Tag: University of Michigan

Earth Day Against the Backdrop of the Events of 1970

Published on April 15th, 2020 by - Blog Posts, News

Organizers of the original Earth Day celebration at U-M reunite 50 years later. Photo courtesy of University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability

By Lana Pollack

Lana Pollack has served as President and CEO of the Michigan Environmental Council, U.S. Section Chair of the International Joint Commission, and a three-term state senator.

The first Earth Day celebration at University of Michigan did not wait until April 22, 1970, the date Wisconsin’s Senator Gaylord Nelson had set for environmental teach-ins across the country. In Ann Arbor, this history-changing observation blasted off March 11 when 15,000 people jammed U-M’s Crisler Arena, and thousands more crowded its parking lot. The four-day happening was sponsored by a new U-M organization, Environmental Action for Survival of the Planet (ENACT), and it was successful beyond the wildest dreams of its young organizers.

By the time this Earth Day precursor closed, 50,000 people had attended 125 events, virtually all of which had been amply covered by national press. Determined to be inclusive, ENACT’s organizers invited and accepted requests to speak from a dizzyingly diverse collection of high-profile individuals ranging from the avuncular Arthur Godfrey to the all-but nude cast of the musical Hair and top-of-the-charts singer Gordon Lightfoot. Headline environmentalist Barry Commoner was joined by Michigan’s Governor William Milliken, the University’s President Robben Fleming (exceptionally adept at avoiding conflict by giving voice to student concerns), the presidents of both Dow Chemical and the United Auto Workers, along with environmental leaders from around the country and of course Senator Gaylord Nelson. Almost every University School and department sponsored a workshop, lecture or symposium on environmental issues related to its discipline.

Not surprisingly, as U-M had been a focal point for many of the white-hot 1960s protests, this environmental happening did not want for a generous dose of zaniness mixed with serious social criticism. A blue Ford Mustang was put on trial in the center of campus. In spite of arguments energetically presented in defense of the accused car (the auto industry was the backbone of Michigan’s economy), the Mustang was found “guilty of murder of the American public.”  Its sentence was death by sledge hammers, with hundreds of observers cheering the executioners.

Somehow, I missed the car’s demise, the ceremonial dumping of thousands of non-recyclable coke cans, Gordon Lightfoot, the crowds in Crisler Arena and even the lectures and symposia in the School of Education where I attended classes and my four-year-old son, John, went to pre-school. 

How did I, a politically interested student who was on campus almost every day, miss out on this eclectic happening we now recognize as the kick-off of the modern environmental movement? Given my full-on commitment to environmental advocacy in the decades that followed, I’ve questioned why I was not an organizer, or at least a participant. In positing my answer, I have vivid memories of an overwhelmed young woman, determined to be a flawless supermom while completing her MA in Education and maintaining a household that showed not a speck of disorder. And all of this in an age when even the nicest of husbands (mine) felt their professional work excused them from sharing childcare responsibilities with their wives. 

But there was another reason I was MIA from Michigan’s original Earth Day, a reason I understand better years on in reading about a memorable session dubbed the Scream-Out. The Scream-Out was the platform for those who thought Gaylord Nelson was wrong in calling for a national day of environmental reflection. In preparing the multifaceted program, organizers had faced arguments that an active environmental movement would only distract from more pressing social injustices. Black student activists saw all that was lacking in commitment to ending campus racism. Just before the four-day, 50,000-person Earth Day teach-in, the U-M campus had been wrenched by a campus-wide strike led by the Black Action Movement (BAM). In a tense two-week stand-off, a large and growing number of professors and students (myself included) refused to cross picket lines in support of BAM’s demands to raise black student enrollment and increase successful minority engagement on campus.

Joined by frustrated anti-war protestors on a campus that fairly enough claimed to be the birthplace of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), it was not surprising that there were both black and white reformers who questioned the importance of Johnny-come-lately environmentalism. (At the time, just a few environmental activists and scholars were beginning to conceptualize environmental justice.) Although I did not consciously decide to boycott the environmental teach-in, I do recall thinking that both the women’s and the environmental movements were of less significance than fighting racism and the Viet Nam War. It was at the Scream-Out, had I attended it, that I would have heard a substantive discussion of my own poorly-formed concerns.

