Oct 27, 2018
Despite all its recent hyperbole about being a national leader in dealing with toxic PFAS chemicals, Michigan’s state government is falling well short of that standard and its own historic example. A couple of pages of Michigan’s environmental history make that clear. PFAS compounds are showing up in drinking water supplies across Michigan as the state conducts testing of all public supplies. Results to date suggest that almost 1.9 million citizens are served by 55 supplies that contain PFAS. But the state refuses to set an enforceable PFAS limit for drinking water, deferring to US EPA, which is in no hurry to set a standard. That leaves Michigan drinking water system operators not knowing what kind of treatment they should apply, and Michigan citizens not knowing how concerned they should be about their exposure. Meanwhile, New Hampshire is moving to set a PFAS drinking water standard, as New Jersey has done. Both states are confident the science justifies such standards. The State of Michigan has a history of taking bold action to protect the public and the environment from pollutants before the federal government acts. Surrounded by the Great Lakes and rich in inland waters, Michigan has more at stake than many other states in reducing toxic pollution. When the preponderance of evidence has supported bans or tough limits on toxic substances, Michigan has taken the lead rather than the back seat. The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 touched off a furor about toxic chemicals, especially DDT. The chemical industry argued against restrictions on DDT use, but as scientific evidence of DDT’s dangerous properties mounted, the...
Oct 22, 2018
A few weeks ago, I gave up my vantage point on Lake Huron. I’ll miss it dearly. Here’s a short essay on my first fall and winter there from the book “Lake Nation.” In the late summer of 2015, I rented a small cottage set back 500 feet from Lake Huron, with the landlord’s house in between. I was an inhabitant of the Great Lakes coastal zone rather than a visitor for the first time in my nearly 59 years. I had loved the Lakes as far back as I could remember, but now I would get to know one of them intimately. The neighborhood I joined was redolent of family summers on the lake, its cottages crammed with the old set of dishes from back home, photos of seasons past, coffee mugs of different sizes and forgotten histories, unmatched chairs around the dining room table and the musty old couch. Most of the housing was a scattering of old styles and structures – wood, stone, cinder block. It was a place where everyone got along, and there seemed little to no judgment. We had the lake in common. One hundred miles downstream, in western Lake Erie, toxic algal blooms were once again disfiguring the waters that August. But the pool of southern Lake Huron I could see was largely free of algae and appealing to the eye. The only hindrances to a day’s swimming were the bands of underwater rocks characteristic of Huron that separated beach from deeper water. Among those rocks, I soon found out, were Petoskeys, the official state stone. Featuring coral markings imprinted in an...
Oct 17, 2018
The journey of Great Lakes author Mary McKSchmidt from business exec to lyrical defender of the Lakes is a story worth hearing. And it takes only 4 minutes and 15 seconds to do so. On a promotional tour this week for her new book Uncharted Waters, Mary stopped at a northern Michigan TV station for this interview. Mary speaks authentically and with deep conviction not just about caring about the Lakes, but also about acting to protect them. And she has specific, simple suggestions. The prose in Uncharted Waters becomes especially vivid when she recounts her Lake Michigan sailing adventures with husband Rubin. These passages make the Lakes more than an abstraction; they are alive, and it is our solemn duty and good fortune to protect them. A longer interview with Mary is...
Oct 5, 2018
This week Governor Snyder announced an agreement with Enbridge, the operator of the twin petroleum pipelines that cross the Straits of Mackinac, that the two parties said would protect the Great Lakes. Like so much in our public discourse these days, this message went beyond misleading to a lie. The line Snyder is peddling is that the deal will replace the pipelines – which he thus implies are risky – with a safer tunnel deep beneath the lakebed. He doesn’t emphasize that it will take 7 to 10 years to build the tunnel, during which the pipelines will presumably continue to convey 23 million gallons a day of petroleum products. He also obscures the fact that the agreement actually doesn’t commit Enbridge to a tunnel, just to exploring one. In effect, the pact gives Enbridge a gift of indefinite but long duration, the privilege of continuing to use (and endanger) public submerged lands and waters for a private purpose. Why do I even wonder that the Great Lakes are in trouble? When leaders declare their love for the lakes yet announce policies that treat them cavalierly, at best, and with the intent to deceive, the Lakes are being ill-served. There appear to be few consequences for this outrageous behavior. The other question is why, in the last three months of his eight years in office, the lame duck governor is trying to bind the state to a commitment that could last a century. Looking at who benefits and who pays, I can only assume the governor’s true motives are not yet disclosed. Perhaps we’ll discover what they are in...
