Tag: great lakes

Skip the Straw

Published on February 23rd, 2018 by - Blog Posts

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 tons of plastic. This amount has been steadily rising, reaching 300 million tons in 2013. A tremendous amount of this plastic is disposable and completely avoidable.

The fourth Friday of every February is Skip the Straw Day. This day originated in Michigan, proposed by Whitehall Middle School students who were concerned about the impact of the straws on the environment.

The Great Lakes are a significant area of concern for plastic waste, and plastic straws are among the top ten most frequently collected items during Great Lakes beach cleanups. One sweep of a fairly well maintained Great Lakes beach resulted in 414 straws in just a couple of hours. In 2016, 29,500 straws were recorded as part of cleanups.

What you can do:

  • Skip the Straw. Often, a drink is served at a restaurant with a straw (or sometimes two) simply for decoration. When ordering a drink, you can ask for no straw.
  • Use a reusable straw. Some straws are made of reusable materials such as glass or steel. If a straw is needed or desired, opt for one of these instead.
  • Make an impact. If you are serving a drink, ask if a straw is preferred. Encourage businesses to switch to compostable straws or to go strawless entirely.

Americans use 500 million straws every day. This is entirely avoidable. It is time to move away from these single-use plastics that end up in our Great Lakes.

Public Trust Tuesday:  A Big Win for the Public Trust

Published on February 20th, 2018 by - Public Trust Tuesday

byzantine-empire-public-land.-trusts

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.  And governments, like the State of Michigan, have a responsibility to protect public uses of these resources.  We explicitly address public trust concerns on what we’re calling Public Trust Tuesday.

Score a big win for the public trust doctrine.

In what can be termed literally a landmark decision, the Indiana Supreme Court on February 14 ruled that the state’s public trust rights to the Lake Michigan shore extend to the ordinary high-water mark.

FLOW founder Jim Olson called the decision “exciting” and said it was an even bigger affirmation of the public trust doctrine than a 2005 Michigan Supreme Court ruling because it carefully explained the basis of sovereign public trust ownership by the state.

The ruling came in a case brought by landowners who sued the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, seeking exclusive access to all land up to the water’s edge. Public trust advocates argued that Indiana received land below the ordinary high-water mark at statehood under the public trust doctrine, and that an act of the legislature is required to deed such land to a private party.

But Olson said the Court should also have articulated a list of traditional and incidental public trust uses, like swimming, bathing, and staging, sitting or other uses that are incidental and necessary to those traditional uses that are protected by the public trust doctrine. “In finding ‘at a minimum’ walking the beach below the ordinary high-water mark is protected, the Court exercised restraint and left the scope of public trust uses unclear until enumerated by the legislature,” he said.

“The public trust is a dynamic and flexible doctrine, dependent on changing public needs and uses of public trust lands or waters,” Olson said. “Certainly, walking and fishing were predominant in earlier centuries, but the use of our public shores and beaches below the ordinary high-water mark for access and their public use and enjoyment has encompassed swimming, canoeing, kayaking, surfing, kite boarding, and similar uses. These uses for safety and convenience necessarily include staging, sitting, and even sunbathing incident to those traditionally protected uses.

The “public trust doctrine is a court-made doctrine common law doctrine, so the Court was well within its traditional judicial powers to enumerate those uses rather than defer to the legislature,” he added.

Trump Administration: Importance of Great Lakes Cleanup Equal to Hosting a Military Parade

Published on February 19th, 2018 by - Blog Posts

The Trump Administration on February 14 revealed that President Donald Trump’s proposed military parade, inspired by his attendance at the Bastille Day celebration last July in Paris, would cost taxpayers as much as $30 million.

While there’s been broad criticism of the appropriateness of such a display by the world’s sole military superpower, particularly in the context of federal budget deficits, it was the $30 million figure that stuck with me.

That’s because just two days earlier, the administration released its proposed $4.4 trillion fiscal year 2019 budget, which would severely cut core Great Lakes programs as well as funding for the federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, charged with implementing them.

