Coast Guard will cease target practice at Great Lakes

In a win for lovers of safety and the environment, the U.S. Coast Guard has withdrawn a plan to conduct machine-gun firing practice in the Great Lakes. After much complaining from boaters, Canadians, congressfolk, local mayors, and other sane people opposed to toxic lead bullets flying amok, a regional Coast Guard commander admitted the plan was "unsatisfactory." Originally described as an important post-9/11 defense against boat-wielding terrorists infiltrating from Canada, the plan would have periodically closed 2,500 square miles of water for firing practice. (We can't help but picture the Coast Guard trainees belting out the strains of "Blame Canada" as they go through their drills.) "If we introduced another proposal, we would do an outreach, look for public input, work with our stakeholders and elected officials, and see if we could come to a solution that works for all of us," said a Coast Guard spokesperson, failing to answer the question: Why didn't you just do that the first time?

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Billions of gallons of raw sewage flow into Great Lakes annually, report says

The Great Lakes, subject of our favorite mnemonic device (HOMES), is being contaminated by homes -- and other places where people poo. According to a report released today, 20 cities release billions of gallons of raw sewage into the lakes every year, enough to fill 37,000 Olympic-size pools. The report's authors say that's just a taste of the issue; the cities they assessed represent only a third of the region's 35 million residents, many of whom rely on the lakes for drinking water. "It's appalling," says report author Elaine MacDonald, a staff scientist with Sierra Legal Defense Fund. "I think countries as wealthy as Canada and the U.S. can do a hell of a lot better." In many cases, outdated systems can't handle both sewage and stormwater, so cities divert sewage when it rains. The worst offenders are Detroit ("quite a quagmire," says MacDonald), Cleveland, and Windsor, Ontario. Among the best: Ontario's Peel Region and Green Bay, Wisc. Which, sadly, renders our headline inaccurate.

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Big Great Lakes cleanup plan gets an OK, but no federal funds

U.S. EPA administrator Stephen Johnson and a bipartisan coalition of Midwestern lawmakers and officials approved a 15-year strategy to restore the Great Lakes on Monday. But the Bush administration says it won't fund the plan, which may cost up to $20 billion. The strategy to pull the lakes back from imminent ecological collapse involves revamping disintegrating municipal sewer systems, clearing out invasive species, decontaminating severely polluted toxic hotspots, and more. Conservationists say the effort is imperative to the region's ecology and economy -- the lakes supply 35 million North Americans with freshwater, and support a $35 billion boating industry and an estimated $18 billion in yearly spending from hunters, anglers, and wildlife-watchers. Lawmakers vow they'll pry funding loose from Washington. "There is not a Democratic plan for cleaning up the Great Lakes or a Republican plan for cleaning up the Great Lakes," says Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.). "There are only two choices -- action or inaction."

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Enviro-backed Great Lakes bill stalls, industry-backed bill advances

Following this summer's massive Detroit News series on threats to the Great Lakes, a key protection measure is ... wait for it ... stalled in Congress. Officials from Great Lakes states and conservationists back the National Aquatic Invasive Species Act, which would force shippers to use stronger measures to kill invasive species in their ballast-water tanks by 2011. "It may be the most important bill in Congress to protect the Great Lakes from ecological collapse," says the National Wildlife Federation's Andy Buchsbaum. But it's languished for three years, while a shipping-industry-backed rival, which would give shippers more time to come up with ballast-water treatments, was voted out of the Senate Commerce Committee this year. The attorneys general of six Great Lakes states wrote to the committee in opposition to the bill, saying that it would not only eradicate EPA authority to regulate ballast water but preempt state laws as well. Witness the power of journalism! Sigh.

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Great Lakes beset by myriad threats

This weekend, The Detroit News published a massive series on the latest threats facing the Great Lakes -- and we mean massive: close to 30 articles. The lakes, which hold a fifth of the world's freshwater, were once emblematic of America's environmental malaise, choked with algae and pollutants. While water quality has improved, a panoply of new threats now confront the lakes: invasive species, unregulated growth in surrounding areas, agricultural and sewer runoff, nearby mines, states and bottled-water companies anxious to siphon off water, an influx of new toxins (and female hormones), mercury pollution, pressure to expand shipping channels, and last but not least, global warming. While the feds spent $1.7 billion to help the lakes between 1992 and 2004, momentum is now building behind a $20 billion package, first recommended by a task force convened by President Bush to study the lakes. If passed, it would be one of the most expansive pieces of environmental legislation in U.S. history.

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Great Lakes Face Continuing Environmental Threats

While overall water quality in the Great Lakes has improved over the past 30 years, the lakes still face dire threats from chemical pollution, pathogens, and invasive species, according to the biennial report on the lakes' water quality from the U.S.-Canadian International Joint Commission. The report hailed the reduction of several pollutants, but drew attention to airborne mercury and common fire retardants, both of which are on the rise. It warned that the profligate use of antibiotics in livestock and humans is leading to a rise in "pathogens and disease-bearing microorganisms" that endanger human health. And it flagged the ongoing rise in invasive species in the lakes; a new one takes hold roughly every eight months, and while some have been contained, none have been eliminated. The U.S. EPA and Environment Canada have formed a joint committee which will make recommendations for shaping up the 1978 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, taking into account the new findings.

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Toronto Cools Itself with Cold Water

Starting this week, near-freezing water from the depths of Lake Ontario will bring relief to heat-stricken residents of Toronto, Ontario. A multi-million-dollar project will pump water from the lake through three intake pipes, where it will be used to cool down other water, which will subsequently be used to cool buildings in downtown Toronto; the original water will continue merrily on its way into the city system, where it will be treated and used as drinking water. It sounds complicated, but according to Dennis Fotinos, the president of Enwave, which is spearheading the project, "Compared to traditional air-conditioning, Deep Lake Water Cooling reduces electricity use by 75 percent and will eliminate 40,000 [metric] tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of taking 8,000 cars off of the streets of Toronto." Enwave claims it has the capacity to cool 100 office buildings or 8,000 homes -- some 32 million square feet of space. Cool!

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Bush chats up Michiganders in Monroe.

Photo: White House.

President Bush swooped into Monroe, Mich., in mid-September for an appearance at one of the largest and most polluting coal-fired power plants in the world. As an exploration of his ideas about environmental policy, the visit was completely baffling. (Why go to such a filthy facility? Why sing the praises of a piece of legislation -- the Clean Air Act -- that his administration has made every effort to weaken?) But as a campaign stop, the Monroe visit made perfect sense.

Michigan is an important swing state at the political and geographic center of the eight-state Great Lakes region. It is crucial to the outcome of the 2004 presidential election -- not only for its votes, but also for the lessons it can teach the rest of the nation. During last year's gubernatorial race, Jennifer Granholm, a centrist Democrat, swept into office on a platform that stressed protecting natural resources as a foundation for improving the state's economic competitiveness. That victory provided politicians of both parties with an object lesson in the galvanizing effect that environmental protection can have on voters in the Great Lakes region and beyond.

Three years ago, Al Gore and Ralph Nader reaped rewards in Michigan and most of the other Great Lakes states by making plain their allegiance to environmental protection and energy conservation. During his visits to the Great Lakes region, Gore talked about ensuring clean water and improving public transportation to reduce traffic congestion. More boldly, he predicted the end of the internal combustion engine. He handily won Michigan and five other Great Lakes states, collecting 117 electoral votes. The Great Lakes, in fact, provided 44 percent of the 266 electoral votes that Gore earned in 2000. Bush won Ohio and Indiana for 33 electoral votes. Nader didn't score any electoral votes, but he did win 892,500 votes in the Great Lakes -- more than in any other region of the country. In fact, he gathered almost 300,000 more votes in the area than he did on the West Coast, and more than twice as many as he attracted in New England.

The Bush administration knows that the Great Lakes states will be critical to what happens in 2004: Karl Rove, the president's political advisor, has predicted that the election will be very tight, and he's told Michigan Republican activists that Bush needs to do better in the Great Lakes in '04 than he did in 2000. In an effort to bolster his image, Bush has become a frequent visitor to the region: His stop in Monroe was his 11th in Michigan since becoming president. (He's also been to Ohio 11 times and has made 22 visits to Pennsylvania.)

Meanwhile, the region is equally crucial to Democrats, who will not prevail in 2004 unless they do at least as well there as Gore did in 2000 -- and preferably better. Since the last election, Great Lakes states have lost nine congressional seats and as many electoral votes to the much faster-growing (and Republican) Sunbelt states. The only other Democratic strongholds in 2000 were New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the West Coast. To triumph in 2004, the Democrats will have to win those regions and the Great Lakes area, plus Florida and a couple of states in the interior West. (Arizona and New Mexico, which have Democratic governors, seem most likely.)

Thus as the 2004 campaign gathers momentum, the electoral dynamics are clear enough. So are the top issues: jobs and the economy, war and national security, and health care.

Still, Democratic strategists say their presidential candidate will need another compelling issue to convince swing voters and Republican moderates to side with them. In Michigan and the other Great Lakes states, there is no better issue for Democrats to embrace than the environment. Conservation is a decades-old value in the Great Lakes region, which is home to the largest supply of surface freshwater on the planet. All those homes along shorelines and cabins deep in the North Woods are owned by people who care about the condition of lakes and rivers and wildlands, and who will vote for a candidate with credibility on the environment. As for those blue-collar workers whom the Republicans think they've locked up: Well, many of them spend a good bit of time fishing, hunting, and boating, and are devoted to protecting what is still a clean and expansive natural domain.

When it comes to environmental politics, the similarities of the approaching presidential election and the 2002 Michigan gubernatorial campaign are striking. Former Republican Gov. John Engler, who was first elected in a close race in 1990, spent most of his three terms attempting to render meaningless those state laws that safeguarded wetlands, water, air, public forests, and the Great Lakes coastlines. Sound familiar?

A factory on Lake Superior's shores.

The state's environmental and conservation organizations, initially overwhelmed by Engler's attack, gradually came to understand its dimensions, and by the late 1990s, they were collaborating as they never had before to fight back. The groups organized at the grassroots and worked together to focus public attention on a handful of important issues, such as overflowing sewers that closed beaches and drilling for oil and natural gas beneath the Great Lakes. They published investigative reports about the deals Engler was making with his industrial campaign donors to open forests, water, and land to development, and they helped the state media track the consequences of his attacks on the environment.

By 2001, Engler's environmental record had become so controversial that Republican gubernatorial candidates distanced themselves from him, and candidates of both parties competed with each other to command the issue. By the spring of 2002, protecting the Great Lakes from unauthorized water withdrawals, protecting farmland and wild spaces from sprawl, and protecting lakes and streams from contamination were priorities for Michigan voters, along with education, the economy, and the looming $1.8 billion state budget deficit, according to polls by both Democratic and Republican campaigns. The environment and natural resources were playing a more influential role in Michigan than in any other race for governor in the nation.

"We have a very active, very aggressive, and very smart environmental movement in Michigan," said Dave Ladd, a Republican lobbyist in Lansing who served in the late 1990s as Engler's environmental advisor and after that as his director of the Office of Great Lakes. "Their work to raise these issues had a major impact in shaping the platforms of both candidates. In 2002, both candidates took the same position on many, if not all, of the significant issues in Michigan -- land use, water, solid waste, out-of-state trash. They were singing from the same hymnal."

Granholm: A blue shirt,
but a green mantle.

Photo: Michigan Governor's office.

In November 2002, by a margin of 51 to 47 percent, Granholm defeated Republican Lieutenant Gov. Dick Posthumus, Engler's handpicked successor. Polls taken before and after the Michigan election showed that no matter how green Posthumus sounded, he was unable to sufficiently distance himself from Engler's dismal environmental record. That's an important lesson to learn as the nation gears up for the 2004 elections: Once environmental stewardship becomes a prominent issue, the advantage goes to the Democratic nominee, because the party's environmental record and credibility are much stronger than that of Republicans.

Exit polls, particularly those taken by Epic-MRA, a respected nonpartisan Lansing-based polling firm, provided insight into the elements of Granholm's victory and the importance of her environmental advocacy. According to Ed Sarpolus, the company's principal pollster, 8 percent of registered Republicans, most of them suburban women, switched parties to vote for Granholm -- and her environmental credentials were a big reason why.

"Gov. Granholm was credible on a wide range of issues and she was right on the environment," said Sarpolus. "Dick Posthumus never really focused on the environment, which appeals to women and to independent voters. The only ad he did on the environment showed him in hunting garb, holding a shotgun and a dead pheasant."

So let's review the story line: A determined chief executive whose party controls both houses of the legislature mounts a stealthy attack on popular laws that safeguard forests, water, air, and public health. His right-wing advisors, who view their top priority as advancing the economic prospects of select industries that are also top campaign donors, zealously pursue the mission.

The parallels between Michigan in 2002 and the presidential campaign of 2004 are close enough that national environmental organizations should look to the state as a model for how to unseat Bush by elevating the profile of his environmental record. Some of those organizations have already gotten the point: The Natural Resources Defense Council has targeted four* swing states (including Michigan) for a major grassroots communications and public-education campaign. "We're going to be working in a number of states to amplify the message we've long been sending regarding the effect of the president's fundamental retreat on the environment," said Greg Wetstone, advocacy director for NRDC in Washington, D.C.

Other national environmental organizations also are planning to campaign hard in the Northwest, Florida, and several Rocky Mountain states, where they are testing messages in focus groups and conducting public opinion polls to identify the salient environmental issues that will rouse voters. In the Pacific Northwest, the campaigns may well focus on how the White House is trying to weaken the Clean Water Act and what that would mean to the region's rivers and coasts. Interior Secretary Gale Norton's work to open public lands to more mining, drilling, and development may be the focus of environmental campaigns in Colorado and other Rocky Mountain states, where multi-billion-dollar tourism industries rely in part on easy public access to wilderness. And in Florida, national environmental groups are honing in on the administration's energy policy and efforts to make Gulf Coast offshore energy resources more accessible to Bush and Cheney's friends in the oil industry.

The vast majority of Americans (70 percent and more, according to most polls) want clean air and water, protected forests, and safe, unpolluted communities -- even if meeting those goals means raising taxes. The challenge facing environmentalists in 2004 is that most voters can't believe that their government would actually attempt to roll back the environmental laws that do so much good. Although major national newspapers have done a decent job of covering the Bush administration's environmental retreat, smaller papers aren't much interested, and television journalists, with the exception of Bill Moyers, barely care.

Thus the job of educating citizens about what's really going on falls mostly to environmental organizations. True, conflict abroad and economic and national security concerns at home could make it difficult to focus voter attention on environmental issues. But "difficult" does not mean "impossible," as recent happenings in Michigan prove. If other states follow the example set there, the political cost to President Bush for trashing the environment could be higher than he ever imagined.

*[Correction, 20 Oct 2003: NRDC has targeted four states for its campaign, not six, as this article originally stated. The states are Arizona, Florida, Michigan, and New Mexico.]

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Illegal Dumping Pushes Up Toxic Contamination in Great Lakes

Toxic pollution in Great Lakes waterways has jumped 25 percent over the past six years, thanks at least in part to rampant illegal discharges from large industrial facilities and sewer plants. Meanwhile, government enforcement efforts on both the national and state levels are stagnating, meaning that most of the violators don't get punished. In Michigan, for example, the state Department of Environmental Quality now has only five employees working on enforcement of water laws -- not nearly enough to catch all the violators. "You're looking at people violating limits sometimes by 1,000 percent and they're doing it for years and years," said Eric Schaeffer, former head of the EPA's enforcement division and now director of the Rockefeller Family Fund's Environmental Integrity Project. "It threatens the whole Clean Water Act."

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The federal government has earmarked $370 million to clean up the waterways of East Chicago, one of the most polluted areas in the Great Lakes region -- and the town's citizens are unhappy about it. Local residents and environmental groups say the remediation solution proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is as hazardous to the community's health as the original problem. The corps plan calls for dredging millions of cubic yards of toxic sediment that have been lying beneath the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal for 30 years. The sludge would then be transferred to a landfill outside of East Chicago, just a half-mile from a high school and elementary school. Critics say the plan does not make use of the best dredging technology available; they also say the corps and other backers of the project believe they can get away with cutting financial corners because East Chicago is 85 percent minority.

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Until two years ago, the 40,550 generally well-behaved Midwesterners of Mecosta County, Mich., regularly attended church, sent their children off to school on yellow buses, and never for a moment worried that their clean, freshwater supply would ever run dry. Mecosta County, after all, sits near the center of Michigan's lower peninsula, which itself sits at the center of the largest supply of freshwater on Earth.

A Mecosta County battleground.

Photo: Jeff Sapp, MCWC.

Then came the water war.

On Dec. 6, 2000, the Perrier Group of America, a subsidiary of Swiss-based Nestle, the world's largest food company, applied to the local health authorities for permission to drill two water wells on an 800-acre private hunting preserve in the county's southern reaches. The company's purpose: to establish a source for a new bottling plant to ship its popular Ice Mountain brand of spring water throughout the Upper Midwest.

Five weeks later the permits were granted. The approvals touched off a stunningly fierce debate about who controls Michigan's underground reservoirs of freshwater -- water so abundant and pure that half of the state's 9.9 million residents draw it straight from the ground. Although Perrier paid handsomely to smooth the way in Michigan -- it hired a public affairs group to massage the media and a respected political consultant to guide needed permits through the regulatory agencies -- its arrival in Mecosta County has been greeted with lawsuits, legislative proposals to strengthen the government's authority to manage water, and political unrest so significant that it has divided the state Republican Party and is influencing the 2002 Michigan gubernatorial campaign. Indeed, the fight over freshwater may be the most significant environmental issue in the country when it comes to affecting how voters will behave at the polls come November.

Perhaps most important, Perrier's presence has generated new public awareness that free trade, globalization, climate change, population expansion, and other worldwide mega-trends are turning the Great Lakes into ever more prominent targets for resource exploitation. On the 30th anniversary of the federal Clean Water Act, the granddaddy of all water protection statutes, Mecosta County is suddenly the epicenter of a new public reckoning over the security of the Great Lakes -- where 20 percent of the world's surface freshwater is stored -- and the underground aquifers that supply them. In a world where clean, freshwater is becoming ever more scarce, the fate of Perrier in Mecosta County will have legal, political, and environmental ramifications for every Great Lakes state and far beyond.

The Perrier case is headed to the halls of justice next year -- but long before it gets there, it will be tried by the public in the courtroom of Michigan's fast-approaching gubernatorial election. Both major party candidates have publicly and repeatedly expressed their resolve to modernize state water policy to block other multinational corporations from privatizing, bottling, and selling hundreds of millions of gallons of Michigan's groundwater annually across state lines. That both candidates are voicing those sentiments -- which are shared by the majority of state residents, according to opinion polls -- is due in large measure to the work of a group of Mecosta County residents who call themselves Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation.

Walls of justice: the Mecosta County
Courthouse.

Photo: Jeff Sapp, MCWC.

Thirteen months ago, MCWC filed a lawsuit arguing that water, like air, is a common resource that is held in public trust and should be managed for the public benefit. If commercial activity such as Nestle's bottling plant is sanctioned by the state, the group asserts, Michigan could become the target of massive diversions of freshwater to thirsty destinations on this continent and overseas. By defining and promoting water as merchandise, the argument continues, the company is vastly increasing the vulnerability of Great Lakes water to development, exploitation, and overuse.

The Perrier Group, which recently changed its name to Nestles Waters of America, says such arguments have no basis in Michigan law. The company's lawyers contend that there is no difference between what Nestles Waters is doing and what dozens of other companies do when they pump groundwater to make soft drinks, brew beer, prepare fruits and vegetables for packing, or any of countless other commercial activities.

Downstream from the wells.

Photo: Jeff Sapp, MCWC.

Moreover, say executives, the company's extensive groundwater-monitoring program in Mecosta County shows that its withdrawal of as much as 576,000 gallons per day is "insignificant" in an underground reservoir that holds billions of gallons. According to scientists working for the company, the disappearance of more than 210 million gallons per year will go virtually unnoticed in a Great Lakes basin containing 6 quadrillion gallons, or about 3 billion times as much. Far from hurting the region, the company argues, the bottling project will create up to 200 jobs and be an economic boon.

In interviews, legal authorities generally agreed that the Michigan citizens group will face an uphill struggle to prove that Nestle's use of Mecosta's groundwater is "unreasonable" under state law. Michigan's water policy -- what there is of it -- is based on the 19th-century belief in an unlimited abundance of freshwater in the state. Thus state law essentially says that anybody can take as much water as they want for free, as long as doing so doesn't harm anyone else.

Whether or not it is successful, the court challenge against Nestle has already helped Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation close in on one of its primary goals: exposing the weakness of the state's water statutes and replacing them with rational water laws fit for the 21st century. The work the citizens group is doing to prepare for its day in court has steadily penetrated the public consciousness and became a political issue with an uncommonly long reach in and beyond Michigan.

For the people of Michigan, the Nestles Waters case is doubly galling. It's bad enough that a rich and powerful outsider plans to snatch up the state's water for free and sell it for a fortune; it is worse that the company was encouraged by a consummate insider -- Michigan's Republican governor, John Engler. The Engler administration has awarded Nestle nearly $10 million in local property and state education tax abatements, job training, and infrastructure grants to take Michigan's water. It's as though the king of Saudi Arabia allowed Exxon to tap his oil fields for free -- only freshwater is more valuable than oil. At the local convenience store, a gallon of bottled water costs more than $8, six times the price of a gallon of gasoline.

Thompson Lake's water levels are
dropping due to nearby pumping stations.

Photo: Jeff Sapp, MCWC.

The subsidies, which MCWC disclosed, helped to spur three separate citizen blockades since April at the company's new bottling plant in Stanwood. They also added Mecosta County to the growing number of global hot spots in the worldwide grassroots campaign to block multinational corporations from privatizing water.

All that activity elevated an environmental dispute into a prominent campaign issue for Michigan's gubernatorial candidates. Not even Engler's closest allies in the Republican party have defended the subsidies or Nestle's entrance into Michigan. In fact, Republican leaders, who spent more than a decade preaching the benefits of the free market and deregulation, have done just the opposite. Lieutenant Gov. Dick Posthumus, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, has proposed a "Marshall Plan" to protect the Great Lakes. The plan includes new water legislation and a much more activist state government to prevent such diversions "now or ever."

Attorney General Jennifer Granholm, the Democratic candidate who is leading by 12 percentage points according to a recent poll, has offered a more specific proposal. She promised, if elected, to develop a new comprehensive water law that bases decisions about water use on how withdrawals affect the environment. She told a Grand Rapids audience earlier this year, "I will lead the fight to enact a state water-protection statute that will base decisions on future water use on what is right for the ecosystem and therefore the people of Michigan in the long run."

In no other Midwest state, and perhaps none nationwide, has an environmental issue gained such electoral prominence during this election cycle. "What happened with that bottling plant has steadily grown into a major issue in Michigan that is not only about the environment but also about how secure people feel about their future here," said Andy Buchsbaum, a lawyer and director of the National Wildlife Federation's Great Lakes Natural Resource Center in Ann Arbor.

There is no doubt that Nestles Waters anticipated that its entry into Mecosta County would stir controversy. Periodic shortages of water around its plants in Florida and Texas had already sparked citizen protests and greater state scrutiny. Just before arriving in Michigan, Nestles Waters had abandoned a proposal to build its new Midwest bottling plant in Wisconsin after a bruising fight with local residents.

But whatever Michigan might bring the company in terms of corporate headaches, the potential profits were worth the fuss. Nestles Waters, the 500-pound-gorilla of the American bottled water industry, bottles the Ice Mountain brand in the Midwest, Poland Springs in the East, and 13 other brands in 75 bottling plants nationwide. The company controls a third of the $6.8 billion national bottled water market, which has grown 18.4 percent since 2000, according to Beverage Marketing Corp., a New York-based research and consulting firm.

Sic 'em, Sikkema.

The question now is whether Nestle is the first in a long line of multinational marketers that will dip their straws in Michigan's pure water for free -- or potentially the last. The Michigan citizens group is trying to oust the company; the gubernatorial candidates say they are ready to pass legislation to make sure other businesses don't follow Nestle's lead. And state Sen. Ken Sikkema, a Republican from Grandville who began his political career far enough to the right that he authored a Michigan law to limit government's authority to oversee natural resources, found in the Nestles Water case an opportunity to track back to the moderate middle. Sikkema, who chaired a legislative task force on the Great Lakes last year, introduced legislation this year that would give local and state government officials authority and resources to vastly step up their power to regulate water.

One of Sikkema's proposals would even require communities to confirm that adequate supplies of groundwater were available for future needs before large water withdrawals could be considered. It is the first time Michigan has proposed linking a community's economic development plan with its water supply, and it represents a decisive step forward in the state's thinking about how to improve the economy and protect the environment.

Michigan is blessed with such abundant natural resources that a 19th-century culture of use and abuse has persisted in spite of a sorry history of home-grown environmental disasters. But Nestle's venture into the state seems to have jarred people here. It sparked a new kind of discussion about the importance of conserving the essential stuff of life, and the role of the state in doing so. Even militants on the right understand that without adequate water-supply protections and clear rules for withdrawals and exports, the state leaves itself open to marketing schemes from across the globe, and potential shortages and environmental damage at home. For the first time in a Michigan gubernatorial election, candidates from both major parties have seized on the security of the state's freshwater to introduce the idea that abundance is illusory and there really are limits to growth.

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Water, conflict, and security on the banks of the Hudson

Carl Levin (D-Mich.) [UPDATED]

The U.S. government has pledged to spend billions of dollars to restore the Florida Everglades -- and now the Great Lakes states are trying to figure out how they can get a piece of the federal pie, too. For more than a year, the governors of the eight states have been meeting to formulate a plan for restoring the lakes. Slated to be released next month, the plan is likely to emphasize cleaning up toxic sediment; controlling non-native species; regulating the removal of lake water for use outside the region; keeping sewage and untreated waste out of the water; restoring and protecting wetlands and coastal habitats; and controlling stormwater runoff, among other issues. The money to meet such sweeping goals is unlikely to come any time soon: It took Florida more than a decade to get federal dollars for the Everglades, and, to make matters worse, plenty of other regions are trying to follow the Everglades example, too. "Everyone took notice of what Florida got. Even in Washington, that's a lot of money," said Chris Jones, head of the Ohio EPA.

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In Ohio, what you don't know can hurt you: The state has just cut a program that warned the public about consuming pollution-tainted fish. In the past, the state EPA and Department of Natural Resources collected fish samples and tested them for pesticides, mercury, and other toxic chemicals; the resulting information was then assessed by the state Health Department for its effects on humans and Ohioans were alerted of possible dangers. Now, fish samples will still be collected and tested, but the fish-consumption advisory program has been abolished to save the Health Department $100,000 per year. Although Michigan drastically reduced its advisory program this year, Ohio is the first Great Lakes state to fully terminate its program. According to the state Health Department website, health effects from eating contaminated fish caught in the state can include birth defects and mental and physical retardation in newborns.

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The U.S. EPA has unveiled a new Bush administration plan to protect and restore the Great Lakes. The plan aims to reduce PCB concentration in some Great Lakes fish species, restore or enhance 100,000 acres of wetland in the Great Lakes Basin, decrease introductions of invasive species, and accelerate the clean-up of contaminated sites. However, the government has not set aside any additional funding to implement the plan. More than 30 million people rely on the Great Lakes for their drinking water, and untold numbers seek out recreation on the more than 600 Great Lakes beaches in the U.S.

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Environmental toxins are disrupting human biology at the most basic level: reproduction. That was the conclusion of researchers at Michigan State University, who found that men with higher levels of exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were more like to father boys than girls. PCBs are known to cause sex-related defects in animals (although the researchers were quick to explain that boys are not, technically speaking, sex-related defects) and are also linked to cancer and infertility. The study examined men who had high levels of PCBs in their blood due to eating fish caught in the heavily contaminated Great Lakes. Interestingly, PCB levels in mothers did not seem to affect the gender of the child.

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Overuse and pollution of the world's lakes threaten nearly 1 billion people who depend on lake water for fishing, irrigation, transportation, tourism, sewage, and drinking water, global experts said during an international conference on lake management being held this week in Japan. More than half of the world's lakes and reservoirs are already suffering from pollution and drainage, and the problems will worsen as population increases and global warming intensifies, delegates said. The most threatened lakes include the Great Lakes in North America, Lake Okeechobee in Florida, Lake Victoria in Africa, and the Aral Sea. China's lakes have already been hit hard, with 543 large and medium-sized lakes disappearing between 1950 and 1980. Read more about China's irrigation crisis on the Grist Magazine website.

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In a move that pleased environmentalists but irked industry, the U.S. Congress voted yesterday to ban new oil and gas drilling in the Great Lakes for two years. The measure, which was part of a $24.6 billion federal energy and water bill, was passed overwhelmingly in both chambers despite President Bush's recent calls to tap into more domestic energy sources. Under the bill, states would be prohibited from green-lighting new projects while the Army Corps of Engineers studied the environmental impact of drilling Although none of the Great Lakes states allow drilling from rigs on the water, there are currently seven slant wells that pipe oil and gas from under the lakes to the shore; Michigan Gov. John Engler (R), for one, has been looking to expand such drilling.

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More than 30 tons of toxic PCBs will be dredged from 19 miles of Wisconsin's Fox River if a cleanup plan announced yesterday wins public support. To atone for decades of dumping the toxins, a consortium of seven paper companies would pick up the $308 million price tag for the cleanup of the Fox, which is the leading source of PCBs flowing into the Great Lakes. Enviros said the plan would be a good first step, but they pointed out that only parts of the river would be dredged. Portions of the river and adjacent Green Bay not covered by the plan would be on their own to recover from the more than 75 tons of PCBs that would remain after the cleanup. The state Department of Natural Resources will take public comment on the plan through early December.

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Toward a medically defensible energy policy

In a heretofore undocumented ecological process, the Great Lakes are purifying themselves by "exhaling" decades-old toxic chemicals, according to a study released on Friday by the Integrated Atmospheric Deposition Network. Lake Ontario alone released nearly two tons of now-banned PCBs between 1992 and 1996; together, the five lakes eliminated 10 tons of PCBs and close to four tons of the pesticide Dieldren, also banned. The researchers describe the finding as a happy surprise -- the lakes are cleansing themselves -- and say the evaporation of chemicals is not a public health concern. However, in bleaker news, an unrelated bi-national "State of the Great Lakes" report released last week says that thousands of toxic chemicals continue to enter the lakes via rain, snow, fog, dust, and polluted air.

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Michigan natural resources officials voted on Friday to lift a four-year moratorium on oil and gas drilling beneath Lakes Huron and Michigan. Supporters said the lake-bottom deposits would boost energy supplies in the U.S. while bringing the state royalty money that could be used to purchase public land. Critics said the risks of the drilling were too great, even though it would be prohibited in "environmentally sensitive" areas. Michigan Attorney General Jennifer Granholm (D), a candidate for governor next fall, hasn't ruled out suing the state Department of Natural Resources to block the drilling. Other top state politicians, such as Lieutenant Gov. Dick Posthumus (R), who is also running for governor, and U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D), oppose the drilling. The DNR said it would take about a year to approve the first drilling permits.

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