Conscious Choice: Keeping the Great Lakes Great

July 2003

Keeping the Great Lakes Great

An Action Agenda

by Dave Aftandilian

It’s easy to take the Great Lakes for granted. Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario together contain 20 percent of all the Earth’s fresh water, and 95 percent of all the fresh surface water in the United States.

Blue-green and beautiful, they provide: clean drinking water for 35 million people in the United States, Canada, and in dozens of Native American nations on both sides of the border; a wealth of recreational opportunities for local residents and travelers; crucial wildlife habitat; deep waterways for international and local shipping; and abundant fisheries that support a $4 billion a year commercial and sport fishing industry.

But the Great Lakes are in trouble. Take our own Lake Michigan, for instance. In its Lake Michigan Lakewide Management Plan (LaMP) for 2000, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wrote, "Lake Michigan is an outstanding natural resource of global significance, under stress and in need of special attention." Two years later, the EPA’s LaMP reported that for Lake Michigan "several key indicators point to the continuing concern for the health of the ecosystem."

These indicators include a growing number of summer beach closings due to bacterial contamination (during the summer of 2001, 97 out of 170 reporting beaches closed at least once, and 23 of those closed more than 10 times). Other factors include:

* The potential collapse of the Lake Michigan aquatic food web as invasive species take over: There are now at least 160 invasive aquatic species in the Great Lakes basin; over the past 20 years, a crucial invertebrate that feeds native fish, Diporeia, has almost disappeared from much of the lake, most likely due to competition from zebra mussels.

* Continuing pollution and toxic contamination: While DDT and PCBs have been reduced dramatically in the lake, mercury and heavy metals from air pollution are on the rise; mercury contamination has grown serious enough that 41 states, including Illinois, now have mercury fish advisories.

* Significantly lowered lake levels due to climate change: This is a trend that several studies predict will intensify as global warming worsens. Each inch of lost clearance from low water levels can cost shipping vessels up to $11,000 in reduced cargo capacity, according to the Great Lakes Shipping Association.

* New worries over the safety of the drinking water supply: This is a concern for 10 million people in Illinois and other states and provinces in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

Water Shortage Woes

An even greater threat looms: the possibility of massive, unsustainable water withdrawals from the Great Lakes. Around the world, fresh water is becoming scarcer and scarcer. A recent United Nations report predicted that as many as seven billion people in 60 countries could face water shortages by 2050. With their vast supplies of fresh water, the Great Lakes will likely become a prime target for thirsty communities not just nearby in the U.S. and Canada, but worldwide. Indeed, they already have become a target. In 1998, Ontario granted a permit to the Nova Group to export more than 150 million gallons of Lake Superior water by tanker to Asia every year. The permit was later yanked following public outcry in both Canada and the United States.

Less than 1 percent of Great Lakes water is renewed by rain or other sources each year; the rest is glacial-melt water left over from the last Ice Age, so once it’s gone, it’s gone. Unfortunately, according to Cameron Davis, executive director of the Lake Michigan Federation, existing state, national, and international laws and treaties are not strong enough to prevent harmful water withdrawals from the Great Lakes. That’s why the governors of the eight Great Lakes states and two Canadian provinces have agreed to add a provision to the Great Lakes Charter. The charter, originally adopted in 1985, set out five "principles for the management of Great Lakes water resources," which were intended to regulate large consumptive uses and diversions of Great Lakes water. The new provision — known as "Annex 2001" — is expected to protect the basin from harmful water withdrawals. A final draft of the plan should be released for public comment this fall.

These myriad threats to the Great Lakes basin have not gone unnoticed. In a report released this past May, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) found that 33 federal and 17 state programs spent at least $1.7 billion between 1992 and 2001 on Great Lakes protection and restoration efforts. "But," the report concluded, "there is no overarching plan for coordinating and tying together the strategies and program activities into a coherent approach to attain overall basin restoration.... Without such a plan for the basin, it is difficult to determine overall progress and ensure that limited resources are being effectively utilized."

The GAO placed the blame for this lack of coordination and strategic planning largely on the U.S. EPA and urged the EPA Administrator to "ensure that the [EPA’s] Great Lakes National Program Office fulfills its coordination responsibilities and develops a...Great Lakes strategy." President Bush’s EPA Administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, resigned last May and, as of this writing, a successor has not been named.