But I didn’t go. I had two small children to care for, MA degree assignments to be finished, and a broken refrigerator to be replaced at home. I could never have imagined in 1970 that both my husband and I would spend decades dedicating ourselves to advancing deeper environmental understandings and better environmental laws, no matter what other responsibilities we faced.

Ironically, my slow-off-the-blocks start as an environmentalist has made me a more effective advocate. Remembering how overwhelmed I felt then, toiling to manage multiple responsibilities, has prompted me to be more respectful when engaging with people struggling today to get on top of their own lives’ demands. And recalling that on Earth Day One I viewed environmental concerns as competitors with — rather than integral to — battles for social, economic and racial justice, prods me now to act more inclusively, recognizing that the fabric of a healthy planet and just society is woven from many threads.

Great Lakes Histories: from Ruin to Recovery, Led by Citizen Leaders

Published on February 26th, 2020 by - Blog Posts, News

Photo: Dave Dempsey (right) appears at the Michigan Union together with (l-r): moderator Jen Read, UM Water Center; Clare Lyster, University of Illinois at Chicago; and Margaret Noodin, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Photo by Diane Dupuis.

Dave Dempsey, Senior Advisor

Excerpted from a presentation by FLOW senior policy advisor Dave Dempsey delivered on Monday, February 24, at the Michigan Union in Ann Arbor as part of the University of Michigan’s Great Lakes Theme Semester panel series: Great Lakes Histories—Indigenous Cultures through Common Futures.

Since the beginning of Michigan as a state in 1837—the starting point of my book, Ruin and Recovery: Michigan’s Rise as a Conservation Leader (University of Michigan Press, 2001)—we’ve had several resource binges. First, we took a heavily timbered state and consumed over 90% of the resource in less than 50 years, leaving behind what commentators have called “a burned-over, cutover wasteland.” Then we fouled the waters, first with mill waste and raw sewage, then with persistent toxic chemicals. Then we consumed the land, building unsustainable communities crawling across the landscape.

How could these things happen? Didn’t people care about their own children and grandchildren? I think most did. But they believed in something I call “the myth of inexhaustibility.” The myth holds that despite our great numbers, the world is so plentiful in resource riches that humans cannot exhaust them.

This played out in Michigan as elsewhere. In the late 1860s, timber interests estimated there was so much white pine in our state that it would last 500 years. Most of it was gone in two generations.

Later, the experts said our waters, including the Great Lakes, were so plentiful they would absorb and “purify” the wastes. Before long, Michiganians were dying of typhoid and cholera because their drinking water supply intakes were downstream of cities discharging raw sewage.

When Michigan awoke with hangovers from the first two binges, public-spirited women and men, volunteer conservationists and environmentalists, fought successfully for societal healing. Citizens pressured public officials to take over the cutover lands, plant trees and initiate mostly sustainable forestry, and build the largest state forest system east of the Mississippi. Similar events occurred in the Great Lakes states most like Michigan—Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Citizens pressured public officials to attack raw sewage and industrial wastes, including the early persistent toxins like DDT and PCBs. Over a period of 50 years, Michigan displayed national leadership. For example, Michigan was the first state to cancel the registration for DDT after it showed up in alarmingly high levels in Great Lakes fish.

Whether we’re going to have a similar healing cycle for our use and misuse of land is an open question. There are hopeful signs, but our “Tale of Two Cities”—central cities and all the other cities—still reeks of institutional racism, flawed economic thinking, and personal prejudices.

And don’t get me started on climate change.

I’ve had a front-row seat in the environmental policy theater for 30 years as Michigan and Wisconsin have denied, delayed and degraded serious answers to the climate crisis. Like the public officials who facilitated the gluttonous consumption of our forests and waters, we’ve been misrepresented for those three decades by officials eager to please short-sighted interest groups for today’s gain. Two lost generations.

So we continue to suffer these periods of ruin and recovery, degradation followed by healing. And we need recovery now. Will we have it?

Yes, if we learn.

If we heed the lessons of the past, there is abundant hope.

It starts with those who envision the future, who see where our patterns of resource exploitation will take us if unchecked. In both the forest and water ruins of our history, individuals saw early what was happening and fought to prevent it, or at least to cure it.

