Blog posts by FLOW team and guest writers
Last month, the International Joint Commission (IJC), created by the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty between the U.S. and Canada, released its first triennial assessment of Great Lakes water quality under a new iteration of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. In the Triennial Assessment of Progress (TAP), the IJC commended the two federal governments for… Read more »
Almost everyone agrees: the old state fish hatchery on the Au Sable River in Grayling is the worst place you could pick for a commercial fish farming operation. It is on the East Branch, just upstream from the famed Holy Waters, the heart of Michigan’s blue ribbon trout fishing industry, and the premier wild trout… Read more »
Our State’s leadership in the handling of Enbridge’s Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac has gone from bad to worse. In light of disclosures by Enbridge of a failed pipeline design and the refusal on the part of our State leaders to take action to prevent devastating harm to the Great Lakes, it is… Read more »
FLOW has contacted key Michigan lawmakers to ask them to defend the public’s Great Lakes waters and submerged lands from intrusion. Legislation before the House Committee on Natural Resources exceeds the Legislature’s powers and puts publicly owned waters and submerged lands at risk. S.B. 409 allows private riparian landowners to occupy Great Lakes submerged lands… Read more »
What do the Flint drinking water catastrophe and the recent agreement regarding the Enbridge pipeline at the Straits of Mackinac have in common? Both are the result of a gubernatorial administration with fundamental mistrust of the public it serves. In Flint, the Snyder Administration appointed an emergency manager to short-circuit democratic processes and act paternally… Read more »
Fort Gratiot County Park north of Port Huron bustles for a little more than three months of the year, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Large groups occupy the gazebos, families snatch up all the picnic tables, teens play Frisbee in the sand while kids rule a small playground, and the smell of cooking meat is… Read more »
The City of Flint, through its city council, just approved a deal to return to and stay on Detroit water, now managed and sold by the suburban Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA). This decision must be viewed as the next step, not the final outcome. Even though the city and residents will get the benefit… Read more »
Jim Maturen of Reed City is a lifelong conservationist who looked personally into the concern that Nestle’s water withdrawals are affecting critical and sensitive trout streams. He did it the old-fashioned way – he went out in the streams. We asked him for his observations. The controversy over Nestlé’s extraction of water in Osceola County… Read more »
What rights does the public have to access the shore? By deciding not to hear an appeal brought by a right-wing foundation on behalf of a coastal property owner, the U.S. Supreme Court has provided an answer, for now. The Court of Appeals decision whose challenge the Supreme Court refused to hear upheld a local… Read more »
Whose waterfront is it anyway? An important court case in Wisconsin will offer one answer to that question – – and it could have important implications for public access and open space in the redevelopment of Michigan’s and Great Lakes’ shorelines. The case, which is on appeal from a trial court that sided with the… Read more »