Of key concern to FLOW and other Great Lakes policy groups is the proposed 90% cut from fiscal year 2017 budget levels to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI), which helps communities clean up toxic pollution, reduce polluted runoff, fight invasive species such as Asian carp, and restore fish and wildlife habitat. Funding for the GLRI would be slashed from $300 million down to just… $30 million.

Thus, in the course of two days, the administration had equated the importance of restoring and protecting the world’s largest surface freshwater system with hosting a one-time military display.

Thankfully, proposed cuts have drawn bipartisan scorn from Michigan’s congressional delegation, which successfully protected the GLRI from elimination in last year’s budget. Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, released a statement saying, “Michigan deserves better than this. The health of our Great Lakes must be a higher priority.”

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing, who co-authored the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative in 2010, pointed to the critical role that clean water plays in our economy, with more than 700,000 Michigan jobs – fully 1-in-5 jobs in the state – tied to water resources. Michigan projects have received more than $600 million in funding from the initiative since its start.

It’s the same success story across the watershed, where the Great Lakes generate more than 1.5 million jobs and $60 billion in wages annually, support a $7 billion fishing economy, and provide drinking water to more than 40 million people.

Kelly Thayer

Communities across the Great Lakes region are benefiting from economic recovery and re-investment thanks to the GLRI. Full implementation of the initiative is projected to generate $50 billion in long-term economic benefits for the region and a 2:1 return on investment, according to the Great Lakes Commission.

Visionary leaders are calling for a continued Midwest transformation from Rust Belt to Water Belt. Getting there requires steady, long-term investment and oversight – just the opposite of short-term grandstanding at a parade.

What a Difference 100 Years Makes

Published on February 14th, 2018 by - Blog Posts

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 time, many communities drew their drinking water from rivers into which upstream communities dumped their typically untreated sewage. Predictably, disease resulted. Typhoid and cholera outbreaks were not rare. 

Among the boundary waters studied were the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers. The Commission also compiled health statistics from communities relying on the two waterways for drinking water, including Port Huron, St. Clair, Marine City, Algonac, Detroit, River Rouge, Ecorse, Wyandotte and Trenton. The results were striking: typhoid fever death rates were highest in cities whose community water supplies were drawn from the foulest water.

The St. Clair River was too polluted for drinking without extensive treatment for 34 miles south of Port Huron. Even worse was the Detroit River. “From Fighting Island to the mouth of the river the water is grossly polluted and totally unfit as a source of water supply…Unfortunately, Wyandotte, Trenton and Amherstburg are taking their water supplies from this part of the river,” the Commission said. 

Those on land weren’t the only victims. In 1907, a steamer traveling the Great Lakes pulled drinking water from the Detroit River, resulting in 77 cases of typhoid fever. In 1913, on three Great Lakes vessels carrying 750 people, there were 300 cases of diarrhea, 52 cases of typhoid and seven deaths.

The report helped spur governments along the border, including Detroit and downstream communities, to chlorinate drinking water supplies and save lives.

We look back on such practices as primitive. But 100 years from now, which of our practices will seem primitive to our descendants?

Have we really come so far in a century, or are we creating a new generation of problems with the same shortsightedness as our ancestors? The public trust doctrine, with its intergenerational concerns and duties, can help us prevent and resolve the mistreatment of our waters.

Public Trust Tuesday: Shutting Down Line 5

Published on February 13th, 2018 by - Public Trust Tuesday

byzantine-empire-public-land.-trusts

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.  And governments, like the State of Michigan, have a responsibility to protect public uses of these resources.  We explicitly address public trust concerns on what we’re calling Public Trust Tuesday.

The public trust doctrine is at the heart of FLOW’s efforts to shut down the antiquated Line 5 oil and gas pipelines that span the lakebed at the Straits of Mackinac.  Enbridge, the pipeline owner and operator, has access to the lakebed only because the State of Michigan provided an easement to the company’s predecessor in 1953, subject to the requirements of the public trust doctrine.

