years in the future?” Right now, they have “outstanding” federal support, but he worries what will happen next.
The Government of Canada has provided the Thunder Bay area of concern $20 million over 20 years, which Chambers says is significant but never enough. “The American side [of the areas of concern program] has a lot more money and hard engineering solutions, whereas in Canada we take more of a community — and in some ways thoughtful — approach to restoration,” he says. “We’re more grassroots than the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers coming in and removing all this debris.”
But a change in government could limit the scope of what Hollinger, Chambers and their colleagues can achieve here, especially if that new government has less of an inclination to finance environmental solutions. At Hollinger’s last estimate, cleaning up North Harbour alone will cost $130 million, maybe more if additional grassroots ideas are incorporated.
Members of the community — spearheaded by the local Rotary Club — have pushed forward plans to make this site the start of an almost 14-kilometre-long waterfront trail. If built, the trail would connect to Fisherman’s Park, the city’s downtown shoreline and all the way down, eventually maybe to Fort William First Nation — linking various suburbs of the city and the parking lots and big boxes in between them to the lake.
“I haven’t seen this big push ever for remediation work,” Guy Walter, landscape architect with the city of Thunder Bay, says.
Traditionally, the city has relied on what he describes as “easy maintenance efforts” — “burying it, covering it, piping it, putting grass down.” But he has seen a noticeable shift in the last few years with local officials incorporating these new nature corridors in development plans.
This culture shift is happening as companies eye Thunder Bay’s waterfront for a new industrial boom, with the lithium refining industry already making bids, a nuclear waste site in progress a few hours away and mining set to increase farther north.
“Anytime you have a city like Thunder Bay that’s nestled in nature, you will always have industry and people who love nature living together,” Walter says. “We’re always going to be stuck in between private demands and what’s good for the lake.”
But the conversation has changed, Walter says, with people now envisioning that both are possible. The city wants the lithium industry but wants to keep access to the new clean and nature-filled Lake Superior shoreline. The city wants to keep the remnants of the old piers and turn them into parks for cruise ships to dock at.
The city hasn’t yet quantified the positive economic impacts of a cleaner, more accessible Lake Superior shoreline, Walter says, but a plan to measure it is in progress. “But we do get a ton of qualitative positive feedback,” he adds, especially from cruise ship operators and their users, about how much they enjoy the renewed waterfront. According to Walter, one person called it “the best shoreline on the Great Lakes.”
Walters is fielding requests for new food and beverage establishments along the shoreline, even as the city continues to prepare a plan on how to best offer development opportunities that won’t reverse the positive gains of the remediation work. Planning budget meetings are now rooted in the idea of the savings that come from green infrastructure, like parks and habitat restoration, and how developers can support more of it in their own burgeoning processes.
One thing is clear, Walter says: “We’re learning to balance our industrial harbor with the ecosystem needs of Lake Superior.”
When Doherty talks about his time at the paper mill, he does so with assured pride. Standing at the now-empty site, he describes the building in visceral detail: the views from its windows, where the logs were piled, where he parked his car, the beach spot nearby where he took swim breaks and, yes, emerged with slime dripping down his legs.
“It was gorgeous,” he says, nonetheless.
As the shoreline becomes cleaner and nature emerges again, Doherty, like many of his fellow residents, are changing their minds about what should and shouldn’t be allowed in the water. The Lakehead Region Conservation Authority and Lakehead University have been at the forefront of this educational movement, bringing people out to plant seeds or just see the scale of the damage up close.
In this way, the area of concern program has achieved much of what it set out to do in Thunder Bay. It has brought together multiple groups of people to clean up environmental damage caused by industry over decades. There are members of the community who don’t know Thunder Bay’s shoreline as anything different than what they see today: clear, cold water that they can enjoy. And that’s a new precedent for companies setting up in town: if they mess with the lake, there will be consequences.
Despite the progress on cleaning up the shoreline, Doherty hasn’t been fully in the water since he worked at the mill decades ago; he’s only put his feet in, he says, but “I didn’t have to clean them after.”
“I don’t think anybody would let this happen again,” he says. “I’m at the age where I want to enjoy this part of Thunder Bay, not pull up on the beach and smell a paper mill or look at toxic waste on the side of the beach.”
Lake Superior gently laps up to Doherty’s shoes as he looks into its clear surface.
“Not up here. Not here.”