Citizen Leaders

In 1900, Charles Garfield, one of our first citizen forestry advocates, said, “Some time it may be, our state shall be so ruled by men of vision and men of taste—sometime, it may be fondly hoped, our legislature shall have the leisure from the petty politics and the strident voice of the lobbyist and the crank to turn its attention to the State of Michigan—to renew its waste places with forest life—to make this peninsula, which is bound to shelter 10,000,000 of people, as beautiful as God intended it to be.” Garfield was instrumental in making it happen.

In 1878, Robert Kedzie of the state health board warned, “A systematic pollution of our rivers has already begun in our State … any one can easily see that these evils will come in with an increase in our population, unless they are excluded by timely precaution on the part of the public authorities. The evil can be successfully resisted or averted only by combined opposition.” Kedzie called for development of sewer systems designed to prevent stream pollution. His advice was ultimately heeded—after much damage was done.

These men and women educated, they battled and lost, they persisted and ultimately, they prevailed. I can scarcely convey how moved I was when, pawing through papers in the State Archives, I came across a citizen petition to the Governor of Michigan urging action to conserve forests and fish—in the 1870s. These were people looking ahead, a few voices compared to the loud societal chorus demanding consumption now.

Probably the most important lesson to take from that history is the one I didn’t learn in political science, but learned the hard way: our so-called leaders don’t lead, they follow. We are the leaders, if we choose to be.

Today we have many voices urging a better way that meets today’s needs without sacrificing those of tomorrow. At least at the state level in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, they are making gradual progress.

Another big step toward forging a sustainable future is to behold a history larger than those that I’ve described in my books. The place now called Michigan did not really begin in 1837. The ecosystem known as the Great Lakes did not really begin in the 17th Century, when the first Europeans arrived. I wrote only about those histories because they were all that I felt qualified to discuss. But in the context of history as a whole, they are a tiny fraction of time—although an overwhelming majority of the resource consumption.

I’ve been happy to see a steady growth in public consciousness about the Great Lakes. We no longer take them for granted. Each year, we care a little more, and do a little more. Most importantly, we no longer subscribe to the myth of inexhaustibility. We are understanding that despite their size, the Great Lakes are fragile, vulnerable; that we need to take care of them. We are making changes.

Drunk on Development

As the governments of Canada and the U.S. were negotiating a new Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1978, a group of scientists from both nations urged them to build the new pact around the concept of ecosystems. Instead of looking at the Great Lakes as separate holding ponds, aquatic highways, or waste receptacles, the governments should pledge to regard them as an interconnected system of water, land and all life forms. In that way, we would base policy on the idea of looking at effects systemwide instead of in isolation.

To make the point, a Canadian scientist named Jack Vallentyne presented to the members of the International Joint Commission (IJC). Jack, who in retirement became “Johnny Biosphere,” teaching kids about ecosystem concepts, had something special in mind for the commissioners.

Standing in front of the commissioners and onlookers, he produced a bottle of whisky and four glasses from under a table that served as a bar. He poured a shot of whisky into the first glass, two into the second, four into the third, and eight into the fourth glass.

“Commissioners,” he said, “you and our leaders of government and industry believe that constant growth is a good thing. I am going to drink this whisky the way you say our society should grow.” He promised to drink one glass each ten minutes, and began making his formal presentation. It discussed growth as an exponential function – constant growth meaning a doubling of the initial quantity over constant intervals of time. Just like his body, Vallentyne said, the Great Lakes Basin had limits of adaptability to the stresses of population growth and technology.

Vallentyne took a second drink, blinked and cleared his throat. He explained the ecosystem approach, citing acid rain, road salt and toxic chemicals as examples of problems affecting water quality that couldn’t be addressed by considering only water.

After the third drink, a reporter in the front row of the audience gasped loudly, “My God, it really is whisky!” Growing more theatrical with his ingestion of the liquid, Vallentyne demonstrated that there is no “away” in nature by crumpling a piece of paper and throwing it to the floor in front of the commissioners.

“After the fourth drink my hands instinctively went to my chest as the whisky burned down my throat. After regaining my breath, I spent the better part of a minute looking unsuccessfully for the summary sheet of my text.” Knocking himself on the head, Vallentyne realized the summary sheet was the one he had wadded up and hurled to the floor. He read it “cool and collected” to the commissioners.

The commissioners verified the validity of Vallentyne’s stunt by sniffing the bottle—which did contain whisky, though diluted by tea. The chair of the Canadian section of the IJC told a Canadian Broadcasting Company reporter that Vallentyne’s presentation had been “a simply staggering performance.”

