The Disaster Solutions (DS) Institute aims to provide the Syracuse Community with artistic projects and presentations that illuminate critical local environmental issues. Onondaga Lake is the focus of the group’s first project; it became a Superfund site in 1994 due to detrimental effects of industrial and municipal waste disposal over the last century. The future of the lake has become both a scientific and political issue. The creative specialists of the DS Institute bring a cultural perspective to the table. This project distills deep research (including interviews with experts) in order to establish facts, elucidate controversies, point out missing information, and illuminate proposed solutions.
Through sculpture, poster exhibitions, lectures, and video, the DS Institute provides a variety of information and interpretations of the history, current dynamic, and the planned future of the lake’s ecosystem. The DS Institute produced a custom-built sculptural model that it uses as a pedagogical tool during lectures and videos. This machine, which is based on a scale model of Onondaga Lake, is fully equipped to distill lake water and is used to demonstrate a spectrum of remediation solutions from the realistic to the Utopian. The Institute’s educational video employs documentary-style presentations of interviews and lectures to explore a range of outcomes. The DS Institute aims to educate the public about the history of the lake and to show that the next chapter needs help being written. In doing so, they hope to inspire critical dialogue about ethical consumption, civic responsibility and environmental care.
Apparently, there is a large lake in Syracuse NY, but I didn’t see it until recently. Onondaga Lake is hidden by the flat geography and Carousel Mall. Hearsay of the lake’s pollution fuels the mystery. Now I’m at the DS Institute working on the limnological study. We went to the twelfth annual Onondaga Lake Scientific Forum a few days ago. The day-long conference included many presentations by scientists and contractors hired to work the lake. We found out that most of the work is on analyzing and modeling the lake system, and not remediation.
The majority of these people are focussed on analysis, not remediation. The few that do focus on rehabilitation (not remediation either) are the sewage processing plants. They focus on making sure their effluent is getting more clean (limiting phosphorus and etc).
Daphnia look beautiful – even chimerically mythical – under a microscope (photo below)!
The conference did not seem to address:
The need for improved knowledge sharing between parties. Most groups are working out their own particle tracking models, while some are still messing with dumping dies into the lake and studying their movements.
The current debate between Honeywell and others about how deeply to dredge the bottom of the lake.
The complexity of the pending plan of pumping out lake water, sending it for processing, and returning it back into the lake.
The critical need for public debate about what the lake should become so as to inform future action.
The talks were very informative. The visualisations were stellar. One group discussed the life and death cycles of the iconic Daphnia, a crustacean that can easily swim far up your nose. Another group described their algorithms that find correlations between sunlight absorption of the lake and different contents of substances such as phosphorous, benzene, and chlorophyll. Soon, they said, they wouldn’t have to send scientists to sample any more lake water because their models would be able to figure it all out from a satellite photo.
The conference was at the movie theater and was well orchestrated. The lunch in the theater’s banquet area was delicious. The coffee was good and strong, and held up for the day. The attendees were very optimistic. $25 dollars well spent!