Under the terms of that easement, the State, acting as a trustee of the public interest in the Great Lakes, cannot allow impairment of public uses of the affected Great Lakes waters and submerged land.  Further, the State authorized the easement subject to Enbridge exercising “the due care of a reasonably prudent person for the safety and welfare of all persons and of all public and private property.”  Multiple disclosures by Enbridge of shoddy stewardship of Line 5 have demonstrated the lack of due care.

Last week, FLOW submitted to the State six pages of comments and additional exhibits making the case that Enbridge’s patchwork approach to maintaining Line 5 has fallen well short of that standard.  Further, FLOW argued that the major changes in structural support for the pipeline contemplated by Enbridge constitute a new project for the purposes of review by the state.  This requires the State to insist that Enbridge demonstrate the absence of feasible and prudent alternatives to the proposed pipeline support changes – including alternate routes for the transport of oil and gas.

FLOW concluded, “the burden rests with Enbridge – not the State of Michigan or its citizens – to establish that there are no unacceptable risks or likely effects to waters, fishing, navigation, commerce, and public and private uses, and that no feasible and prudent alternatives to Line 5 based on existing or feasible capacity of overall pipeline system in the Great Lakes; the required scope of this showing of no alternatives includes determination of whether existing or improved pipeline infrastructure within the Enbridge system into and out of Michigan are a feasible and prudent alternative.”

You can read the full comment letter here.

A Holistic View of the Public Trust Doctrine

Published on February 6th, 2018 by - Public Trust Tuesday

byzantine-empire-public-land.-trusts

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.  And governments, like the State of Michigan, have a responsibility to protect public uses of these resources.  We explicitly address public trust concerns on what we’re calling Public Trust Tuesday. Today’s thoughts are from FLOW’s founder, Jim Olson.

This winter marks the fourth year of the water policy course at our Water Studies Institute, a two, four, and post-graduate degree program at Northwestern Michigan College. Each year is a cycle, with fresh information, insights and ideas. The approach to this new course is to explore and view water and the risks to water – locally or globally – holistically; that is, to see human behavior and risks in the context of the earth’s water cycle.  The water cycle consists of several arcs that make up the whole– precipitation, runoff, and percolation into and through soil to groundwater, groundwater flow to seeps, wetlands, springs, creeks, streams, lakes, rivers, oceans, evaporation, hydrosphere, condensation, and full cycle to precipitation. If we understand the relationship between human and natural effects and impacts on our hydrological cycle – our water – we can begin to find solutions to the threats to life, earth, people, and communities.

Water runs through every part of our life on this earth. What we do through impact on or use of water affects every arc of the water cycle. If pollutants discharge to groundwater, the groundwater transports the pollutants, like nitrates from fertilizers or pesticides, to streams or lakes, and evaporation lifts some toxic chemicals from pesticides into the atmosphere, then they fall back to earth and to our lakes, streams, and percolate into groundwater somewhere else. Several decades ago, a carcinogen known as toxaphene used on cotton crops in the southeastern U.S. was found on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. PCBs used by the electrical utility industry as a heat retardant in transformers hundreds of miles from where they were used. These chemicals show up in fish, other wildlife, and humans.

As previous public trust articles in this column have artfully noted, our navigable lakes and streams, including our inland seas like the Great Lakes, are owned by each state in a public trust for the benefit of citizens to protect our public rights in these public trust waters for navigation, fishing, swimming, boating, drinking water, and essential sustenance. Under the principles of this public trust doctrine, no one, including our government as trustee has a right to measurably impair or subordinate these preferred public trust uses; nor can government allow another person to privatize these public rights and uses for private gain. If a member of the public wants to fish or canoe in a public trust stream, private landowners along the stream enjoy their shore rights as private landowners, but they cannot interfere with these public uses; nor could a landowner pollute these public waters to the point it impairs these public uses or public health.

