Echo

End of the road for public beach?

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(MI) The Holland Sentinel – Lower courts have issued conflicting resolutions about the beach at the end of 121st Avenue, resulting in two sets of signs with two sets of directions. Now, the Michigan Court of Appeals might give the final direction after it hears testimony Wednesday about the issue of beach use along Lake Michigan. More

Echo

Getting Benton Harbor to tap area’s bounty

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(MI) The Herald-Palladium – Fruit and vegetable growers from six farms stood at folding tables Wednesday afternoon in the parking lot at the Mercy Center in Benton Harbor. The tables were filled with locally grown produce, all the colors of the rainbow. More

Echo

From junk pile to farm park

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(MI) Detroit Free Press – Howard Taylor might never have started his own theme park if his wife hadn’t reached her limit with the junk strewn about their yard. “I bought an old sawmill in 1991 and had the pieces spread out everywhere,” said Howard Taylor, who with his wife, Gloria, has created Wellington Farm Park, where visitors can tour a village that re-creates life on the Depression-era farm he knew as a child. More

Echo

Cash leaves Mich. on dove wings

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(MI) The Detroit News – Nationwide, 1 million dove hunters will spend more than $1 billion on lodging, licenses and supplies. None of it will be spent in Michigan. Forty states allow dove hunting. And while Texans are the most fanatical, the dove season is a much anticipated gateway to fall hunting in many other places.  More

Echo

A Wooded Prairie Springs From a Site Once Piled High With Garbage

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(NY) The New York Times -South of the Belt Parkway near Exit 15 in Brooklyn, approaching Kennedy International Airport an unassuming hill slopes upward, dotted with small, scraggly trees and bushes. A quarter-century ago, the hill was a more memorable sight. It was the Fountain Avenue Landfill. More

Echo

Railing against conventional transportation

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(ON) The Globe and Mail – Imagine a train car suspended high above traffic that could reach speeds of 250 kilometres per hour and get you from Quebec City to Montreal in less than an hour. Each car in the inverted monorail system could transport 60 to 75 passengers and would be powered by 16 in-wheel electric engine motors. No need for expensive fuel – just clean, affordable electricity, its promoters say. More

Wildlife

Special report: The alewife question

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Alewives are a Great Lakes invasive fish that baffle native fish reproduction but give imported Pacific salmon — the target of a profitable fishery — something to eat. What’s a Great Lakes fishery manager to do? Sept. 2, 2009
Alewives: Should Great Lakes managers kill ‘em or keep ‘em? Fishery managers have made little progress in restoring lake trout, the Great Lakes’ dominant predator until the species collapsed in the 1940s and 1950s.

Wildlife

Great Lakes fish in the balance; biologists have little control

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By Jeff Gillies, jeffgillies@gmail.com
Great Lakes Echo
Sept. 4, 2009
Editors note: This is the final story in a three-part series about the challenges of managing non-native fish in the Great Lakes. Managing invasive alewives in the Great Lakes is like walking a tightrope. Too many stymie native lake trout reproduction. Too few cripple the profitable salmon fishery.

Echo

U.S. EPA launches detailed study of Cleveland-area air quality

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(OH) Cleveland Plain-Dealer – Fifteen feet above the pavement at Broadway and Orange Avenue, a white-metal battalion of computerized monitors is measuring and analyzing our dirty downtown skies as never before.  

More than a dozen humming machines — half of them the city of Cleveland’s existing equipment, the other half installed last month by U.S. EPA researchers — stand in tight formation across a new wooden deck atop the R.T. Craig building. More