Great Lakes Echo (https://greatlakesecho.org/2011/05/page/2/)
As scary as it is to think of an impaired bus driver shuttling your kids, wouldn’t you also want to know if someone might have been stoned while operating a nuclear power plant?
The federal government apparently doesn’t want you to know.
At 8 p.m. this Tuesday (May 24), WKAR public television will broadcast Bad Company, a one-hour documentary that looks at how human-driven influences have altered the environment of the Great Lakes. Check your local listings. The project represents over a year’s work of effort by Lou D’Aria and many of his students enrolled in his video production classes at Michigan State University. D’Aria is a faculty member associated with the university’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, the same unit that produces Great Lakes Echo. The documentary will be offered to all PBS stations in the Great Lakes region.
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s mission to guarantee clean and safe recreational water resources includes an assessment plan to make the public aware of problems.
DEQ said it has five related goals: 1) enhance recreational waters, 2) ensure edible fish, 3) protect and restore aquatic ecosystems, 4) ensure safe drinking water and 5) protect public safety.
Two years after implementing an online tool to reduce the impacts of excessive water withdrawal from the Great Lakes, funding that supports the Michigan project has dropped by more than 90 percent.
Eleven small Canadian beaches will be dropped from those that are tested for water quality problems, the Niagara Falls Review reports. The beaches are located on lakes Erie, Ontario and the Niagara River in the Niagara region of Ontario, Canada, according to the Niagara Region website. Public health officials in Ontario say they lack the time and resources to daily test every bit of the Great Lakes shorelines in the region, the paper reported. Officials said the move is an attempt to increase water testing at more frequently used beaches in Ontario.
A new federal report says it’s cheaper and easier to test water quality from space than it is from a boat or a dock. Data gathered by hand can be extrapolated to satellite imagery.
It’s an important advance in lake-heavy regions where it is expensive and challenging to visit every body of water.
Still, gathering data the old-fashioned way is not obsolete.
A new state effort is targeting the shrinking amount of habitat land for grassland birds in the Lower Peninsula by focusing on pheasant restoration.
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Kirk Deeter, who blogs for the Field & Stream website, recently named Michigan the top state in the U.S. for flyfishing. Deeter credited the state for an abundance of bass, pike, steelhead, salmon, panfish and fly-fishable lakes. He ranked New York twelfth. The only other Great Lakes states he mentioned were Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Wisconsin — and then only as an invitation to rebut his decision not to include them in the top 12. What do you think?
The United Press International (UPI) reports that the Canadian energy company, Bruce Power, has decided against shipping steam generators loaded with nuclear waste through the Great Lakes region. U.S. Rep. Candice Miller received the information from Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, UPI reported.
Are you tired of sitting in a classroom to learn about the environment? Why not go outside to touch and feel nature?