In the 1980s, a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision in Just v Marinette County held that wetlands could not be filled or dredged if the activity impaired public trust uses and aquatic resources in an adjacent stream. It was understood that wetlands and lakes or streams were arcs of a whole that were inextricably connected. Not long after, the California Supreme Court decided in what is known as the Mono Lake case that Los Angeles couldn’t divert water for its city water supply from a non-navigable tributary upgradient from the lake, because it impaired the wildlife, aquatic life, and public use and enjoyment of the public trust lake. In other words, an activity upstream that impairs the downstream public trust body of water violates the public trust doctrine as much as if you discharged pollutants or diverted water from a pipe directly from the downstream water.

If human activity including industry, farming, land developments on land or near water harms or impairs downstream public trust waters, is that upstream? And if it violates the public trust, is it a reasonable or lawful use of land?

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, courts in Hawaii, Wisconsin, California, and Vermont have extended the protection of public trust waters to groundwater. The Hawaiian courts viewed groundwater and lakes and streams as inseparable in the same way as the earlier Mono Lake and Just decisions, and declared them to be subject to the duties and rights of protection under the public trust doctrine. Hawaiian farming and development interests could not rob groundwater and lower the levels of streams where it degraded or impaired public trust rights and uses of the stream. In Wisconsin, the state could not permit a town’s groundwater withdrawal without considering and limiting impairment to the public trust uses of an adjacent lake. In Vermont, a landfill could not leach chemicals to groundwater where it is determined it impairs public trust wildlife, fish, or uses.

In the last few years, courts now recognize that there is little difference from a land use that discharges pollutants to or removes water directly from a stream, and a land use that discharges or leaves pollutants on the land, or alters the land through construction that robs water that would otherwise flow to the stream. Hawaiian courts have nullified zoning permits issued to land developers where local governments have failed to consider the effect of the change in land use on adjacent or hydrologically connected public trust streams. Just recently, a court granted citizens the right to intervene in a land use permit proceeding to protect their public trust interests in nearby public trust waters. Last month, here in Michigan, a trial judge in Otsego County recognized that anglers had standing to contest privatization by a private fish farm of the public waters of the Au Sable River.

To come full circle around the water cycle, last fall a federal district court in Oregon in a case called Juliana v United States ruled that children of families whose use and enjoyment of public trust in streams and rivers were or would be impaired from increasingly frequent and more intense storm events or droughts could bring a court action against the federal government for failing to take stronger actions to protect their public trust rights attributable to the U.S. portion of human induced greenhouse gases.

When what we humans do to land, the hydrosphere, groundwater or our lakes and streams impairs our fundamental rights in public trust waters for sustenance, survival, health, safety, fishing, boating, or drinking water, now and for future generations, we are subject to the paramount rights of all citizens and communities protected by the public trust doctrine.

Think about it. Private landowners and their uses of water sit side-by-side with these public uses protected by the public trust doctrine. Both private landowners and the public depend on the common water that runs through and defines their watersheds, livelihood, health, and quality of life. What value does land have if the use of land or water destroys the common waters that sustains the private and public or community uses in a community?

Jim Olson

So what does this mean for us in a city or rural village in the Great Lakes region? It means that collectively we can use the existing framework for local planning and zoning, water and health ordinances, and redesign local or watershed local regulations and infrastructure like water services, roads, development, stromwater and erosion controls. It means that the focal point of this redesign is water centered on a single backstop principle— the public trust in our water commons that calls for protection of water quality and quantity from impairment in each community. If we do this, we will make good decisions in our communities and the world at large about health, food, energy, land use, infrastructure and quality of life for current and future generations.

Considering Productivity on World Wetland Day

Published on February 2nd, 2018 by - Blog Posts

Today, February 2, is World Wetland Day.

A 2012 UN Report says from 1900 to 2012, the world lost 50% of its wetlands.

As humans, we value our productivity. We want to gut the unnecessary and utilize every minute and every inch to its full potential. However, when we aim for 100% productivity, our first instinct will often lead to less productivity.

The worker who works 24 hours each day will not last long. Productivity, if not the worker, will die quickly. It is crucial to eat, to sleep, and to exercise to reach any desirable level.

Our land is similar. If we use every acre of land in a manner that at first seems the most productive, it will result in a mess of roads, farmland, and buildings that is likewise unsustainable.

