Blog Posts

Blog posts by FLOW team and guest writers

Great Lakes Proud

Great Lakes Proud (GLP) isn’t just a local brand, it’s national, even dabbling internationally (with stickers spotted in South Korea, Japan, Austria, and Croatia – to name a few)  – and the work it is doing locally is adding value fit for the scale. Since 2009, the Michigan-based business has donated over $100K to Great… Read more »

Skip the Straw

The production of plastic was first viewed as a miracle, the birth of a surprisingly durable material. But used as a disposable material, that durability is part of its downfall. Plastic degrades very slowly, and it often ends up in the environment and in the food chain. In 1950, the global market generated 1.7 million… Read more »

Our Public Water, Infrastructure and Health:  Here Come the Profiteers!

Our public water systems are in crisis. Every person and business in every city and town in the U.S. will face increasing competition for water, more and more repairs, improvements, and replacement of crumbling infrastructure or preventing illness or pollution. They will also face the wild card of increased frequency and intensity of rainfall and… Read more »

Public Trust Tuesday:  A Big Win for the Public Trust

FLOW’s organizing principle is the public trust doctrine.  What sounds like an exotic concept is quite simple.  This centuries-old principle of common law holds that there are some resources, like water and submerged lands, that by their nature cannot be privately owned.  Rather, this commons – including the Great Lakes — belongs to the public. … Read more »

Let’s Go to the Creek!

“Let’s go to the creek!” Wide eyes and an expectant smile stared up at my dad. Growing up with a state park behind our house, I felt the creek had a mystical quality. We would explore for what felt like days, sliding down the hill, peering in the fox den, but mostly just crashing through… Read more »

What a Difference 100 Years Makes

What a difference 100 years makes. In 1918, a US-Canadian commission reported on the condition of the boundary waters between the two countries with an emphasis on the connecting waters of the Great Lakes. In the words of the International Joint Commission, the situation was a disgrace. It was also fatal to thousands. At the… Read more »

Public Trust Tuesday: Shutting Down Line 5

FLOW’s organizing principle is the public trust doctrine.  What sounds like an exotic concept is quite simple.  This centuries-old principle of common law holds that there are some resources, like water and submerged lands, that by their nature cannot be privately owned.  Rather, this commons – including the Great Lakes — belongs to the public. … Read more »

You Can’t Spin This One

When a special interest group backs bad legislation, it’s almost par for the course that the group will try to doctor its proposal with seemingly innocuous rhetoric. But deplorable legislation now before the Michigan House of Representatives is so one-sided and anti-environmental that attempts by the State Chamber of Commerce to cloak it in good… Read more »

A Holistic View of the Public Trust Doctrine

FLOW’s organizing principle is the public trust doctrine.  What sounds like an exotic concept is quite simple.  This centuries-old principle of common law holds that there are some resources, like water and submerged lands, that by their nature cannot be privately owned.  Rather, this commons – including the Great Lakes — belongs to the public. … Read more »