Les Monostory
Fayetteville, N.Y.Retired Environmental Planner

An avid fisherman, Monostory founded the Central New York chapter of the Izaak Walton League of America in 1989. He also helped start Project Watershed, an outreach program that recruits high school and elementary students to clean up and monitor local lakes and streams. He continues his decades-long effort to clean up Onondaga Lake.

Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, there was an area of the waterfront where we used to go that became closed for swimming when I was 9 or 10 years old. By the time I got to college, they didn't recommend swimming anywhere in Lake Erie. While I was an undergrad studying zoology I kept track of which lakes and streams came back, and after I went to Syracuse for grad school, I started paying attention to Onondaga Lake.

Syracuse was a typical northeastern industrial town. For a small lake, Onondaga was getting a tremendous load of both municipal and industrial waste. The entire lake bottom was essentially a blanket of calcium chloride waste.

About 20 years ago, a friend and I decided that one way to start the lake reclamation process would be to sponsor a fishing tournament. We had heard all sorts of rumors about the contaminants in the water—it fit the widely known description as one of the most polluted lakes in the nation—but he and I eventually convinced the commissioner to reopen Onondaga Lake for fishing. We thought it would start the process of getting the public to recognize the lake as a potential resource.

Cleaning up the lake's tributaries has been a big part of this. In 1991, we received an anonymous phone call that Beartrap Creek was being contaminated by a deicing agent used at the local airport. We went out and checked, and sure enough, it was contaminated. Our chapter -adopted the stream and pushed the state conservation department to address the problem, and the city ended up installing a new $10 million filtration system. In the past three years or so, we've seen a significant comeback of macroinvertebrates. The results have also been positive with the lake. While the fish population at one point was made up of over 90 percent carp, today we have more than 60 species of fish.

Looking back, I guess I've always enjoyed lakes and streams. I've been fortunate in that my interests in the outdoors and water quality happened to coincide with much of my work.

—As told to Tom Tiberio