Daniel Macfarlane is a professor in the School of Environment, Geography and Sustainability at WMU. His book “The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History” was published in 2024, but Macfarlane’s media whirlwind didn’t start until President Donald Trump released an executive order on August 27 to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.”
He said his phone started blowing up with interview requests shortly after the executive order was announced. When he spoke with WMUK, Macfarlane was in Toronto, fresh off an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
“Lake Ontario is the only lake that doesn't touch Michigan. So, I interestingly picked the one Great Lake Michiganders don't care as much about," Macfarlane said.
But he said that’s not necessarily the case anymore after the renaming efforts. Macfarlane was born and raised in Canada, and lives and works in the United States. He said the reaction from most people he's spoke to on both sides of the border have been "pretty uniformly 'laugh-out-loud'".
"I think everyone thinks it's very ridiculous," Macfarlane said. "Even the sort of conservative parts of Canada that are a little more sympathetic to Trump seem to be — I don't think — too happy about this."
Macfarlane's book details the environmental and cultural history of Lake Ontario, including the early indigenous peoples of North America who were the first to interact with the lake and its resources.
Macfarlane said the name “Lake Ontario” is an English version of an indigenous word that means “lake of shining waters” or “beautiful lake”.
"Europeans even arriving into the Great Lakes Basin, they adopted that name fairly quickly in the New France era when the French were controlling Lake Ontario — well, they weren't really controlling it. Indigenous peoples were still the ones controlling it, but the French thought they did according to their maps. But they tried calling it a few different things like Lac Frontenac or Lac Saint-Louis, but that never stuck. So before the US and Canada became countries, it was already firmly named as Lake Ontario, and that's what both sides — or all political jurisdictions were calling it. So, there's that long history that predates the United States," Macfarlane said.
He said Lake Ontario is also often considered a "culturally Canadian" lake due to the fact that such a high percentage of Canadians live near the lake along the US-Canada border.
“As I argue in the book, I mean aside from the fact that Michiganders don't touch Lake Ontario, hardly any Americans do. It's upstate New York, it's fairly sparsely populated. The Ontario side is the most densely populated part of all of Canada. A quarter of Canadians live there," Macfarlane said.
Macfarlane and other experts say the United States doesn’t have legal rights to rename the lake because it is jointly controlled by Canada and the US and is also named Lake Ontario in several international documents and treaties.
He hopes the media attention from Lake Ontario’s renaming will bring heightened attention to environmental conservation efforts in the Lake Ontario basin.
