Great Lakes Echo (https://greatlakesecho.org/category/solutions/page/3/)
Stories that offer environmental solutions.
A tractor falls on you. A horse kicks you. A cow pins you against the side of a barn. Your hand gets caught in a corn shucker.
These are just some of the accidents Michigan State University researcher Laurel Morano documented in her recent study of agriculture-related injuries – and only among the most dramatic examples of the dangers farmers face every day on the job.
Steve Hall used to call public health “the invisible profession.”
“Previously, when we did our jobs well, people didn’t know about us,” said Hall, who for 10 years has been the health officer for the Central Michigan District Health Department.
When Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed off on expansive recycling reforms in December 2022, she also approved a last-minute amendment allowing chemical recycling — a process decried by many environmentalists — to be classified as a legal manufacturing process.
Chemical recycling, specifically the commonly used plastic pyrolysis process, turns plastic into fuel.
The number of farmhands in Michigan working on H-2A visas — which allow farms that are struggling to hire U.S. workers to bring in temporary laborers from other countries—increased from 277 in 2010 to over 15,000 in 2023, according to the Michigan Farm Bureau.
Chicago is joining a nationwide trend of large cities incorporating equity or justice goals into preparing for climate change’s impact on public health.
The idea is to better protect Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and other socially vulnerable and marginalized communities. That hasn’t always been the case.
Delilah, the 13-year-old cat of Rep. Laurie Pohutsky, D-Livonia, had to visit a veterinarian every time it got a respiratory infection.
That is, until emergency orders by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer during the COVID-19 pandemic allowed a broad expansion of veterinary telehealth, where owners and pets see their vets through video calls.
Fish-leather purses and wallets may make their way into Great Lakes fashion with an initiative to use 100% of commercially caught fish by 2025.
One of the latest projects of a binational Great Lakes organization is to fully use the region’s whitefish, lake trout, yellow perch, walleye and white sucker.
Hundreds of years ago a lord of the Tohoku region in Japan offered villagers a deal – equal weight in silver to any who could find a rare mushroom.
The villagers danced with joy when they found the valuable fungus, inspiring the mushroom’s name, “maitake,” or “the dancing mushroom.”
Canada is turning to Indigenous fire safety knowledge after record wildfires raged across the country last summer.
“One big issue with Indigenous services is there’s a gap,” Lazare said. “What we are doing is closing that gap to make sure First Nations are included.”
A newly discovered chemical compound that makes it difficult for invasive sea lamprey to find their breeding grounds may be a new tool in the toolbox for controlling a parasite that threatens Great Lakes fish.
Anne Scott, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, and her team of researchers are creating a new method of sea lamprey control