Painesville sets record for longest microtunneling project in U.S., with new Lake Erie intake pipe (Page 2,490)

For our 50th anniversary, we commissioned author and journalist Kari Lydersen to look at the Great Lakes and clean water issues that have shaped our region. Read the rest of the series here. 

Toxic pollution spurs founding of Lake Michigan Federation

From the industrial revolution onward, the Great Lakes region was a thriving hub of industry thanks to the lakes and rivers that allowed easy transport of goods and raw materials, and water for industrial processes. By the 1960s, as a result, the waterways were also laden with toxic waste, much of it settling into the sediment, from steel mills, factories, tanneries, breweries, paper mills, coal plants, and countless other industries.

Lee Botts founded the Lake Michigan Federation in part to demand an end to the contamination of the watershed, and to force the cleanup of past toxic pollution. This goal became especially important as the region’s heavy industry was declining and emerging economies — recreation, tourism, and cleaner industries like advanced technology, education and health care — depended on rivers and lakes as amenities to attract people.

43 areas identified for cleanup

In its early days, the Lake Michigan Federation focused heavily on the creation and implementation of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. In 1987, as part of that agreement, the U.S. and Canada designated 43 Areas of Concern (AOCs) in the Great Lakes that held dangerous pollutants and could not support recreation, or habitat for wildlife. The biggest need was the removal of copious amounts of the toxic sediment that keeps releasing carcinogenic and neurotoxic heavy metals, PAHs, PCBs and other compounds into water and wildlife for decades.

The AOCs include the Grand Calumet River emptying into Lake Michigan just southeast of Chicago, where an industrial menagerie of steel mills, oil refineries, pharmaceutical manufactures and more contaminated the sediment with PAHs, PCBs, oil and grease, and heavy metals. Green Bay, Wisconsin, and the Fox River that leads into it were rife with PCBs and other contaminants from paper mills, particularly from the making of carbon-free copy paper. White Lake, Michigan, in Muskegon County near Lake Michigan, was deeply contaminated from years of dumping by a tannery and chemical company. And Presque Isle Bay on the southern shore of Lake Erie was laced with PAHs and heavy metals from steel mills, a foundry and other industry.

Cleaning up toxic sediment is a laborious and expensive job, involving expansive testing to find where pollution is worst, then physically removing massive amounts of contaminated sediment, drying it and transporting it to and storing it in secure facilities.

Lake Michigan Federation pushes for action

When Cameron Davis became executive director of the Lake Michigan Federation in 1998, the AOCs were a major priority.

“These AOCs had been languishing,” Davis recounts. “We had all the right policies in place, we knew what we needed to do scientifically, we just didn’t have the resources to kick these cleanups into high gear.”

As the country headed for the 2000 presidential elections, Davis remembers, public support for Great Lakes cleanup was accelerating. Davis volunteered to work with Congress to craft a plan. With close allies including Congressmen Vern Ehlers, Republican from Michigan, and James Oberstar, Democrat from Minnesota, they ultimately drafted legislation and Davis proposed a name: the “Great Lakes Legacy Act.”

“The title had two meanings,” he explains. “We wanted to rid the Great Lakes of these legacy pollutants and thereby leave a stronger, more vibrant legacy for future generations.”

Testifying before a congressional subcommittee in 2001, Davis noted that almost 15 years after the designation of AOCs, only one had been delisted, in Canada. “Contaminated sediment is not a glamorous issue,” he testified. “But therein lies the danger of this problem. It is one that continues to permeate the Great Lakes. It is one that continues to permeate the health of the people in the Great Lakes. And because it is not glamorous and does not really get front page attention, it makes it all the more important that we do something about it.”

Another thing caught Davis’s ear. Some representatives contended that the country couldn’t afford to fund the bill because there wasn’t enough money. “Yet here we were in the middle of the largest economic expansion in world history,” Davis recalls thinking while at the witness table. “It was a great lesson that, as advocates, we have to be diplomatic and determined.”

