This past year marked an extraordinary year for FLOW, as we celebrated a decade of keeping our water public and protected. In reflecting upon this past decade, we have much to be grateful for, even in these challenging times.
Fifty years ago, on December 11, 1971, 22 workers died in a tragic explosion while completing a tunnel designed to bring Lake Huron drinking water to the Detroit metropolitan area. The anniversary of the disaster was marked by a ceremony earlier this month. “We are honoring the 22 men who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our clean drinking water and they need to be remembered,” said Joel Archibald, business manager for a labor union that organized the ceremony.
A recently-released survey of residents of the Great Lakes watershed reveals strong support for government funding and actions to protect the Lakes, but also suggests the public believes the lakes are not in good shape.
When a book of history you’ve written becomes history itself, this not only makes you feel old, but also gives you a chance, in hindsight, to see how accurate it is. Twenty years ago, in 2001, the University of Michigan Press published “Ruin and Recovery: Michigan’s Rise as a Conservation Leader.” It was a book I’d long wanted to write. Based on 20 prior years of learning the environmental history of Michigan on the job, I attempted to put in perspective the good and bad in the state’s management of its natural resources.
As anyone who knows Terry Swier could attest, it was her clear-sighted commitment to principle and her conviction, grounded like the roots of an oak tree deep in the soil with branches wide in the sky, that stood behind Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation’s victory over Nestlé. “Who owns the water?” Terry asked, something she would keep asking for the next 20 years. Not Perrier or Nestlé. It belonged to the public.
“I’m thrilled to be surrounded by all of this water and humbled by the opportunity to keep it public and protected for all,” says Zach Welcker, FLOW’s first full-time legal director, who is responsible for building on FLOW’s legal power, policy acumen, and partnerships—especially among tribes, conservation groups, frontline communities, justice organizations, and scientists—to ensure the waters of the Great Lakes Basin are healthy, public, and protected for all.
“Our bodies are mostly water. Water connects us to everything around us that is alive,” says award-winning poet Alison Swan. “The water and the land are inseparable from one another. Stop and think to yourself: How does what’s happening to the land around this water impact the water supply of essentially the world? Because water flows all over the surface and below the surface of earth.”
By Liz Kirkwood Water is life. It is the resource that not only keeps us alive, but also powers everything we do on this small blue planet. Living here in the Great Lakes, we are stewards of some 20 percent of the planet’s fresh surface water. It is an enormous gift and an enormous responsibility,… excerpt-read-more" href="https://forloveofwater.org/securing-public-ownership-of-our-water-as-a-human-right-public-trust-and-defense-against-privatization/" title="ReadSecuring Public Ownership of Our Water as a Human Right, Public Trust, and Defense against Privatization“>Read more »
Michigan Technological University professor Nancy Langston is a nationally recognized environmental historian and the author of five books . In her latest, Climate Ghosts: Migratory Species in the Anthropocene, she explores the fate of three species historically found in the Great Lakes watershed: woodland caribou, common loons and lake sturgeon. Nancy reports on stresses imposed on these signature species by European colonization and now by climate change. Can we restore them? Perhaps, she answers, if we’re willing to make difficult choices. FLOW interviewed Langston recently by e-mail.
In the end, it took outside intervention to begin moving the people of Benton Harbor toward a clean, safe water supply this fall. Why? Despite three years of data showing that the city’s drinking water exceeded state standards for lead contamination, it wasn’t until the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center filed a petition with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on September 9 that the State of Michigan took decisive action to address the problem. The EPA followed suit with an order to the city on November 2 to improve disinfection and corrosion treatments at the water plant, monitor for disinfection byproducts, repair plant filters, and contract with a third party to study the long-term operation of the city’s drinking water system.