That was Jack Vallentyne—a brilliant scientist willing to drink too much in public to prove a vital point. He and his scientific colleagues prevailed, and the 1978 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement ushered in a new ecosystem approach for these magnificent waters. It’s significant that he told this story, again, in a paper he authored for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, “Managing the Great Lakes Basin as Home.”

I hope we won’t have to get drunk to chart a new course for the histories we’re going to make. I don’t think we will. People ask me, “Do you think we are going to be able to turn things around in time?”

And I say “yes, because we have to.”

I believe human beings are resourceful, and can choose life over extinction if they are determined to.

And I believe the histories future speakers talk about in the year 2120—100 years from now—will be ones that talk about how we came to our senses, and learned to live sustainably in Michigan, in the Great Lakes region, and globally.

Public Trust Perspectives

Published on May 15th, 2018 by - Blog Posts, Public Trust Tuesday

byzantine-empire-public-land.-trusts

FLOW’s organizing principle is the public trust doctrine.  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, these 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 Public Trust Tuesday. 

This week, we are welcoming five graduate students from the University of Michigan who will be assisting FLOW in our new Blue Communities project.  The purpose of the initiative, which begins in the Grand Traverse Bay watershed, is to empower communities to instill the values of water stewardship in their policies and practices.  This grassroots, place-based program is based on the knowledge that water is precious to all, and its stewardship has the potential to unite communities in achieving environmental goals.

As they arrive on scene this week to get a lay of the land, we asked them for their perspective on the public trust.

Public trust is the principle that certain spaces and resources such as air and water are preserved for public use. In addition, governments have the obligation to prohibit any use that could harm these resources in order to protect the rights and benefits of current and future generations. This concept is becoming more important when it comes to water crisis and over-extraction of ecosystems. As an existing source of legal authority, public trust should be taken hold to prevent impairment of natural resources and related habitats as well as improve public awareness and water stewardship.

-Lingzi Liu: Landscape Architecture

What having the public trust doctrine in place means to me is that there is an established set of rules/guidelines that determine if something can be owned by one person or if it belongs to everyone (aka a common good). It is through this doctrine that the Great Lakes have been made accessible to all. It is through this doctrine that the government is given the responsibility of maintaining and preserving these common goods. It is also through this doctrine that we as citizens and people of the commons have the ability and duty to make sure the government is upholding their responsibility. It is through this public trust doctrine that a tragedy of the commons can be avoided.

-Kaitlin Vapenik: Environmental Informatics with Data Science Certificate

“By the law of nature these things are common to all mankind—the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shores of the sea.” Public spaces and resources are owned and shared by the public. The concept is to protect public resources for the public (owner). Public trust is the principle that could be used to govern all decisions, rights and duties of the use of common resources, like waters and shorelines. Public trust waters should be used for public purposes (like drinking water, navigation, recreational uses, etc.), instead of being controlled or transferred to private interests for private purposes. And the proposed uses cannot harm waters, influence the quality and quantity of public trust waters, or protected public uses as well.

-Kangu Yu: Landscape Architecture

The public trust doctrine states that the public has the right to use certain resources, such as water. Water belongs to everyone, and the government has been given the responsibility to protect this resource for the people. Therefore, the government must ensure that current and proposed uses do not violate the principles of the public trust, and that no one individual or group is disproportionately causing harm to or interfering with other’s rights to use water resources. The multitude of stressors threatening water resources today suggests that there is a need to protect this resource that belongs to all of us.

-Nancy Ye: Environmental Toxicology with an emphasis on Aquatic Toxicology

To me, the public trust doctrine is the idea that creation ought to be enjoyed by everyone, regardless of their place in life. The beauty of creation often takes my breath away, and many of my fondest memories involve utilizing natural resources like lakes, rivers and beaches. The natural world is here for everyone’s reasonable use and enjoyment and should not be the pleasure of a few. While privatization is often good in many sectors and encourages healthy competition, the destruction, alienation or diversion of natural resources through private ownership often produces detrimental effects for the environment at-large, oftentimes destroying that which was exclusively sought after in the first place. The public trust doctrine allows the citizens of our country to protect precious, natural resources from degradation so that these resources can be enjoyed by anyone, including future generations. In a world of instant gratification and abundant, self-centered pleasures, the public trust doctrine calls on us to resist our own selfish desires and to put the good of the community first.

