Blog Posts

Blog posts by FLOW team and guest writers

Founding FLOW Board Member Royce Ragland: Public Trust Combines Policy, Stewardship, Theology and Philosophy

June 28, 2021

“It was 10 years ago that I first met Jim Olson, and I invited him to be a guest speaker for Green Elk Rapids,” recalls Royce Ragland, the organization’s co-founder and a founding FLOW board member. “He talked about his favorite thing—the public trust. I was just so taken with the idea. It’s an old thought. It combines everything from policy to stewardship to theology to philosophy. I loved it.”

Paddling for Change, from the Mackinac Bridge to Lansing

June 28, 2021

Childhood friends William Wright and Chris Yahanda wanted to do their part to protect the Great Lakes and to urge Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to shut down the Line 5 oil pipelines under the Straits of Mackinac. So they decided to paddle board from the governor’s mansion on Mackinac Island to the governor’s residence at the State Capitol in Lansing.

It’s Raining PFAS

June 23, 2021

By Dave Dempsey Every now and then an environmental news headline jumps out at you as though it were printed in 12-inch-tall type on a newspaper front page or web site. It’s not necessarily because of its significance when compared to other news, but because of the personal reaction it triggers. Such was the case… Read more »

Chicago Sewer-and-Stormwater Commission Sounds Alert on Water Markets

June 10, 2021

Last week, the Board of Commissioners of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD) unanimously approved a resolution affirming water as a human right and expressing concern about the trend toward treating water as a commodity. The resolution also affirms that “the water of the Great Lakes … shall remain in the public trust for the people of the Great Lakes region.” This resolution promises to be a milestone in the looming controversy over the creation of water futures markets.

FLOW to Host Webinar on Managing High Water & High Tension along the Great Lakes Shoreline

June 10, 2021

The public is invited to join FLOW on Tuesday, June 29, from 1:00 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. Eastern for a webinar—Managing High Water & High Tension along the Great Lakes Shoreline—that will provide frontline, scientific, regulatory, and legal insights into efforts at the state and local level to manage high waters and high tensions along Michigan’s Great Lakes shoreline.

Our Great Lakes – Hostage to the ‘Most Destructive Industrial Project in Human History’

June 3, 2021

Some 800 miles north of the Montana border, past vast prairie grasslands, clear, untroubled lakes, and pristine boreal forests, lies a place of profound devastation and desolation. Just north of Fort McMurray in Northeast Alberta, Canada, one encounters an abrupt alteration of the landscape—a ravaged wasteland of disturbed lands and metallic lakes of oil-sheened process waste. Welcome to the place where bitumen—a thick, viscous, oil-containing soil having the consistency of coffee grounds—is extracted for later upgrading and refining into tar sands oil, ultimately destined to cross the Great Lakes watershed by pipeline.