In 2002, President George W. Bush signed the Great Lakes Legacy Act. The EPA worked with groups on the ground to assess the needs, develop cleanup plans and begin the hard work of removing decades’ worth of contamination. But the process was still frustratingly slow.

Lake Michigan Federation becomes Alliance for the Great Lakes

The organization was poised to channel that frustration into accelerated progress for the Great Lakes. In 2004, with unanimous approval of the board of directors, Davis transitioned the Lake Michigan Federation into the Alliance for the Great Lakes. And, in 2008, as president and CEO of the Alliance, Davis was back testifying before the same subcommittee, again working closely with Reps. Ehlers and Oberstar, making the point that only one of the American AOCs had been cleaned up. More funding, more flexibility and other changes were needed to jumpstart the cleanups and keep them going long into the future, Davis and others argued.

The success of the Legacy Act was the foundation for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative that President Barack Obama signed and Congress began funding in 2009, a sweeping measure that included ongoing funding for toxic sediment removal as well as habitat restoration and other goals. Even in our current highly polarized political environment, the initiative has continued to enjoy strong bipartisan support from Congress, with funding of more than $3 billion since inception.

Toxic pollution cleanups accelerate

In 2013, Presque Isle Bay on Lake Erie became the second American AOC delisted, and in 2014, White Lake and Deer Lake in Michigan were also delisted.

Management actions have been completed on multiple AOCs stretching from Waukegan Harbor and the Sheboygan River on Lake Michigan’s western coast to the Ashtabula River on Lake Erie to the Rochester Embayment on Lake Ontario.

The Canadian government also has a program to clean up Areas of Concern, developed in cooperation with the U.S. Canada has cleaned up and delisted AOCs including Collingwood Harbor and Severn Sound on Georgian Bay. Five AOCs are joint U.S.-Canadian efforts.

In all, the Great Lakes Legacy Act has meant the cleanup in the U.S. of 4.3 million cubic yards of sediment, with $362 million in federal funds spent on cleanup. Those funds have also leveraged $251 million in non-federal spending from state, county, municipal and private partners since under the act, the federal government matches non-federal spending in a 65%-35% split.

New types of pollution emerge as threats

New types of toxic pollution are threatening the Great Lakes today. Non-point-source pollution including agricultural and urban runoff create toxic algal blooms and other health and ecological threats, as discussed in the next blog in this series. And other types of industrial and consumer waste are also a problem.

Among them, microplastics — plastic from straws, bottles and other items that break down into tiny pieces — are being consumed by bottom-dwelling organisms and fish. These plastics can absorb chemicals, so consuming them passes the chemicals up the food chain. And harmful bacteria can grow on them, making them a conduit for this bacteria to potentially affect humans or aquatic organisms. Microplastics have even been found in cormorant chicks who get them through regurgitated fish from their parents. About 22 million pounds of plastic enter the Great Lakes each year, most of it in Lake Michigan, according to the Rochester Institute of Technology. Microplastics are found in drinking water drawn from the lakes, and even in beer. If plastic breaks down into even smaller pieces — nanoplastics — it can enter the bloodstream of fish and of humans. Last year Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a law mandating the state EPA examine the impacts of plastics in water on human health.

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are also a major concern. These are manmade chemicals — sometimes called “forever chemicals” — from non-stick cookware, waterproof fabric, packaging and flame retardant that don’t break down in the environment, or the human body. They’ve been found in water bodies, groundwater and drinking water across the Great Lakes region, and states have developed regulations and response plans. But even as some harmful PFAS are phased out or banned, replacement chemicals are also raising serious concerns. And there’s little understanding of the exact impacts of many chemicals, though in general they are known to cause kidney or testicular cancer, fertility problems and other impacts.

PFAS and microplastics in drinking water drive home that our dependence on the Great Lakes doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. “There are real, serious threats to the health of countless people who never visit the lakes but depend on their water every day,” notes Joel Brammeier, Alliance president & CEO.