-Adam Arend:  Environmental Policy and Planning

 

U-M computer model shows Straits pipeline break would devastate Great Lakes

Published on July 10th, 2014 by - News

Click here to read the article on Detroitfreepress.com

By Keith Matheny – Detroit Free Press Staff Writer

July 10, 2014

A rupture of 61-year-old, underwater oil pipelines running through the Straits of Mackinac would be “the worst possible place” for a spill on the Great Lakes, with catastrophic results, according to a University of Michigan researcher studying potential impacts of a spill.

David Schwab, a research scientist at the U-M Water Center, retired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where he studied Great Lakes water flows and dynamics for more than 30 years. He’s the author of a new study done in collaboration with the National Wildlife Federation looking at different scenarios for potential oil spills in the Straits from Canadian oil transport giant Enbridge’s Line 5.

“I can’t think — in my experience — of another place on the Great Lakes where an oil spill would have as wide an area of impact, in as short of time, as at the Straits of Mackinac,” Schwab said.

Line 5 is a set of two oil pipelines that runs from Superior, Wis., through the Upper Peninsula, underwater through the Straits and then down through the Lower Peninsula before connecting to a hub in Sarnia, Ontario. The lines transport about 23 million gallons of oil and other petroleum products, such as natural gas liquids, through the Straits daily.

A July 2010 spill near Marshall caused by a ruptured Enbridge pipeline, and concerns about the underwater pipeline through the Straits, already has prompted state and federal scrutiny. Michigan U.S. Sens. Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow have sought information on Line 5, as have several members of Congress. And state Attorney General Bill Schuette and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality Director Dan Wyant late last month announced they will cochair a multiagency government task force to look at petroleum pipelines and the health, safety and environmental issues they potentially pose in Michigan.

Part 1: Three years after oil spill, a slow recovery haunts Kalamazoo River

Part 2: Enbridge’s expanded oil pipeline draws ire of homeowners in its path

Schwab looked at six different scenarios — and all spelled a catastrophe for the lakes. That’s due in large part to the Straits of Mackinac being “really, a strange place on the Great Lakes,” he said. The strength of water flowing through the Straits is 20 times the amount necessary to keep Lakes Michigan and Huron at the same water level, he said. And the flows go in both directions — sometimes from Michigan to Huron, sometimes from Huron to Michigan — and change directions every few days.

Schwab created six animation models looking at what would happen if Line 5 ruptured at the northern, middle and southern end of the Straits — both at times when the water is flowing into Lake Michigan and when it’s flowing into Lake Huron. His projection was for a 1 million gallon oil spill lasting 12 hours.

“One million gallons is conservatively the amount of oil that resides in the pipelines in the Straits at any time,” he said.

The spill scenarios show that, depending on current directions, a spill could be transported eastward into Lake Huron, westward into Lake Michigan and move back and forth through the Straits several times. Shoreline areas most impacted would be Mackinac Island, Bois Blanc Island and the Lake Huron shoreline east of Mackinaw City. Contamination could spread as far west as Beaver Island in Lake Michigan to Rogers City in Lake Huron, the study found.

“What this report shows is (that) a significant oil spill in the Straits would be an ecological disaster for the Great Lakes,” said Andy Buchsbaum, regional executive director for the National Wildlife Federation. “It would severely impact shipping and tourism.”

Such a spill would severely damage “the Great Lakes brand,” Buchsbaum said. “The Straits of Mackinac are iconic. They are what many people think of when they think of the Great Lakes. It would be a death blow for the Great Lakes ecology and economy.”

Line 5 is older than an Enbridge oil pipeline that ruptured near Marshall in July 2010, causing the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history and necessitating a $1-billion cleanup of the Kalamazoo River and Talmadge Creek that is still not complete.

Enbridge spokesman Jason Manshum said the company shares the National Wildlife Federation’s “views on the critical nature of the Great Lakes ecosystem in general, and the Straits in particular.” This new report will advance “continued and meaningful discussion on pipeline safety in the Straits,” he added.

Manshum noted that Line 5 “has been incident-free since it was constructed in 1953, and through even greater oversight, the use of new technology and ensuring all risks are monitored — and, where necessary, mitigated — Enbridge is committed to maintaining this incident-free record into the future.”

Contact Keith Matheny: 313-222-5021, kmatheny@freepress.com or on Twitter @keithmatheny