Onondaga Lake: Sacred Site, Founder of Democracies, and America's Most Polluted
AquaDiary: Water Mysteries, Science & NewsShow Notes
The scientists who worked on this cleanup all signed NDAs and wouldn't speak with me. And mercury is still being found. In April 2026, routine marina renovations at Onondaga Lake uncovered mercury in sediment nobody had ever tested, in a lake declared cleaned up. The DEC says the origin is "unknown." The Onondaga Nation says they've been ignored for twenty years. And the experts who know the most about what's really in that lake cannot legally speak about it. This episode covers the full contamination history of Onondaga Lake in Syracuse, NY, once designated as the most polluted lake in America. We dig into the Solvay Process Company's century of industrial dumping, 165,000 pounds of mercury discharged between 1946 and 1970, the mudboils in the Tully Valley still delivering salt and silt downstream through Onondaga Nation territory every single day, and the roster of companies — Honeywell, General Motors, National Grid, Crucible Specialty Metals, and others — that turned a sacred Haudenosaunee site (and the founding site of both the US and Haudenosaunee democracy) into a federal Superfund site. We also explore what the Onondaga Nation has said from the beginning: that this cleanup was never enough, that their legal claim to their own homeland was dismissed on a technicality, and that the water their people have given thanks to for over a thousand years was declared clean without their agreement. This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Next time, we will cover the cleanup, the eagles that came back, the fish that are still toxic, and the question with no clean answer: what does it mean to remediate a lake when the polluter gets to decide when it's done? Further reading:Onondaga Nation land rights: onondaganation.orgRobin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013)Glenn Coin, Syracuse.com/NNY360, May 2026This episode had 28 citations. You can see them all by supporting the show on Patreon for $3 a month: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheAquaDiaryPodcast
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