Wetlands are considered to be “among the most productive ecosystems in the world.” The benefits are many. The wetlands of the Great Lakes region support over $50 billion of recreational activities each year. A surprising number of species are dependent on wetlands specifically for survival. They protect against storms and flooding. Wetlands also function as a natural filter to keep our Great Lakes water clean, which is now more important than ever. Our lakes are great, and the resulting wetlands are spectacular and quite beneficial.

In Michigan, half of these wetlands have been drained and filled in the past couple of centuries. For newcomers at that time, this land was seen as unproductive, in the context that it could not be cultivated. The solution was to replace the wetlands with land that could be cultivated. Today, more wetlands are lost to development – parking lots, stores, roads, and more.

Nayt Boyt

Whether you see Michigan’s wetland areas as now being half full or half empty, the dangers remain. Today, many efforts are being made to create wetlands – to return land back to wetlands – which can be difficult to do. Despite these efforts, the overall amount of wetlands in Michigan is still declining. It would seem that the most productive method is not to remove them in the first place.

The Public Trust Doctrine in Action

Published on January 30th, 2018 by - Public Trust Tuesday

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Editor’s note: 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.  And governments, like the State of Michigan, have a responsibility to protect public uses of these resources.  We explicitly address public trust concerns on what we’re calling Public Trust Tuesday. Today’s thoughts are from FLOW’s board chair, Skip Pruss.

“We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security and women’s empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all.”   — Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, 2011 Address

It’s time that we better manage our natural resources by broadly applying the Public Trust Doctrine.

Our water, air, and other public resources are facing multiple threats and unprecedented challenges. The threats to our environment are complex and systemic, and current government efforts are inadequate and ineffective.  The public trust doctrine provides government with a framework to identify, comprehend, and address environmental threats at their root cause.

Last week at World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, political and business leaders, social activists, and philanthropy came together to assess the current state of the world and prioritize problems and solutions.

To inform the discussions of the attending global elite and set the agenda, a series of reports issued including Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution for Life on Land and The Global Risk Report 2018.  The former indicates that a survey of earth systems science finds that stresses on the planet’s environmental systems have worsened considerably in the last 25 years.  The Global Risk Report – which has measured and categorized global risk annually for the last 13 years – found that environmental challenges from water scarcity, climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution of air, soil and water now pose the greatest global dangers in terms of both potential catastrophic impacts and imminent threats.

The WEF warns that governments thus far are ill-equipped to respond to complex interactions and systemic threats that can quickly cascade into calamitous and costly events.

In the Great Lakes Region, the WEF’s warnings are validated by new emerging science:

A broader approach to address these growing systemic threats is needed; one that focuses on the public interest and on protecting human health and the environment as a fundamental guiding principle.

The public trust doctrine starts with the proposition that the natural resources on which we all depend – our water, air, forests and wildlife – are essential to our wellbeing and must be protected from impairment and degradation.

Our nation’s highest courts have long embraced the public trust doctrine as an overarching legal principle.  In a landmark case involving Lake Michigan, the United States Supreme Court spoke unequivocally to government’s fundamental duty to protect public trust resources:

“The State can no more abdicate its trust over property in which the whole people are interested like navigable waters and the soils beneath them…than it can abdicate its police powers in the administration of justice and the preservation of peace.”

The Michigan Supreme Court has found that the doctrine establishes a “high, solemn and perpetual duty” of proactive environmental stewardship.  The protections afforded by the public trust doctrine are recognized by Michigan’s Constitution, which states: “The conservation and development of the natural resources of the state are hereby declared to be of paramount public concern in the interest of the health, safety and general welfare of the people.”  Wisconsin’s highest court has found that the public trust doctrine “requires the law-making body to act in all cases where action is necessary, not only to preserve the trust but to promote it,” and has applied the doctrine to protect public rights in sailing, rowing, canoeing, bathing, fishing, hunting, skating, and “scenic beauty.”  California’s highest court has found that the doctrine demands that the best science must inform government’s responsibility to protect public trust resources and that prior governmental decisions must even be reexamined in light of new scientific knowledge if such information indicates public trust interests are affected.

