If you visit the Erie Canal today, it’s a quiet waterway and trail that winds through charming towns and forests, where hikers, bicyclists, kayakers, bird-watchers and other visitors seek to enjoy nature and escape the pressures of modern life.
But recreation and scenic beauty had nothing to do with the origin of this waterway.
When the Erie Canal opened 200 years ago, on October 26, 1825, more than 360 miles of forest and field facilities were lit up with rotting trees left over from the rapidly accelerating construction.
Yoghurts on the towpath along the canal can pull a heavy barge at a faster clip than the work of dragging wagons on primitive roads. Boats rushed goods and people across the Great Lakes and New York City harbor for more than a few weeks. Freight costs reduced by 90%.
As many books proclaim, the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made New York known as the Empire State. It also changed the environment and forever changed the ecology of the Hudson River and the ecology of the lower Great Lakes.
For environmental historians like myself, the Canal’s Bicentennial provides an opportunity to reflect on the evolution of US efforts to balance economic progress and environmental costs, among others.
Human and natural communities were torn apart
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the native peoples of the French called the Iroquois, engaged in canoe-based trade along the Great Lakes and the Hudson River Valley for centuries. In the 1700s, American colonists took land through brutal warfare, unequal treaties, and exploitative policies.
It made possible the Haudenosaunee’s separated erie canal.
Haiwhagai of the Onondaga Nation, Jake Edwards, explains the impact of the Erie Canal on the people of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Wmht.
After the Revolutionary War, commercial enthusiasm for a direct catfish route to the West intensified. Canal proponents envisioned the break at the junction of the Mohawk River and the Hudson as a place to dig a canal on the Hudson to Lake Erie.
New York’s uneven terrain and 363 miles of waterways have created formidable challenges. Since the ledge rises 571 feet between Albany and Buffalo, a canal would require more than one lock to raise and lower boats.
Federal officials refused to fund such “internal improvements.” But New York politician Dewitt Clinton decided to complete the project, although he wanted to use only state funds. Critics have called the $7 million mechaproject, worth about $170 million today, “Dewitt’s ditch” and “Clinton’s folly.” In 1817, thousands of men began digging a 4-meter-deep canal using hand shovels and pickaxes.
Construction works, engineering breakthroughs such as hydraulic cement, locks made of local materials and the water of the knouse about 60 feet, and destroyed acres of forests.
After boarding a canal boat between Utica and Syracuse, writer Nathaniel Hawthorne described the surroundings in 1835 as “now rotten and dead.”
However, most canalists saw the waterway as a vehicle for progress. As a commercial artery, New York City became the financial center of the nation. As a nation, it fueled religious revivals, social reform movements, and the growth of cities on its great lakes.
The socio-economic benefits of the Erie Canal came at a greater environmental cost: the passage enabled organisms from distant places to reach lakes and rivers that had been isolated since the end of the last ice age.
An invasive species expressway
On October 26, 1825, Gov. Clinton led the flotilla to New York City in a grand ceremony of the Seneca chief from Buffalo.
To symbolize the global connections made possible by the new canal, participants spat a piece of sand at the entrance to New York Harbor, a sandbar. Observers “cross the waters of the lakes with the ocean with the ocean” at the time described as the ritual “with the ocean with the ocean”.
Clinton was a naturalist who studied the geology, birds and fish of the canal route. He even predicted that the waterway would “bring western fish to eastern waters.”
Today, biologists would consider the “wedding of the waters” event a biosecurity risk.
The Erie Canal and adjacent feeder rivers and reservoirs are likely favorable for two non-intermingled species, the Atlantic Sea Lamprey and the Altewife, to enter the Great Lakes ecosystem. Predators of lake trout and other highly valued native fish, these invaders have devastated the lakes’ commercial fisheries. In the early 1960s, yields fell by an astonishing 98% from the previous average.
Their origins are difficult to trace, but historical, ecological and genetic data suggest that sea lampreys and their antagonists entered Lake Ontario via the Erie Canal in the 1860s. Later advances to the Welland Canal in Canada allowed them to reach the upper Great Lakes in the 1930s.
Protecting the $5 billion Great Lakes fishery from these invasive organisms requires ongoing work and consistent funding. Specifically, it costs $20 million a year to apply pesticides and other methods to control lamprey populations.
The most environmentally and economically damaging invasive species in the Great Lakes is the Zebra Mussel. Zebra Midshipmen traveled from Eurasia in the 1980s in the ballast water of transoceanic ships using the St. Lawrence Seaway. Following the Erie Canal to the Hudson River was the “mussel expressway”.
The hungry invasive mussel caused a nearly tenfold decline in Phytoplankton, the primary food for many species of the Hudson River ecosystem. This competition for food, along with pollution and habitat disturbance, has led to the disappearance of two common species of Hudson’s native pearl mussels.
Today, the Erie Canal remains vulnerable to invasive plants such as water chestnut and hydrilla, and invasive animals such as the round goby. Boaters, kayakers, and anglers can help reduce bioinvasions by cleaning, drying, and drying their equipment after each use to avoid carrying invasive species to new locations.
A treasure trove of relaxation
In its gilded age in the late 1800s, the Erie Canal was influenced by environmental concerns in a utilitarian sense. Logging in the Adanondack Mountains caused so much erosion that the East Channel’s feed streams were silting up.
To protect these waterways, New York created the Adirondack Park in 1892. Encompassing 6 million acres of parkland, a unique mix of public and private lands for forest conservation, recreation and commercial use.
Shipping of the Erie Canal was denied in the 20th century by the opening of the deeper and wider St. Lawrence Seaway and the competition of rails and highways. The canal still supports commerce, but the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor now provides an additional economic engine.
Kayak Tour shows how the locks work on the Erie Canal. WMHT Public media.
In 2024, 3.84 million people used the Erie Canalway Trail for biking, hiking, kayaking, sightseeing and other adventures. Tourists enjoying the historical scenery and day trips are more than 300 million dollars annually.
Over the past 200 years, the Erie Canal has been shaped by both environmental forces and its socio-economic priorities have changed. As New York re-shares its canal for a third century, the ecological history of the man-made river provides important insights into the design of technological systems that respect human communities and work with nature.
Christine Keiner is Chair of the Department of Science, Technology and Society at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
This article is republished from the chat under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.