Lead pollution in drinking water is another serious health threat, and a pressing environmental justice issue, in cities across the Great Lakes, most notoriously in Flint, Michigan. Lead in drinking water comes from archaic water service lines, and is another signal that people in this most water-rich part of the world still cannot count on safe water in their homes and businesses for their families and friends. That’s just not sustainable.

Past successes can inspire future solutions

As challenging as newer toxics are, the past offers hope. If we could successfully tackle decades of contamination that happened before society was even aware of the dangers, then we can address threats emerging in real time.

Davis says the Great Lakes Legacy Act and related work should continue to be an inspiration: an historic achievement that shows the potential for bipartisan cooperation and long-term thinking. That same attitude will be required to solve things like PFAS, microplastics and failing pipes.

“These Great Lakes helped deliver this country through two World Wars, through different economic downturns,” fueling industry and providing jobs that benefitted the whole country, Davis muses. “It’s our time to give something back to the Great Lakes.”

For our 50th anniversary, we commissioned author and journalist Kari Lydersen to look at the Great Lakes and clean water issues that have shaped our region. Read the rest of the series here.

A warning rallies the region

In 1998, an obscure Canadian consulting company announced its intention to ship 158 million gallons of Lake Superior water to Asia.

Though that specific plan seemed unlikely to materialize, it was a warning that in a world increasingly plagued by droughts and warming temperatures, fresh clean Great Lakes water is an invaluable and potentially very lucrative commodity.

“There had been a fear for decades that with global water scarcity, sooner or later thirsty industry and people would come calling on the Great Lakes to their peril, to send Great Lakes water all over the continent or all over the world potentially,” says Peter Annin, author of The Great Lakes Water Wars.

“That really rallied the region to create a legal water management paradigm to keep Great Lakes water in the Great Lakes watershed. It wasn’t that 158 million gallons would harm Lake Superior, it would be virtually immeasurable. But it would have set a legal precedent. If you can send Great Lakes water to Asia, where can’t you send it?”

An epic battle begins

Thus was launched an epic battle to keep Great Lakes water in the Great Lakes Basin. The Alliance (then the Lake Michigan Federation) and other lakes advocates began working tirelessly to persuade lawmakers and officials of the imminent threat, and craft policy to prevent diversions of Great Lakes water.

Alliance Vice President for Policy Molly Flanagan remembered that “there was this sense of scarcity in other parts of the country and fear in the Great Lakes region that those places might start to look to the Great Lakes as a source of water. In reality it would be astronomically expensive, but even the specter of that was enough to unify the region to say, ‘This is a really important resource for our communities, our economies, our way of life, and we’re keeping it here.’”

The effort required participation and ratification by all eight Great Lakes states and the federal government, including passage by Congress. Each state had to pass its own implementing legislation.

Flanagan, at the time working for the National Wildlife Federation, spearheaded collaboration with industry, farmers and other stakeholders to shepherd passage of the legislation in each state.

“In retrospect it was as challenging as you can imagine going into eight states and telling them they have to pass a piece of legislation exactly as written, and no they can’t change any word, no they can’t add or subtract anything,” Flanagan said. Despite the challenges, “the ratification of the Compact happened really rapidly, because there was a good understanding by each of the states that we really have a resource in the Great Lakes that’s worth protecting.”

Success: A shining example of bipartisanship

After ratification by each state, on Oct. 3, 2008, President George W. Bush signed the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Compact, which banned almost all diversions of water out of the basin. It also included a host of “remarkable,” in Annin’s words, sustainability and conservation measures.

The Compact was a shining example of bipartisanship, hashed out and adopted by both Republican- and Democrat-led states. Likewise after being signed by Bush, the provisions have been respected by subsequent administrations.

There were many thorny philosophical and practical questions. Could bottled water and beer be made in the Great Lakes — with Great Lakes Basin water — and sold outside the basin? How to deal with Chicago, which had been diverting millions or billions of gallons per day since the reversal of the Chicago River a century ago — by drawing drinking water from Lake Michigan and then sending treated wastewater out to the Mississippi River. What about municipalities that straddled the basin perimeter or lay just outside it?

