photo by Beth Price The Town of Long Beach, Indiana, runs along a wide stretch of sandy Lake Michigan beach just below the southwest corner of Michigan. Residences, and a series of public access corridors, extend to the shore from the town’s Lake Shore Drive. More homes extend inland along winding streets, hills, and vistas, all… Read more »
After last year’s election, newly chosen leaders and the old guard with a few weeks left in Lansing rushed in opposite directions. The Snyder administration and legislators intensified their unprecedented, legally questionable attacks on water, the environment, and public health during a lame-duck feeding frenzy. The new guard, Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana… Read more »
Some gifts come after the lights and music of the holiday season drift into the snowy weeks of the New Year. We at FLOW are delighted to share a gift just sent to us from Courtney Hammer, our first legal intern, who spent the summer of 2014 here in Traverse City helping us research law… Read more »
It’s January 2019, and it is time to unpack and undo the anti- water, air, environment, public health, and community laws passed by the Republican-run Legislature and signed by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder in the last two months of 2018. Lame-duck lawmakers and now ex-Governor Snyder blatantly followed a hit-list prepared by far-right, big business-supported… Read more »
Photo credit: Charles Brackett In the midst of multiple legislative attacks on environmental laws and natural resources that Michiganders cherish, it is tempting to despair. But at FLOW we seek positive, right solutions based on the principle that no matter who a person is, no matter her or his walk of life or political persuasion,… Read more »
photo: Beth Price What better way to divert attention on Election Day than to write something beyond political parties and votes—but wait, maybe it’s not so far beyond, as this election could make the difference for the future of the planet, and our children and grandchildren. On November 2, the U.S. Supreme Court, with its… Read more »
A Preface When I sat down to finish this post this morning on the news about Michigan’s agreement with Enbridge to consider replacing an aging, dangerous Line 5 crude oil pipeline through the Great Lakes basin, I realized that what I should really be writing about is yesterday’s dire warning by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel… Read more »
Today marks the beginning of a campaign to protect groundwater in Michigan and our surrounding states as the “Sixth Great Lake,” a lightning-bolt phrase promoted by Dave Dempsey, FLOW’s senior policy advisor and author of a sentinel groundwater report released by FLOW this week. In this second of a trilogy of reports published by FLOW… Read more »
Michigan Senator Gary Peters, ranking member of a Senate committee overseeing hazardous pipelines, held a public hearing in Traverse City, Michigan Monday, ground zero in a race to turn off Enbridge’s 65-year old Line 5 before it spills millions of gallons into the Straits of Mackinac and blackens the water, life, and economy of the… Read more »
“Water Justice Flows Like Water.”[1] Law professor Sprout D. Kapua’ala, borrowing from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I’ve Been to the Mountaintop speech in 1968 (“justice rolling down like waters”), captures decades of conflict over the streams and waters of Hawai’i, siphoned and dried from a century of withdrawals and diversion ditches cut across the landscape for… Read more »
