Lake Annecy Story

This is a non-commercial website created to celebrate the pioneering environmental campaigns that saved two beautiful lakes from pollution.

It has been written by Stanley Root, an Englishman, who fell in love with a beautiful French lake several years ago and made it the retirement home for himself and his wife.

He is neither an environmentalist, nor limnologist, nor historian, let alone a journalist, and so an unlikely author for a history of environmental campaigns focused on the science of limnology.

Countries are increasingly divided both between and within themselves by language and culture. Science and Reason appear, astonishingly in our so-called information age, less and less influential in shaping public opinion. In this context, Stanley is interested in stories recording the contributions of remarkable individuals from different countries to our scientific understanding and artistic appreciation of the natural world, and celebrating occasions where collective civic action to protect this natural world has been informed by good science and sound reason.

This website tells the story of how, sixty years ago, Lake Annecy came to be saved from pollution thanks to the inspiration of one man, together with the collective action of the local community and eventual support of the government. The story is remarkable because of the importance of the topic in general, the contribution made by Lake Annecy to the science of limnology, its impact on the environmental movement in France and worldwide, and the inspirational example it gives of how one individual could change the world for the better. The story is additionally remarkable because, 10,000 miles away from Annecy in the United States, at almost exactly the same time, an almost identical drama took place, with a similar cast of exceptional scientists and citizens, leading to an equally successful restoration of another lake: Lake Washington.

The website is incomplete. It lacks three important sections which would set the account it in its rightful context. The stories of Lake Annecy and Lake Washington occupy a significant place in the development of the science of limnology.  They also mark the culmination of a 500-year transformation in both our scientific understanding of the natural world.  And, thirdly, they mark a complementary transformation over the same period of time in our aesthetic appreciation of the natural world. The author welcomes contributions from anyone interested in limnology, the history of the theory of evolution, and modern art history, to complete these three sections and so do full justice to these stories.

The similarity of the two stories and their importance for the global environmental movement is not, as far as I am aware, generally well known. And so this website aims to make these stories more widely known, and celebrate the achievements at lakes Annecy and Washington and the legacy of two beautiful lakes they have given us. The author of course also welcomes feedback on his errors and omissions.

The Grand Theme of this story is the struggle to preserve, from the threat of eutrophication, limited supplies of fresh water for an increasingly large global population, by implementing adequate wastewater management.   Since these two stories took place, the same threat of eutrophication has affected, and continues to affect, hundreds of freshwater resources worldwide and the communities dependent upon them.  The current situation is summarised in a recent UN Water Analytical Brief 

"At the beginning of the 21st century, the world faces a water quality crisis resulting from continuous population growth, urbanization, land use change, industrialization, food production practices, increased living standards and poor water use practices and wastewater management strategies. Wastewater management (or the lack thereof) has a direct impact on the biological diversity of aquatic ecosystems, disrupting the fundamental integrity of our life support systems, on which a wide range of sectors, from urban development to food production and industry, depend. It is essential that wastewater management be considered as part of an integrated, full life cycle, eco-system-based management system that operates across all three dimensions of sustainable development (social, economic and environmental), geographical borders, and includes both freshwater and marine waters (Corcoran et al. 2010). The World Water Forum meeting in March 2012 echoed the problems and the need to bring wastewater to the fore in world water politics."  And the same report concludes:

"A paradigm shift is now required in water politics the world over not only to prevent further damage to sensitive ecosystems and the aquatic environment, but also to emphasize that wastewater is a resource (in terms of water and also nutrient for agricultural use) whose effective management is essential for future water security."

Yet this was not always so clearly, or generally, well understood. Our account takes place before the 2015 UN Water Congress where the above report was discussed, before the 21st conference on Global Climate Change in Paris, and before the first ever conference on climate change in 1991. It takes place before France, or any national government for that matter, had even established a Ministry of Environment. It takes place before the first Earth Day was held, before Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth were founded. It takes place at a time when the issue at the heart of the story - human induced eutrophication of freshwater lakes - was poorly understood and never tackled even within the narrow circle of specialists in the relevant science - limnology.

Certainly, none of this was clearly or generally understood by ordinary citizens, in a small provincial town in France, in the years immediately following the second world war.

But one man was about to change that.

His name was Dr. Paul-Louis Servettaz.

Lake Annecy Story by Stanley Root is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.