Blog posts by FLOW team and guest writers
Carrie La Seur, FLOW Legal Director — Like most history, the story of central Michigan’s Pine River includes some unpleasant chapters. Jane Keon is the author of a recent one. Her 2015 book Tombstone Town is a dispatch from the frontlines of the fight for a livable planet. The tombstone of the title is real –… Read more »
On a snowy day, drivers feel relief when road salt helps clear the way of slippery spots. But, though necessary under certain circumstances, road salt is a major polluter of Michigan’s rivers, inland lakes and the Great Lakes. Winter Salt Week is an opportunity to learn about the environmental impacts of road salt and alternatives… Read more »
On the 40th anniversary of Michigan state government’s Office of the Great Lakes, its new State of the Great Lakes report provides an important narrative about the many outstanding efforts to protect and restore these world-class waters. But, as has been true with the previous 39 reports, it makes little effort to gauge the health… Read more »
An on-line tool provided by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) enables Michiganders to identify and map sites of environmental contamination in their neighborhoods or across the state. Called the Ride Mapper (an acronym for Remediation Information Data Exchange), the interactive tool displays as of January 15 of this year a… Read more »
January 14, 2025 Lansing, Mich. – Today, attorneys representing several tribal nations and environmental groups asked the Michigan Court of Appeals to reverse the Michigan Public Service Commission’s flawed December 2023 order approving a permit for Enbridge to build a tunnel for its Line 5 oil pipeline beneath the lakebed of the Straits of Mackinac…. Read more »
Like many of you, we here at FLOW are coming back together after the holidays to roll up our sleeves and think about our path forward in this new year. We had plenty of ups and downs over this past legislative session, and it is now time to re-group and chart our path forward. Let’s… Read more »
WATCH THE WEBINAR RECORDING Enbridge’s plan to bore a tunnel between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron to replace an underwater segment of Line 5 is costly and ill-advised, according to a new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). The report shows that the aging pipeline is servicing a shrinking… Read more »
In a major victory for citizens opposed to the packaging and sale of water as a commodity, advocates in southwest Ontario successfully campaigned for the shutdown of a water bottling plant in the township of Puslinch owned by BlueTriton, which bought the facility from Nestle in 2021. BlueTriton announced in November that it would shut… Read more »
By Carrie La Seur, Legal Director — The Pine River. It’s a name that ought to conjure up images of cool water riffles, children splashing on a hot day, the voices of kayakers carrying over the water, maybe a trout rising to a fly. But going on two decades now, since 2005, it’s been off-limits… Read more »
Nancy Langston is an interdisciplinary ecological historian and visual artist whose work fuses storytelling, visual art, and environmental history to grapple with the unsettling contradictions of climate change in the boreal north. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita at Michigan Technological University, and she is working on her 6th book, Reindeer on the Run (Yale University… Read more »