Waukesha: Proving the Compact works

One such case presented a key legal and political challenge to the Compact. Waukesha, Wisconsin, just a mile and a half outside the basin near Milwaukee, is within a county that straddled the basin. Its water supply drawn from the ground was becoming increasingly contaminated with naturally occurring radium. The town wanted to be able to tap Lake Michigan water. Waukesha was eventually approved for an exception under the Compact, allowing it to use Lake Michigan water as long as it returns treated wastewater to the basin and meets stringent requirements for water conservation, efficiency and treatment.

Crafters of the Compact counted the resolution of the Waukesha matter as a victory, a logical and realistic solution that kept the Compact strong while providing a legal water supply to Waukesha if it plays by the rules.

The process that created the Great Lakes Compact also involved Canada, and U.S. governors work with Canadian premiers on protecting Great Lakes water and keeping it in the basin through an official agreement signed in 2005. The two Canadian provinces are also able to weigh in on any requests for diversions in the U.S.

Annin notes that the Compact is still seen “as a global model for international transboundary water management. And perhaps more miraculously, we had this bipartisan, multi-jurisdictional effort to protect one of the most important freshwater resources in the world on behalf of future generations, passed in the absence of a crisis. That doesn’t happen often.”

Climate change presents new challenges

When the Compact was signed, Great Lakes water levels were at nearly historic lows. Docks were left high and dry, barges were stranded in low rivers, and sport fishing and recreational boating were jeopardized as harbors drained. The appearance of the lakes receding before people’s eyes lent an even greater sense of urgency to the Compact.

Today, lake levels are high, in some lakes at record high levels. Last year neighborhoods around Lake Ontario were flooded, and shipping was jeopardized on the St. Lawrence Seaway flowing out of the Great Lakes. The lakefront running trail in Chicago is sometimes underwater. Lakefront properties are swamped with water or buffeted by waves causing massive erosion.

Fluctuation in lake levels is natural and ecologically healthy. But the fluctuations are expected to be more drastic — with higher highs and lower lows — and to happen more quickly because of climate change.

And lake levels are far from the only way that climate change is affecting the Great Lakes. Warming temperatures are likely to worsen harmful algal blooms, and increased heavy rains will likely increase the runoff of fertilizer from farms that feeds those blooms. Heavy rains will also likely cause more combined sewer overflows — overwhelming sewer systems and forcing municipalities to release untreated sewage into the lakes or tributaries. Warmer temperatures may favor some invasive species and harm important native species.

“In this era of big [lake level] swings and rapid change, it is all the more important and very fortunate to have something like the Great Lakes Compact in force so that in a period of high water, short-sighted officials don’t rush out and propose deals that end up looking terrible when we go back into a period of low water, which we always do,” Annin says. “We have more volatility, more uncertainty, so the importance of a stabilizing factor like the Compact is arguably more important than ever.”

The Compact as a model for addressing climate change

The Compact was an historic effort and symbol of bipartisan collaboration across jurisdictions. Hence it offers hope and best practices regarding how Great Lakes stakeholders can forge ahead to meet the challenges of climate change — both adapting to the inevitable and helping to curb climate change.

“How do we ensure we are as resilient as possible in the face of climate change?” asked Flanagan. “We’re seeing that exposed pretty starkly with high water levels and coastal erosion. We need to be thinking together about how to address these issues. It’s about taking a long view and looking at the resources as a whole instead of as individual pieces of property.”

Major infrastructure upgrades are needed to handle increasingly fluctuating lake levels and increasingly powerful storms — to protect shorelines and water systems from damage and to protect the lakes from increased pollution brought on by storms and flooding. It’s more important than ever to clean up legacy contamination, since storms could stir up contaminated sediment.

