Nancy Langston is an interdisciplinary ecological historian and visual artist whose work fuses storytelling, visual art, and environmental history to grapple with the unsettling contradictions of climate change in the boreal north. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita at Michigan Technological University, and she is working on her 6th book, Reindeer on the Run (Yale University… Read more »
This month, Michigan House Rep. Rachel Hood (D-81) and Rep. Donavan McKinney (D-14) introduced important bills (HB 6273, 6274), based on FLOW’s model legislation, that would impose a $0.25 per gallon royalty on bottled drinking water extracted from Michigan’s publicly-held water resources (including groundwater), and create a Water Trust Fund. The Fund would use the… Read more »
By Carrie La Seur FLOW Legal Director — When I ask them how they feel about the Pine, their local waters – , people who’ve lived in Gratiot County, Michigan all their lives – remember childhood summers spent swimming in the mill pond behind the dam at Alma. That’s not possible anymore. Fall rains and… Read more »
The current chair of Michigan’s Natural Resources Commission (NRC), Tom Baird is a retired attorney who was born and raised in Grand Rapids, practiced law in Lansing, and currently lives in Elk Rapids. Throughout life his passions have been conservation and the environment. This led to various roles as board member of FLOW and in… Read more »
What is the “lame duck” session in Lansing? Lame duck is a legislative session that begins after a November election but before new members take the oath of office in January. ‘Lame duck’ refers to the fact that many legislators voting in November and December are retiring or were defeated and are considered lame ducks…. Read more »
This week we acknowledged the 49th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald’s sinking – the doomed freighter that met the November gales early and sank in Lake Superior in 1975. Gordon Lightfoot’s hit song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” (which many of you are mentally humming as we speak) is filled with haunting lyrics and… Read more »
I’ll be honest: Wednesday was a hard day. While there are a few silver linings, our uphill climb to protect and preserve the waters of the Great Lakes Basin just got a little bit steeper. Journalists, political scientists, and social media keyboard warriors will conjure many pixels over the days and weeks ahead, seeking to understand… Read more »
By Carrie La Seur FLOW Legal Director I first encountered the Pine River of central Michigan in May 2024, a season when I was reading Wendell Berry’s The Way of Ignorance as meditation. The robins were nesting a second time on the drain pipe of our house outside Traverse City and indigo buntings had taken… Read more »
I recently spoke before a lively and well-informed audience at the St. Clair Public Library in Port Huron. As is always the case, when I opened the floor for questions and comments, a dozen arms shot up. Everyone had thoughtful and important things to say, but most of the questions boiled down to two major… Read more »
In these times of partisan division, it’s important to recognize that one issue has united Michigan voters for over 50 years: Four times since 1968, they have approved by large margins the issuance of general obligation bonds to pay for critical environmental needs. But the last such proposal reached the ballot in 2002. Why? It’s… Read more »
