Oct 30, 2016
Not long ago, I embarked on a quest to find out why, if so many of us in this region love the Great Lakes, these precious waters aren’t in better shape. I put a list of questions together and started to email and talk to people. I posted them here. And the answers trickled in. One stands out — and I will explore it. Indifference. A number of respondents argue that sentiment for the Great Lakes in our part of the world is widespread but shallow. The Lakes are an amenity, not a necessity. They are not part of the daily lives of most of us. It follows that not enough people are motivated to take direct action or communicating with government to protect the Lakes. It’s not what I expected to...
Oct 16, 2016
Who needs words when pictures are available to speak? Here are images of two orbs over Lake Huron on Saturday, October 15. Huron is the forgotten lake, not as majestic as Superior, not as familiar as Michigan, not as troubled as Erie. A couple of interesting facts about Huron: It’s the second largest Great Lake by surface area. it’s the fifth largest freshwater lake in the world. Because of an estimated 30,000 islands, it has the longest shoreline among the Great Lakes. Here’s to the forgotten...
Oct 11, 2016
In an age of infinite information and 140-character tweets, there’s pressure to tell the story of the world’s most complex freshwater system in cartoons. Like this. Well, it’s not exactly a cartoon, and it is backed up by large lakes of information. Presented by the Canadian and U.S. Governments at the Great Lakes Public Forum in Toronto last week, the technical information supporting the graphic was similarly mixed. But the bottom line is one Great Lake good, three fair, one poor. Why is this? And what can we do about it? An important question, to be discussed soon. ...
Oct 1, 2016
Tuesday was the 54th anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring, the seminal work that many credit with sparking the modern environmental role. The importance of Michigan in the book, and the citizen effort to ban “hard pesticides,” is often overlooked. The following is an excerpt from Chapter 9 of my environmental history of Michigan, Ruin and Recovery. Man, for the first time in his history, has chemicals at his disposal that can completely alter his own food chain. By wiping out certain insects or minute sea-creatures he removes link after link in the very delicately balanced chain of life on which he depends…[T]here is enough evidence for us to be greatly concerned and to start bringing the unnecessary and widespread use of these persistent chemicals to a halt.” — Ralph A. MacMullan, Director, Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Michigan Natural Resources Magazine, March-April 1969 Although reports of bird mortality were made as early as 1947, they first came to the attention of an important Michigan bird lover in the spring of 1955, the year after the City of East Lansing began its Dutch elm disease control program. A graduate student in zoology at Michigan State University, John Mehner, was performing a study comparing robin populations in unsprayed areas in Pittsburgh with two sprayed areas in East Lansing, including a five-acre plot that had once housed the university’s horticultural gardens. Mehner brought the results of his study to Dr. George J. Wallace, a professor of zoology. Wallace would later describe them as “dramatic and disturbing.” By 1958 no study was needed to suggest something was wrong. Wallace and others...