The Green Book Takes Charge

Federal representatives of the eight Great Lakes states are considering proposing a basin-wide plan for Great Lakes restoration along the lines of the GAO report and modeled on a recent $7.8 billion Everglades restoration plan. To guide their efforts and ensure that their plan pays for needed and effective programs — not wasteful pork — a nonprofit coalition known as Great Lakes United (GLU) has developed a grassroots "Citizens’ Action Agenda" for Great Lakes protection and restoration. It’s in conjunction with dozens of groups, from the Sierra Club to the Canadian Auto Workers. Officially released last month, GLU’s Great Lakes Green Book offers specific recommendations in seven different areas: toxic cleanup, clean production, green energy, sustaining and restoring water quantities and flows, protecting and restoring species, protecting and restoring habitat, and water and air quality regulations. (The full text of the Great Lakes Green Book is online at www.glu.org.)

I asked Margaret Wooster, GLU’s executive director, to highlight some of the most important items on their action agenda. In terms of toxic cleanup, she said the Green Book is calling for complete cleanup and restoration of all 43 toxic hotspots or "areas of concern" in the Great Lakes basin (such as Superfund sites) by 2015. It asks that "extended producer responsibility" legislation be passed that would require manufacturers...to be fully responsible for recovery and safe disposal of all high-risk waste from the items they produce, such as automobiles, electronics, and packaging materials.

"When producers are required to be responsible for their products, they will design products that are less toxic and more recyclable — and that will benefit the Great Lakes environment," said Jim Mahon of Canadian Auto Workers Local 1520, which helped draft the Green Book. To reduce radioactive waste and air pollution from nuclear and coal-fired power plants, the Green Book wants governments to increase the amount of non-hydropower renewable energy (i.e. wind and solar) produced in their states and provinces to 20 percent by 2020, and to eventually phase out all coal and nuclear power plants. Currently, 95 percent of energy in the Midwest is produced by coal and nuclear power plants.

The Green Book. also calls on the state and provincial governments to adopt by 2004 a binding agreement — based on sound science — to prevent harmful water withdrawals from the Great Lakes. Governments are advised to ban navigation practices, such as the dumping of ballast water from ships that allow the introduction of nonnative species into the Great Lakes basin. Strict urban growth boundaries that remain fixed for 20 to 30 years should be created to help stop low-density urban sprawl. Ongoing loss of wetlands in the Great Lakes basin should be halted and at least one million more acres of wetlands should be protected in the basin (about two-thirds of the original wetlands in the Great Lakes states are already gone and wetland loss in the Lake Michigan states is currently greater than the national average). Municipalities should receive increased funding so that they can eliminate untreated sewage overflows into basin waters by 2010. And finally, the United States and Canada should agree on strict air and water pollution controls, including a phase-out of all persistent organic pollutants and other long-lived toxic substances such as mercury.

As you can tell from these recommendations, both the breadth and depth of GLU’s Citizens’ Action Agenda are quite impressive. Pretty much every aspect of life in the Great Lakes region, from agriculture to shipping, manufacturing to energy efficiency, is addressed by one or more of the Great Lakes Green Book‘s recommendations. And the Green Book doesn’t pull any punches either, setting lofty goals and strict timelines for reaching them. As Wooster put it to me, GLU wanted to set the bar high with its agenda so that it wouldn’t be starting in a compromised position when it begins negotiations with federal, state, and local governments to help develop a comprehensive Great Lakes restoration plan. And GLU also wanted to avoid sending mixed signals, making its long-term goals clear at the start so that government and industry can then work together on finding the best ways to achieve those goals.

One of the other great strengths of GLU’s action agenda is its holistic, bioregional outlook. Instead of addressing each issue in isolation, the Green Book tackles them as a whole, showing us how they’re all connected — how mercury from scrapped cars can make Great Lakes fish unsafe to eat, how untreated sewage overflows can trigger beach closings, or how air pollution from coal-burning power plants can aggravate children’s asthma attacks. The Green Book also helps us realize that all of us who live in the vast Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River basin share a common cause, a vested interest in protecting and improving the lakes that make our region such a great place to live.

Dave Aftandilian regularly writes about the environment and music; he has a special interest in the interface between nature and culture.

Get More Info

The Great Lakes Charter online

Great Lakes United

Lake Michigan Federation

U.S. EPA, Great Lakes National Program Office

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: