Green Options

With concerns over climate change globally, you might think that the last thing that environmentalists would worry about would be the natural food chain of wildlife; but for the Great Lakes there could be severe consequences posed if the carp manage to enter waterways they’ve been barred from entering.

Bighead carp are one of two non-native species of Asian carp causing widespread concern among Great Lakes advocates. The other is silver carp.

Great Lakes advocates are calling it a “conservation emergency” now that non-native Asian carp have been detected within seven miles of Lake Michigan. They want an immediate closure of locks and gateways leading to the lake in a literally”last-ditch” attempt to keep the fish out.

The fear is that the giant fish will disrupt the valuable Great Lakes sport fishery by outcompeting species at the top of the Lake Michigan food web, consuming the forage fish the established species depend on — and like many of the other 180 non-native aquatic species already in the Great Lakes, causing general ecosystem disruption.

Pollution from industrial facilities like this one at East Harbor in Indiana up to the 1970s left a legacy of contamination still in need of cleanup from new Great Lakes restoration funding.

Giving President Obama a major victory, Congress on Thursday sent him a spending bill containing $475 million in new funding to help restore the Great Lakes. During his 2008 campaign, candidate Obama committed to a multi-year effort to combat Great Lakes invasive species, habitat loss, climate change impacts and threats to water quality. The Great Lakes contain almost one-fifth of the world’s available surface freshwater.

Legal skirmishes in Ohio and Michigan are reviving debates over whether those who own Great Lakes shoreline properties exclusively control their waterfront land or whether the public can access and travel along the coast.  The same legal doctrine at issue in these battles is a central focus in current debates about n a time of potential c ommercialization of Great Lakes water.

Lyngbya wollei, south shore Maumee Bay in Ohio, September 23, 2009.

Lake Erie, declared dead by the news media in the 1960s because of widespread, repulsive algae blooms, is once again marred, this time by both old and new causes. Some scientists and lake advocates worry that the unsightly algae is a warning of a lake once again in decline.

Tom Bridgeman, a lake scientist with the University of Toledo’s Lake Erie Center, said, “I’ve never seen the water as green as it was this year — and it’s not showing any signs of dying off yet. This is a growing problem.” Increased phosphorus runoff from farms and city streets, coupled with the feeding and excretion habits of non-native mussels introduced through ballast water, is believed to be associated with the resurgent blooms.

The western end of the lake has suffered from a surge in microsystis algae this summer. Bridgeman hypothesizes that in addition to phosphorus, underwater sediment shifts are culpable.

In a century of rising fresh water scarcity, a community of activists in the Great Lakes region is working to prevent private ownership of that water resource, although most mainstream conservation and environmental activists are focused elsewhere. If the activists’ concerns are valid, their battle has national as well as international implications.

The fear stems from the interaction of the North American Free Trade Agreement, other trade pacts, and the Great Lakes Compact ratified by the eight Great Lakes states and Congress last year. The definition of “product” in the Compact includes water once extracted from its natural state and location. A controversial Nestle Waters North America, Inc. bottled water operation in Michigan that is pumping hundreds of millions of gallons per year of state water heightens the concern.

The North American Great Lakes contain 6 quadrillion gallons of freshwater, about one-fifth of the world’s available freshwater supply.

For more than 25 years, residents of the Great Lakes region have feared large-scale public works projects to take freshwater from the Lakes to thirsty, faster-growing areas of North America. That’s why the eight Great Lakes states and Congress last year approved a compact barring most water diversions of the Lakes, which contain 80% of the continent’s fresh water. But ideas about turning the Lakes into a cash cow, floating around for years, are not dead yet. At the same time, relatively little attention has been paid to the idea of “sharing” the water of the Lakes to alleviate a global humanitarian emergency in an era of freshwater scarcity.

While public opinion remains divided about the risks and benefits of installing wind farms in the Great Lakes, several of the eight states with Great Lakes water are racing to be first to approve projects capturing energy from frequently strong offshore winds. It remains to be seen whether a public generally supportive of developing wind energy will support turbines in the Lakes for the first time. Opposition to the proposed Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound because of aesthetic impacts has slowed that saltwater proposal.

As climate scientists scour the Earth’s surface looking for indications of climate change impacts, freshwater lakes and reservoirs are becoming the sentinels of choice for many investigations. Although they make up a small percentage of the planet’s surface area, such bodies of water–small to large–are providing clues to past climate fluctuations, as their sediments and “catchments” (the total chemical and biological materials that result from the presence of the body of water) often record ancient climate impacts, and offer indicators [...]

In the Obama Administration’s proposed 2010 budget, it’s $475 million in new money in the first year for Great Lakes restoration. The five lakes hold about 6 quadrillion gallons of water and provide drinking water for 40 million North Americans but are afflicted with aquatic invasive species, habitat destruction, lingering and new chemicals, and animal and human waste.

Long sought by the region’s advocates, the money would be divided up [...]

Right now, there’s no wind in the Great Lakes, but lots of talk.

There’s a bit of money, too, totaling about $100,000 from the federal stimulus package, aka the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The Great Lakes Commission has been granted $99,740 to develop a set of “Best Practices to Accelerate Wind Power in the Great Lakes and Beyond.”

The end result will be a guide to what works and what doesn’t when it comes to protecting the environment, being sensitive to community concerns and … building wind turbines in the water.