Unseasonable heat and smog are smothering Great Lakes states. Many cities experienced record-breaking temperatures with ground-ozone that are unhealthy for children, older adults and people with lung disease.

What do Great Lakes states do well? And what do they need to work on? This fun set of maps compiled by Big Think’s Strange Maps illustrates each state’s best and worst attributes — many are environmental.

This week the farmers begin building a second greenhouse and installing solar panels to support geothermal heat.

They start planning a rain cistern to capture rainfall

There’s nothing more disappointing than heading to your favorite beach on a hot summer day, only to discover it’s closed. In 2010, the chance of that happening was about five percent of the time, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA’s recently released beach report found that the nation’s beaches remained open 95 percent of the time during the summer swim season — a trend that’s been persisting for the past six years.

Researchers in Canada have discovered a hydraulic fluid used by planes within Great Lakes surface water and fish. The health threat is unclear. Equally mysterious is how the chemical got into the water. The discovery indicates that there may be other chemicals in the environment that researchers have yet to detect.

Officials in Ontario are preparing for a possible Asian carp invasion in the Thames River by performing a tabletop exercise with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Municipalities throughout Michigan are focusing on street lighting to save money and reduce energy consumption.

Some communities may overhaul street light systems to more energy-efficient ones. Others may reduce the time the lamps are lit.

A number of Michigan counties have fewer healthy food outlets than the national average, a new study shows.

The overall percentage of counties’ access to healthy foods in the state is 73 percent, while the national benchmark is 92 percent, according to County Health Rankings, complied by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources recently inducted its first brewery into the statewide Green Tier program for sustainable businesses.

Many Great Lakes craft breweries advocate sustainability through smart water use.

Product stewardship, a concept which puts environmental responsibility on consumers and producers, is one of the focuses of this year’s round of pollution prevention proposals to the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), which will award $50,000 to the winning community to implement its initiative.