Echo

Man bites fish

By |

(IL) Chicago Tribune – When we learned that wildlife officials had spent $3 million poisoning the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to kill one Asian carp (and tens of thousands of innocent by-swimmers), our first response was whew! The purpose of last weekend’s deliberate fish kill wasn’t to eradicate the carp population but to make sure none of them was close enough to make a run past an underwater electric barrier while it was shut down for maintenance. Despite the near-hysterical protests of some of our neighbors, the body count suggests the carp aren’t poised to take over Lake Michigan the day after tomorrow. Their numbers must be smaller than feared, we thought, or the barriers are working better than the doomsayers want to believe. More

Echo

Cries to halt Chicago canal traffic because of carp are opposed

By |

(MI) Detroit Free Press – As Michigan’s attorney general prepares to file lawsuits this week to force Illinois and federal agencies to do more to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, some members of Congress also are mounting an anti-carp assault.

They say the time has come to close off a system of Chicago canals that allows invasive species to move between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River basin. More

Echo

Cherry: Bottler fee could revive scholarships

By |

(MI) Detroit Free Press – Lt. Gov. John Cherry on Thursday proposed using Michigan’s water supply to fund education. Businesses that make a profit by selling Michigan’s water should pay a fee of 10 cents per bottle, Cherry said. That money, in turn, could replace the recently dismantled Promise Scholarship, he said. “We are losing one resource — our talented workforce and the energy of our young people — and we are giving away another resource, our water, for free,” he said. “You don’t need a PhD in mathematics to know this is a terrible equation.”

Echo

4-lot purchase will clean up, beautify Minnehaha Creek

By |

(MN) Minneapolis Star Tribune – Minnehaha Creek Watershed District plans to buy four lots totaling just over 11 acres on Minnehaha Creek in St. Louis Park in a long-term effort to make the creek cleaner, more scenic and easier to access in St. Louis Park and Hopkins. Most of the land in the 7200 block of Excelsior Boulevard is a cattail wetland through which the creek once meandered. More

Echo

Road salt quickly makes its way to area streams

By |

(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – Several hours after county and municipal trucks began spreading salt on area streets and freeways in this week’s snowstorm, the salt was detected in urban rivers and streams by a series of water quality monitoring gauges, an environmental official at the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District said Wednesday. Chloride concentrations in Honey Creek in Wauwatosa rose to levels that could kill fish and other aquatic life on Tuesday afternoon and remained at toxic levels until Wednesday morning, said Chris Magruder, the district’s community environmental liaison. More

Echo

Waukesha taking first step to solve radium problem in wells

By |

(WI) Pierce County Herald – Waukesha took one small step yesterday toward getting rid of its radium-contaminated water wells. A committee in nearby Milwaukee recommended that the city declare an interest in selling water to Waukesha under the terms of the new Great Lakes water protection agreement.  

Waukesha is just outside Lake Michigan’s natural basin — and under the new compact, it might eventually get approval from all eight Great Lakes governors to use Lake Michigan’s water. As part of the process, Waukesha is seeking bids from communities which already use the lake’s water — and the city would tap into them. More

Echo

Dow AgroSciences fined $70,000 by EPA for violations at Harbor Beach

By |

(MI) Bay City Times – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reached an agreement with Dow AgroSciences on alleged Clean Air Act violations at the company’s pesticide production facility in Harbor Beach. The agreement, which includes a $70,000 penalty, resolves EPA allegations that Dow Agro violated national emission standards for hazardous air pollutants at the plant, according to information from the EPA’s Region 5 office in Chicago. More

Echo

Lone Tree environmental group to host dioxin meeting

By |

(MI) Bay City Times – The Lone Tree Council, a Saginaw Bay area environmental group, is hosting a “community conversation” with Peter deFur at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Delta College Lecture Theatre. Lone Tree and other organizations are bringing deFur to town to discuss dioxin contamination in the region and the draft consent order between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Dow Chemical Co. of Midland to address the contamination. More

Echo

Asian carp raises fear and loathing on Great Lakes

By |

(MI) The Associated Press – After nearly four decades as a fishing guide on the Great Lakes, Pat Chrysler has seen enough damage from invasive species to fear what giant, ravenous Asian carp could do to the nation’s largest bodies of freshwater. “It’s like introducing piranhas to the Great Lakes,” Chrysler said from South Bass Island in Lake Erie, which teems with walleye, perch and other fish that draw anglers from near and far. More

Echo

Petri pork project aims to reduce emissions by forgoing the farm

By |

(ON) The Globe and Mail – Do you care if your sausage never had a chance to squeal? It’s a question green-minded grocery shoppers may one day be faced with if a group of researchers in the Netherlands figures out how to exercise the test-tube-grown pork they’ve got lazing around in petri dishes so the meat will toughen up — and taste — as though it had been raised on a farm. Part of a government-funded group called the In Vitro Meat Consortium, the Dutch scientists are attempting to produce meat while doing away with the farm altogether — a bold departure from the general run of research into ways to stem the harmful atmospheric emissions caused by industrial livestock farming. More