The Public Trust Doctrine at Work

Our nation’s courts have been clear and unambiguous, stating repeatedly that the public trust doctrine creates an affirmative legal duty to protect public resources from degradation and impairment.  So how might government apply the public trust doctrine to address complex and challenging environmental threats?

The doctrine operates as a shield to prevent activities that impair the public’s interest in public trust resources or conveys public rights in public trust resources to private parties.  But beyond that, the public trust doctrine also empowers local, state and national governments to proactively manage and supervise activities that threaten public resources.

It provides, for instance, government with legal authority to require septic systems to be inspected and repaired if they are failing.  If fish or aquatic resources are threatened by harmful wastes or chemicals, government is empowered to stop the pollution at its source.  When it was found in the 1980’s that the operation of the Ludington Pump Storage Facility killed large numbers of fish in Lake Michigan, the then attorney general asked the courts to require measures that abated the fish mortality.  The Michigan Court of Appeals stated, “Because the fish resources destroyed by the plant are held in trust by the state for the people, the state is empowered to bring a civil action to protect those resources.”

Similarly, Attorney General Bill Schuette could bring and action to close Line 5, the 65-year-old oil pipeline crossing the Straights of Mackinaw, because it presents a known catastrophic risk to public trust resources and waters of the Great Lakes.

The public trust doctrine could be used to address climate change by requiring utilities to transition to available, low-cost, zero-carbon energy resources.  Because clean energy is now widely acknowledged to be the energy source of the future, there is no good reason to allow the continued loading of acid gases, heavy metals, and carbon pollution into our Great Lakes, rivers and streams.

Skip Pruss

The public trust doctrine will become increasingly important as issues of water availability, water quality, and water scarcity become more frequent and more contentious.  The doctrine could provide a means of directly countering the present actions of the federal government to dismantle environmental laws and regulations.  The doctrine can also enable communities to maintain high standards for the protection of natural resources and environmental values while being proactive in preventing problems before they arise.

The public trust doctrine is uniquely compelling as a means to address large-scale complex problems.  With so much at stake, a broad application of the public trust doctrine is needed now.

The State of the Great Lakes

Published on January 24th, 2018 by - Blog Posts

Are the Great Lakes getting better or worse?

Any good scientist will tell you that’s a short question with a long answer, a simple question with a complicated answer.  And after a half hour of trying to explain it to you, they will have made it only a little simpler.  If you’re lucky.

So why is it so difficult to create a report card informing the interested public about the condition of the Great Lakes?

It’s not that people haven’t been trying.  Beginning in the 1990s, the many talented Great Lakes scientists and government agency staff presented data on so-called indicators at State of the Lake Ecosystem Conference (SOLEC) gatherings.  They offered up scores of measures including the health of benthic organisms, levels of chemical contaminants in herring gull eggs, the number of public beach closings, the quality of finished drinking water, phosphorus concentrations in water, toxic air pollutants deposited to water, and more.  Each indicator had a rationale, and most had solid data to back them up. 

But there were too many – over 100 at the beginning, and approximately 80 as late as 2011.  The array of likely and potential indicators was so large that it constituted an unfathomable Great Lakes report card.  How to simplify?

While the scientists wrestled with their data and discussed which indicators best told the story of Great Lakes health, taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of U.S. and Canadian dollars without lucid measures of whether they were paying for improvement.  Pressure was building.  And something happened.

Following the 2011 SOLEC, organizers created a highlights report to distill what the indicators said.  Organized around the three principal results sought by governments – protection of the physical, chemical and biological integrity of the Great Lakes ecosystem – the report contained a clear verdict – to a point:

Water quality status is fair, and the trend is deteriorating.

Aquatic-dependent life status is fair, and the trend is deteriorating.

Landscapes and natural processes status is fair, and the trend is improving.

Two out of three indicator groupings deteriorating?  No rocket scientists were needed to explain that one.  But “aquatic-dependent life” is a term not many members of the public could define.