And with increased heat and economic and social stress related to climate change, Great Lakes communities will need to make sure the most vulnerable have access to the lakes themselves and to that most precious commodity: clean drinking water.

“The Compact is doing its job of keeping our Great Lakes water here where it belongs,” says Alliance President & CEO Joel Brammeier. “Our challenge remains to make sure everyone who lives here can enjoy that water safely — in their homes, their businesses and in the outdoors.”

For our 50th anniversary, we commissioned author and journalist Kari Lydersen to look at the Great Lakes and clean water issues that have shaped our region. Read the rest of the series here. 

“Shut up and listen.”

It’s a mantra for Alliance vice president of policy and strategic engagement Crystal Davis, guiding her work with communities on the ground, and shaping policy proposals that meet these communities’ needs.

Environmental and conservation groups have increasingly realized the importance of really listening to a diverse range of residents and stakeholders, and taking their cues from people’s needs and desires rather than leading from the top.

It’s a lesson the Alliance has taken to heart, as it redefines the definition and scope of Great Lakes issues and partners with community organizations and others to try to ensure that all Great Lakes residents can enjoy the benefits of the lakes, from recreational access to economic vitality to clean, affordable drinking water.

“The Alliance is listening to communities and then integrating what we’ve heard into our water priorities,” explains Davis, who is based in Cleveland. “And we do more than listening. We are now actively supporting the communities that we engaged by advocating for legislation that addresses the issues that they identified.”

Residents lack access to safe, affordable drinking water

While the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan, made international headlines in 2015, thousands of residents across the region don’t have dependable access to clean, safe and affordable drinking water, even as they live amidst the world’s largest repository of fresh water.

Toxic lead in service lines is a crisis across much of the Great Lakes, with people in lower-income neighborhoods often most affected and most burdened by the necessity of buying bottled water. PFAS — often called “forever chemicals” — in drinking water are increasingly an issue of concern across the Great Lakes and the nation. Algae blooms can create toxic byproducts that foul water supplies. Water shutoffs are also a crisis for many from Chicago to Cleveland to Detroit and beyond, an issue highlighted during the coronavirus crisis.

“People care about affordability, about drinking water, and they want it to be connected to health and kids and families,” Davis said.

Davis notes that a report on water affordability commissioned by the Alliance and Ohio Environmental Council in 2019 shows how it’s an issue affecting both urban and rural communities. The report notes that in 80% of Ohio communities, a month of water and sewer service costs the equivalent of 8 hours of labor at minimum wage, and many families are forced to make tough economic choices to afford water.

In urban areas, communities of color long affected by disinvestment and systemic racism spend a disproportionate amount of their income on water, while in rural communities, lack of infrastructure and economies of scale mean residents pay especially high rates for water service.

Amplifying voices from urban and rural communities

“Diversity means that we are authentically collaborating with urban and rural communities so that their voices are amplified and positioned to influence water policies at all levels of government,” Davis said. “We’re trying to let people know it’s an income inequality issue. People are suffering in silence — we don’t know a lot of those stories until people feel comfortable enough to talk about it. We are partnering with a lot of organizations that already have ready-made audiences since we don’t have the capacity to do door-to-door ourselves.”

Davis works with community organizations including We the People of Detroit, Junction Coalition in Toledo and the youth development organization MYCOM in Cleveland to help people fight for laws and policies ensuring clean and affordable water, and more. Among other things, they work with youth to educate state elected officials on water bills.

MYCOM network director Kasey Morgan noted that during the pandemic, “Kids are home all day, taking more showers and baths, water bills are going up, and once the state of emergency lifts, these companies are going to be looking for their money.”

The Alliance and MYCOM have together been heavily focused on water affordability, and helping people bring their concerns directly to elected officials.

“We did a webinar talking about how to advocate, who do you speak to, what are some of the things you need to know,” Morgan noted. The Alliance and MYCOM also work together to teach students and others about the Great Lakes system and how issues like nutrient pollution in Lake Erie impact people’s daily lives.

