Echo

St. Lawrence River PCBs linked to low testosterone in Mohawk men

By |

By Andrew McGlashen
Environmental Health News

Straddling the brawny sweep of the St. Lawrence River, where New York, Quebec and Ontario meet, the territory called Akwesasne has long provided fish that feed the 12,000 members of the Mohawk Nation there. But the junction of their ancestral legacy with their region’s industrial legacy has exposed the Mohawk to high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Now research suggests that the human health risk and gender-bending potential of these widespread and long-lasting pollutants are greater than previously recognized, and the Mohawk aren’t the only ones who should worry. Mounting evidence has shown that PCBs mimic estrogen, a female sex hormone, and can cause male bodies to develop feminine characteristics.

Echo

VIDEO: New perennial wheat easier on soil, passes cookie test

By |

By Steven Davy, stevenrdavy@yahoo.com
Great Lakes Echo
June 23, 2009

Crop and soil sciences researcher Sieglinde Snapp hopes her work at Michigan State University produces a more sustainable wheat. The variety she’s developing doesn’t have to be planted every year, and early research suggests it is easier on the soil, needs less fertilizer and contains more protein and micro-nutrients. It tastes good, too. Federal agriculture officials like the wheat so much they recently awarded the university a $1 million grant to help bring it to market. Snapp and graduate student research assistant Brook Wilke explain in this video the wheat’s research, potential and cookie test.

Echo

Book excerpt: Death of a Great Lakes icon

By |

It was the beauty and symbolism of these birds that made it so disturbing to see them washed up, dead, on Great Lakes beaches. In November 2007, I went looking for birds I did not want to see. Dead loons were washing up on the eastern shores of Lake Ontario. More

Echo

Foggy future of Great Lakes climate puts pressure on Michigan cherry growers

By |

By Andrew McGlashen
The Daily Climate

In the glacier-carved hillsides of northwest Michigan where half of America’s tart cherries grow, climate change is already in full bloom. The state is two degrees warmer on average than it was 30 years ago, and it’s generally wetter, said Michigan State University geographer Jeffrey Andresen, the state climatologist. There’s less ice on the Great Lakes, allowing for more evaporation and more lake-effect snow in cherry country. Farther north, Lake Superior has warmed five degrees since 1979. More importantly for growers, cherry blossoms now appear seven to ten days earlier than they did three decades ago, leaving them susceptible to potentially devastating spring frosts.

Echo

“Pandora’s Locks” creates route for invasive species that destroy Great Lakes ecosystem

By |

There are brief moments of gothic ghastliness in Jeff Alexander’s new book: Eel-like sea lampreys repeatedly strike and latch onto a teenage girl trying to swim across a choppy Lake Ontario at night. A 50-foot-wide band of dead fish lines a 40-mile stretch of Lake Michigan’s shore. Loons poisoned with botulism can’t hold their heads out of the water, and drown. But while those images might give readers the willies, the book’s larger tale of the federal government’s failure to keep invasive species out of the Great Lakes will make them downright sick. Michigan State University Press published Pandora’s Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St.

Echo

Michigan, Illinois, New York consider school alternative energy incentives

By |

By Theresa Gasinski, gasinsk1@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
May 21, 2009

The Michigan Legislature may soon create a fund to loan schools money to build windmills, solar panels or other sources of alternative energy. Elsewhere in the Great Lakes region, lawmakers in Illinois and New York have introduced similar legislation. Some ideas within the Michigan bills to integrate wind energy into schools were written by Cory Connolly, an international relations junior at Michigan State University. Connolly is senior fellow for energy and the environment at the MSU Roosevelt Institution, a public policy research group that is part of a larger nonprofit with student chapters nationwide. State Rep. Paul Opsommer, R-Dewitt, used parts of Connolly’s policy memo in a bill introduced in the House, which was duplicated and sent to the Senate.

Echo

Building a Great Lakes toxic legacy

By |

Millions of dollars have been spent cleaning historic Great Lakes contamination. Millions more are sought. Does it make sense to clean the lakes before the pollution sources are eliminated? A look at toxic fallout. An ill wind blows no good
As contaminated sediment is cleaned up in the Great Lakes, persistent pollutants continue to blow in, threatening again to poison soil and harm human health.

Echo

Great Lakes cleanups hampered by economic woes, bureaucratic hurdles

By |

By Andrew Mcglashen
Environmental Health News

A most-wanted list of toxic substances–including PCBs, dioxins, mercury, lead and pesticides–has lingered in western New York’s Eighteenmile Creek for decades, leaving its salmon, trout and other fish unsafe to eat and jeopardizing its wildlife. Now the nation’s sour economy has complicated and delayed the already daunting cleanup of the Lake Ontario tributary, as well as several dozen other toxic hotspots around the Great Lakes. “Given the fiscal situation in the State of New York, it’s really up in the air if the cleanup will get done,”said Victor DiGiacomo Jr., who chairs a local group of landowners, officials and others aiming to restore the area. Eighteenmile Creek, a meandering, lush stream in Niagara County known for its salmon and trout runs, is one of 43 highly contaminated sites that were designated “Great Lakes Areas of Concern” more than 20 years ago as part of a water-quality pact between the United States and Canada. As a promise to expedite the cleanups, Congress passed the Great Lakes Legacy Act in 2002, and then last fall, reauthorized it for another two years.

Echo

EPA chief open to crackdown on Great Lakes invasive species

By |

The Obama administration’s top environmental official indicated Tuesday that she will consider tougher rules to protect the Great Lakes from invasive species that hitch rides into the region aboard oceangoing vessels. Newly appointed Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said she will take a fresh look at her agency’s new policy that requires oceangoing vessels to flush their ship-steadying ballast tanks in mid-ocean to expel any unwanted organisms.

The EPA ordered the flushing late last year after losing a lawsuit over its long-standing policy to exempt ballast discharges from provisions in the Clean Water Act. But the conservationists who sued the EPA say that merely flushing ballast tanks does not go far enough to protect the Great Lakes from the next zebra mussel. They want the agency to force ship owners to install ballast treatment systems that will go much further toward killing unwanted organisms.

More