Blog posts by FLOW team and guest writers
Photo credit: Nancy May Happy Birthday to the Mackinac Bridge! Today marks its 61st birthday. The Mighty Mac, as it is affectionately known, opened to traffic on November 1, 1957. Perhaps no other piece of public infrastructure in Michigan evokes the same pride and sense of majesty as does the Mackinac Bridge. It draws tens… Read more »
The rush continues in Michigan’s lame-duck legislature to bind the future of the Mackinac Bridge to notorious oil-spiller Enbridge and its proposed private oil tunnel. A Republican-led Senate committee at an 8:15 a.m. hearing today (Wednesday, November 28) voted 3-2 along party lines to approve Senate Bill 1197 and advance it to the full Senate… Read more »
By Liz Kirkwood and Skip Pruss Substitute Bill SB 1197 continues to be riddled with faulty assumptions and logic that favor and bend towards Enbridge’s private corporate shareholder interests. Most glaring of all is the audacious and misguided underlying assertion that we humans will continue to rely on a fossil fuel based economy over the… Read more »
By Jim Olson “With my Grandma I like to walk along the beach and find Petoskey stones. With my Grandpa I like to go in Lake Michigan and body surf the waves,” my 11-year-old granddaughter Ava Bachmann reflected in late August when she stood with me along the shores of West Grand Traverse Bay. We… Read more »
Children play near a coal-fired smokestack in 1972—two years after the federal Clean Air Act was passed. Photo courtesy of Flickr.
We asked Skip Pruss, FLOW’s former board chair and former director of the Michigan Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth under former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm how incoming President Joe Biden and his cabinet of environmental all stars will combat the climate crisis and what the federal government’s effort could mean for Michigan and… Read more »
“I’ve spent my whole life surrounded by water, with the exception of spending time in the desert. Living on the desert floor in Tucson, like 25-35 square miles, this urban sprawl is happening, and there’s no requirement for people to demonstrate that they have access to water. I thought to myself, ‘How is this sustainable?’ It drive me to focus on water law,” said FLOW executive director Liz Kirkwood in this testimonial about the impact we’ve had during the past decade.
By Liz Kirkwood, FLOW Executive Director Because we are celebrating FLOW’s 10th anniversary throughout 2021, I have been reflecting with gratitude on how far we have come over the last decade—thanks to you and others in our community of supporters—in securing water justice throughout the Great Lakes. And because there is still so much we… Read more »
FLOW will host a livestream event – Groundwater: Making the Invisible Visible on World Water Day & Every Day – on Tuesday, March 22, 2022, from 12 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. EST. The online session will offer perspectives on the critical importance of our groundwater resources and the work of the Michigan Groundwater Table, which is convened by FLOW.
While the word “water” was not on the November 8 statewide general election ballot in Michigan, it was present on the ballot in various local communities and in different, more subtle ways across the Great Lakes State. In some of Michigan’s 276 cities and 1,240 townships, voters considered new regulations to safeguard water resources and… Read more »
