Echo

How stimulated are the Great Lakes?

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The almost $100 billion slated to provide clean drinking water and to rebuild and develop the nation’s roads, bridges and rails is expected to be one of the federal stimulus’ biggest job creators. And it’s an area that has clear environmental ramifications. For instance, the U.S. Department of Transportation recently announced a $25 million grant for 3.4 miles of light rail to connect 12 locations from downtown Detroit to its New Center commercial district. So how stimulated are the Great Lakes states? It depends on how you look at it.

Echo

VIDEO: Ice, ice baby

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The ice is back, and it’s filling the newsites and blogosphere with echoes of the 1980s.   Happily it has nothing to do with a certain rapper. No, the St. Clair River is once again stoppered by a miles-long ice jam.  The last time the river was this backed up was 1984.  That ice jam was 20 miles long and blocked the passage for 24 days.  It was recently eyed as one of the causes for Lake Huron’s falling water levels. The new ice jam is considerably shorter (a measly 9 miles) and the ice cutters are already racing to the rescue.  Still, ice jams can damage a river bed in a relatively short period of time.  The river water forced under the ice cover is moving fast. Remember when you were a kid playing with the garden hose and you covered half the opening with your thumb and then chased your siblings around with the super-powered water spout?  Yeah.  It’s something like that.  Only instead of terrorizing children, the water is scraping the river bottom clean of sediment and generally messing things up.

Echo

Displaced chaos: The silence of the newsroom

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The windowless room where our reporters work is nicknamed the Echo Chamber. It’s a catchy phrase that is wrong on a couple counts. Reporters here better not be mere echoes. They should bring context and fairness and accuracy and diversity and complexity and their own innate brains and knowledge to what they produce. There is a difference between stenography and journalism.

Echo

Is carp invasion a Taliban plot?

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Articles following the carp drama ran in many major newspapers nationwide this week and have found some play overseas as well. But the most consistent and up-to-date coverage is provided by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Dan Egan and John Flesher of the Associated Press. Carp watchers should keep an eye on the “Ongoing Coverage” section of the Journal-Sentinel’s Great Lakes, Great Peril special report.  Flesher’s most recent report on the financial implications of closing the locks can be found in today’s Los Angeles Times. And don’t miss Great Lakes Echo’s attempt to resolve competing estimates of the value of the fishery at risk. Michigan Now reporter Chris McCarus may have got the carp quote of the week from a retired steelworker speculating that the invasion may have been launched by the Taliban:
“Did you ever think it was a bin Laden plan?

Echo

Feeling okay about being an “Organic Foodie Guru”

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I have been groomed to be an “organic food snob.”

I munched on whole grain bread with organic peanut butter and jelly, organic apples and grapes as a 5-year old in the cafeteria. I had organic carrot cake for every birthday until I was 16 and trips to the local farmers market in my family were made more frequently than trips to any major supermarket. So, today I guess that it is understandable that I feel very comfortable spending a significant part of my income buying groceries with the organic label on it. I am not ashamed to admit that I have driven across Lansing, Mich. for an hour looking for organic bananas and raspberries, which are not always available at the conventional grocery store here.

Echo

VIDEO: Next best thing to an actual Great Lake? Try a virtual one

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Under the category “Cool Things on the Web”, I’d like to file the Great Lakes virtual tour by NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. The tour uses a Google Earth plugin and narration to navigate the Lakes.  My favorite part of the tour is the Lake Huron sinkholes by the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. I wrote a series of articles on the sinkholes last summer, and am always pleased to give them a shout out. The tour works fine online, but if you have Google Earth on your computer you can download the tour and make better use of some of its features.  This is particularly handy if you want to watch some of the accompanying videos or check out photos.  Otherwise, the site lists the videos below the plugin, so you can watch them on YouTube. This is a great site for a refresher on some of the more interesting geologic and historical features around the Lakes.  At a little more than 13 minutes it might seem like a long commitment (especially by Web standards), but I think you’ll enjoy it.  You might even learn something new about our Lakes.

Echo
Lake Superior clouds

VIDEO: Spaced-out views of Great Lakes weather

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The Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies — a joint effort between UW-Madison, NOAA and NASA — runs a blog featuring posts of weather-related satellite imagery. The posts often include beefy animated images of things like volcanoes in the West Indies and potential vorticity anomalies on the California coast. Luckily, the institute’s Wisconsin bias sometimes shows through and they offer up cool Great Lakes scenes. In December, they put together this mesmerizing shot of cloud bands streaming over Lake Superior. Photo: University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center
Be sure to let the whole image load and start looping, which could take a few minutes.

Wildlife
Eagle

Eagle watch: Spotting baldies in the Great Lakes states

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Spotting a bald eagle may not be a big deal for people who live in Alaska, along the East and West Coasts, the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River, where the large, predatory raptor lives year-round. But Great Lakes staters take what we can get when we get it. Below are the best spots in each of the Great Lakes states to spy the national bird, courtesy of the National Wildlife Federation. And once you see one, ask the bald eagle why it finally decided to clarify its stance on war. Indiana

Monroe Lake, (812) 837-9546

Michigan

Erie Marsh, (517) 316-0300

Minnesota

Voyageurs National Park, (218) 283-6600

New York

Mongaup Falls Reservoir, (845) 557-6162

Hudson River, (212) HUDSON

Sullivan County, (845) 557-6162

Ohio

Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, (419) 898-0014

Pennsylvania

Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area, (717) 787-1323

Wisconsin

Nelson Dewey State Park, (608) 725-5374

Echo

Lake politics: Bayh and the Basin

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A Great Lakes swing state is a bit more, well, swinging, now that Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh announced he would retire this year. So what does it mean for the basin? It depends on how you link political parties to environmental protection. The retirement of Bayh, who was once rumored to be President Barack Obama’s VP choice, puts his Indiana seat in play for Republicans. Bayh has $13 million on hand for his campaign, and recent polls had him leading his Republican challengers, former Sen. Dan Coats and former congressman John Hostettler, by 20 points and 16 points respectively.

Echo

Does hunting solve the equation of desperation?

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When the number of people having trouble feeding themselves and their families increases, and the services that are instituted to help them, suffer at the same time, what I call “an equation of desperation” is created. Food isn’t really a commodity, and if it isn’t available, there certainly aren’t replacements. I mean, hell…the stuff has generated wars and caused people to do outrageous, unspeakable things. So, while we may not be to that point yet in the United States, could it get there if the system that was put in place to prevent food hardship fails? The 2010 Food Hardship report by the Food Research and Action Center recently reported nearly 20 percent of all people have trouble feeding their families on a daily basis.