Great Lakes Echo (https://greatlakesecho.org/author/dschoenherr/)
Like clockwork, Michigan’s Ford Lake and its downstream neighbor, Belleville Lake, turn bright green every summer due to harmful algal blooms.
The lakes, located near Ypsilanti in the southeast part of the state, have struggled for decades with phosphorus pollution that spurs algae growth.
Tucked away in the foothills of Appalachia lies Pennsylvania’s Hawk Mountain Sanctuary — a center for environmental education and a flyway for thousands of raptors each year.
Society of Environmental Journalists members attending their recent conference in Philadelphia caught the beginning of the raptor migration season at Hawk Mountain.
Less than two miles past the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula are dozens of cedars stripped of their bark and left to die.
“It is probably the most obscene thing I’ve witnessed,” said Renee Dillard, an elder of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians who recently discovered the damaged trees.
At Lake Simcoe in southern Ontario, February has traditionally been the peak of ice fishing season.
But this year, the lake’s freezing cycle is in purgatory, continuing to fuel what many locals are calling Ontario’s worst ice fishing season in decades.
On July 2, 1999, 38-year-old Vicky Brockman set out with two friends down the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness’s Gunflint Trail in Minnesota.
Three days later, the group was stranded in the center of a storm with the strength of a hurricane. They rushed into their tents for shelter.
Lake Erie is the first of the Great Lakes getting connected to the internet with a series of offshore “smart” buoys.
And it’s not just for sending texts on the water.
Guinness World Records recently announced that the world’s new hottest pepper is a veggie known as Pepper X, grown by Puckerbutt Pepper Co. of Fort Mill, South Carolina.
But Ryan Karcher, a veteran pepper grower from Howell, Michigan, is contesting Pepper X’s spice and flavor with his own pepper. It will be featured in a January 22 television show called Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People.
The Great Lakes region’s more than 300 bird species may provide valuable mental health benefits.
A recent study from Carleton University in Ontario shows there are fewer mental health-related hospitalizations in Michigan areas with high bird diversity.
Lianne Leddy grew up with stories of the uranium mining that poisoned her Anishinaabek community in Ontario.
Now, she’s retelling these stories through Serpent River Resurgence, her new book based on documents and interviews from family and friends who lived through the environmental crisis.
More tools and resources are becoming available to teachers wanting to pursue environmental curriculum.