“We learn about different creeks and bodies of water, is it safe to swim in them? And if it’s not safe to swim, how is the water filtered into drinking water?” Morgan noted.

Chicago: Pursuing sustainable, healthy approaches to land use and water infrastructure

Educating people about the implications of infrastructure and policy — and understanding how those things affect daily lives — is also central to the work of Alliance community planning manager Olga Bautista in Chicago.

Bautista has long been an activist on the city’s Southeast Side, where among other things she helped lead a fight to remove towering piles of petroleum coke stored near residential streets along the Calumet River, a Lake Michigan tributary.

With the Alliance, she works with community advisory councils, residents, policymakers and other stakeholders to push for a sustainable and healthy approach to land use and water infrastructure. A major focus has been the city’s plans to relocate a metal scrap shredding operation from the North Side to the Southeast Side. Bautista and her neighbors say that instead of such dirty industry, they want to see formerly industrial land used for green space, education or clean job-creating industries, including related to renewable energy. Part of her mission is helping residents envision how the Calumet River and local lakefront — long heavily industrialized — could become accessible to them, assets for recreation and even tourism.

Bautista wants policymakers and residents to understand, “How does land use, zoning and permitting connect to immigrants’ rights, how is it connected to organizations that work with special needs children, things that you don’t typically think about when you think about land use” and lakes.

Tapping into community strengths

A key to effective community partnerships, she notes, is “starting from a positive place — talking about all the strengths in the community, the networks that already exist, and how to fortify those networks.”

She notes that in places like Chicago’s Southeast Side, “there are roots from people who came here who were sharecroppers, people who came from Latin America who were ranchers, who had a really deep connection to the land. It’s in their blood, it’s part of their heritage and culture, then they come to a country where they aren’t included in those issues that have to do with land, water, stormwater management.”

Tapping the knowledge and power of people in under-resourced or challenged communities, she notes, means leveraging “those strengths that people have and meeting them where they are — not the other way around. We’re not asking people to come downtown to talk about issues in their neighborhood. We have to go where they are and meet them on front porches, church basements, school cafeterias. Those are places where people feel the most comfortable.”

Northeast Wisconsin: Working to reduce nutrient pollution from agriculture

Meeting people where they are is also key to the work of Alliance senior policy manager Todd Brennan in northeast Wisconsin, where he works closely with farmers, NGOs, industry, academics and policymakers to reduce nutrient pollution from agriculture, through getting farmers and policy-makers to see value in innovations in the use of fertilizer and tilling, land conservation and other practices.

Brennan partners with organizations like the Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance to learn from farmers about the nuances of their work, their economic and logistical needs and how practices to curb nutrient pollution and otherwise protect water can fit in. Early on in this work, he realized that there were a lot of misconceptions about farmers’ willingness to address nutrient pollution.

“We did a sweeping set of surveys and kitchen table interviews with farmers across the basin,” he recounted. “We heard that they were very interested, would like a watershed conservation newsletter, and in some cases were embarrassed when they saw the river running opaque brown with their top soil.”

Farmer roundtables lead to a victory for cleaning up Green Bay

He spearheaded annual farmer round tables, where farmers come together with other allies in a banquet hall and discuss their land management practices, ideas and goals.

“We have seen attendance at our forums and events start big and only get bigger every year,” Brennan noted. “Farmers share their stories and implement what they have learned from those events and interactions. These are the things you can’t get second-hand, but they come out when you sit down, build trust, break bread and share learning, perspectives and experiences.”

The round tables helped lead to a major victory for cleaning up Green Bay in 2019. In February, four Green Bay-area counties and the Oneida Nation signed a water quality pact for Northeast Wisconsin, calling for an aggressive 60% reduction in phosphorus by 2040 with an interim goal of 30% by 2030.

In a blog, Oneida Nation Vice-Chairman Brandon Stevens wrote: “Our Nation’s ancestors have utilized these waters since our arrival in the 1800s. The waters here were clean and pristine … a place where wild rice grew and the fish were abundant. It is our hope that one day these waters will once again be restored.”