The highlights report put it this way: “The overall deteriorating trend for aquatic-dependent life is a result of decreasing preyfish populations, the declining population of Diporeia (a source of food for small fish), and the declining populations of many coastal wetland species. The food web has been drastically altered.”

As the statement suggests, judgments about a profoundly complex natural system are themselves complicated.  They address matters and species that generalists never consider.  It’s no wonder that the experts have resisted simplifying the ecosystem to an A through E elementary school style report card.

Although publicly available, the data and conclusions in the highlights report were not widely broadcast.  You had to look for them on the Internet. 

It was still not a report card, but governments and scientists were getting there.

The International Joint Commission devoted considerable time to prodding the Canadian and U.S. governments to narrow the list, recommending 16 indicators – but 41 “measures.”  One recommended indicator was persistent, bioaccumulative toxins in biota, but consisted of two measures, chemicals in whole fish and chemicals in herring gull eggs and bald eagles.  It was a step toward simplification, but it demonstrated that even when bringing the number of indicators down, governments and scientists would and perhaps could go only so far.

Dave Dempsey

A report card is still important.  Without it, the public would be left to draw conclusions based on hunches, anecdotes or a misleading façade.  For example, clearer water means healthier water, right?  Not necessarily. Invasive zebra mussels, by consuming plankton in the water column, clarified it, but no one seriously argued that invasive mussels were a good thing.  The plankton they consumed would ordinarily have fed native prey fish.

The report card effort, like almost everything else bearing on the health of the Great Lakes, pivots on how much work citizens are willing – or able – to do in understanding the waters they love.  We must meet the scientists halfway. 

Public Trust Tuesday: A Spreading Stain

Published on January 23rd, 2018 by - Public Trust Tuesday

byzantine-empire-public-land.-trusts

FLOW’s organizing principle is the public trust doctrine.  What sounds like an exotic concept is quite simple.  This 1500-year-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.  And governments, like the State of Michigan, have a responsibility to protect public uses of these resources.  We explicitly address public trust concerns on what we’re calling Public Trust Tuesday.

New York’s Love Canal was once an instantly recognizable label to most Americans.  In 1980, after toxic waste from an old chemical dump began to ooze up in the yards of a housing development built atop the dump, authorities evacuated the neighborhood.  Love Canal became a national symbol of chemical mismanagement, and the impetus for the Superfund cleanup program.

Michigan officials looking for toxic waste dumps and spill sites affecting groundwater found them everywhere.  That, coupled with public concern about everything from health effects to depressed property values, prompted the Legislature and voters to kick in more than $1 billion in state funds for groundwater cleanup.

And then something happened.

In 1995, state policy changed.  Instead of striving to remove all contamination, Michigan went to a risk-based approach – meaning contamination could remain in the ground if means could be put to work to limit the exposure of human beings to these poisons.  These means could be everything from a concrete cap atop contaminated soil to a local ordinance prohibiting the drilling of new wells into contaminated groundwater. 

That saved businesses legally responsible for the contamination considerable money, but it also fostered the spread of contaminants in groundwater in many locations – often groundwater once used for drinking water.

Some areas with spreading contamination have recently attracted media attention, including sites associated with Wurtsmith Air Force Base, Wolverine Worldwide and Mancelona.

The Michigan DEQ estimates that contaminated groundwater is coming out of the ground and discharging to lakes, streams or wetlands at approximately 1,000 locations in Michigan.  It’s as if 1,000 new (and sloppy) chemical plants were sited in Michigan and were allowed to have lax or no controls on the pollution they are sending into our common waters.

The public trust doctrine holds that certain natural resources like navigable waters are preserved in perpetuity for public use and enjoyment, and that government has a duty to safeguard these uses as a trustee on behalf of the public.  By allowing contaminated groundwater to spread and pollute surface water, the State of Michigan has failed to fulfill its public trust obligations.  It’s not only a breach of the public trust in water, it’s a potentially grave threat to the health of our citizens.