Great Lakes Echo (http://greatlakesecho.org/2011/02/page/2/)
Check out these two stories that appeared on Echo recently. One is this piece by Gary Wilson about privatizing public water service in Chicago. The other is this piece by Kari Lydersen about the Kennecott mine proposal in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. They don’t appear to have much in common. One is commentary on a big city urban issue.
The curator of natural history at Mackinac State Parks uses bones and jumps around like a kid to excite schoolchildren about natural history.
“What would be the point of preserving a forest or a bird or a watershed, if it’s something I wouldn’t care or know about?” asks Jeff Dykehouse.
The Water, Woods and Wildlife program reaches about 8,000 Michigan students a year.
If you want to see traces of a region’s native inhabitants, look no farther than the names of its cities. Consider the Lake Superior coastal city Waukesha, Wis., named for the Chippewa or Ojibwe word for “little fox.”
The original Chippewa word most likely sounded like Wau-goosh-sha, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society’s state dictionary. Today, it sounds like Wok-a-shaw. It’s one of many Great Lakes city monikers originating from native languages. It’s also on my personal list of regional words specifically designed to torture Texans like myself.
The U.S. EPA has ruled that Kennecott cannot construct a road it had proposed through wetlands and forest from the mine site to a reopened ore mill. Now Upper Peninsula residents worry about the potential impact on exisiting local roads.
Runoff from urban and agricultural activities has a bad rap–a recent white paper said nonpoint source pollution accounts for 76 percent of Great Lakes water pollution. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources said nonpoint pollution can range from “lawn chemicals, fertilizers, road salts and petroleum products to sediment (dirt) and excessive nutrients from cities, malfunctioning home-sewage treatment systems and livestock operations.”
Ohio is taking the problem into its own hands to clean up Lake Erie. But how do you attack the source when you don’t know where it is? An easy answer: educate the humans. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources granted $75,000 toward three coastal nonpoint pollution education specialists in Lake, Lucas and Ottawa counties.
As the state’s agricultural sector continues to grow, so does the need for young farmers, according to the Michigan Farm Bureau.
While the average age of the state’s farmers was about 54 in 2007, the Department of Agriculture believes that number is currently higher.
So many people didn’t get outdoors prior to 2007 that the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources asked why. What’s keeping Minnesotans away? Lack of time, equipment, outdoor skills and event information, they say. Maybe that’s because kids aged eight to 18 years old average seven hours and 38 minutes per day on their cell phones, iPods, computers and televisions, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study. The department announced recently that plans developed after the department’s study to get people outside have worked.
In the last segment of a three-part video series on Great Lakes dead zones, Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute director Don Scavia discusses federal policy and economic constraints to addressing agricultural contamination in the Great Lakes. Scavia and Pete Richards, senior research scientist at Heidelberg University in Ohio, recently hosted a workshop on clues about why the rates of agricultural nutrients are on the rise in the Great Lakes watershed. Part I is here. Part II is here. This workshop was part of the Agricultural Conference on the Environment held at The Lansing Center on Jan.
Chicago is in the midst of a mayoral election campaign and an issue that wouldn’t normally garner much attention is right there with the budget, schools, city services and crime.
The longest fish caught in Indiana last year reached nearly to my shoulders. It was a 48-inch blue catfish wrangled by David Ben Mullen in the Ohio River. The catch was recorded in Indiana’s “Fish of the Year,” a contest where fisherman attempt to catch the longest fish of certain species. Fish like Lake Michigan’s brown trout, the longest of which was recorded at 31.5 inches (nearly to up to my hip) caught by David Kniola. Or a 21.5-inch (just above the knee) smallmouth bass caught by Brooke Lingerfel in the Brookville Reservoir.