Brennan and his colleagues are partnering with the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay in building a water monitoring network involving at least 15 agencies, universities and organizations.

And he and his allies work closely with county and local land and water use government agencies, ultimately helping to build policy from the ground up.

“This is a game changer,” Brennan said.

Collaboration is “how you make this work sustainable and lasting”

Paul Botts, son of Lake Michigan Federation founder Lee Botts and former board member of the Alliance, has seen the Alliance’s approach to collaboration evolve over time.

“The Alliance has certainly figured out partnerships,” he said. “It’s very different even than 20 years ago. [In the past] everyone was for it but we didn’t really know how to do it. That’s very different now. Especially with younger professionals coming into these fields, rising into positions of responsibility and leadership, collaborating with other organizations and combining strengths is just how you do it.”

He added that some work could be “faster and simpler if the Alliance wasn’t strongly focused on doing it in a collaborative partnering way. Collaboration is not a free magic bullet. It has costs. But it’s clearly worth it, it’s clearly how you make this work sustainable and lasting, it’s not just stomping out one fire at a time.”

Bautista, Davis and Brennan all agree that listening to and helping to empower people and pushing policy that meets their needs is paramount, and that work naturally dovetails with protecting the Great Lakes themselves.

“People across the Great Lakes region know how important the actual resource is,” Bautista said. “When given the opportunity to engage in its protection and conservation, people will show up.”

For our 50th anniversary, we commissioned author and journalist Kari Lydersen to look at the Great Lakes and clean water issues that have shaped our region. Read the rest of the series here.

Like something out of a horror movie

Fishermen were pulling up lake trout and whitefish with gaping bloody wounds and strange tentacles seemingly hanging from them. Upon closer inspection, the tentacles were sea lampreys, a primordial eel-shaped beast with a suction cup mouth ringed by sharp yellow teeth and a rasping tongue, used to scrape the scales off fish and then suck their blood.

It was like something out of a horror movie.

The economic and cultural devastation sea lampreys soon wrought across the Great Lakes was equally horrifying. Fish stock that family commercial fishing operations had relied on for generations were being decimated. Meanwhile without larger fish to prey on them, invasive alewives proliferated, choking the ecosystem and covering beaches most summers in stinking piles of dead fish.

Sea lampreys: The first devastating invader

More than half a century ago, sea lampreys were the first invasive species to create major problems in the Great Lakes, after traveling from the Atlantic Ocean through canals built to circumvent Niagara Falls.

“In 1921, the first one was spotted in Lake Erie,” says sea lamprey scientist and historian Cory Brants, a researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey Great Lakes Science Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “From there the Great Lakes is one big flowing system. They had free rein of the entire Great Lakes Basin, and they didn’t waste their time.”

By the 1940s they were in every Great Lake. By the 1950s, they were killing more than 100 million pounds of fish a year.

“Commercial fishing families were already trying to make ends meet, they’d made it through the Great Depression, then World War II, and then sea lamprey came.”

Scientists worked together with fishermen to understand the sea lamprey’s strange life cycle and spread, and figure out where it would be most vulnerable. They experimented with more than 8,000 different chemicals — often placed in pickle jars with sea lamprey larva — in an effort to find one that could kill sea lampreys without harming other organisms. Eventually they found TFM, a lampricide that kills sea lamprey larva buried in the mud, without doing other harm.

Today the population is under control, thanks largely to ongoing strategic applications of lampricide in the rivers where sea lampreys spawn.

Tiny mussels cause major damage

But that’s the exception. Many more problematic invasive species have come in their wake. In all there are more than 180 invasive species of plants and animals in the Great Lakes. The ones with arguably the most devastating impact are much less frightful-looking than sea lampreys: the tiny zebra and quagga mussels, which are believed to have entered the lakes in the late 1980s in ballast water from ocean-going ships. Past invaders from ships are estimated to cause more than $200 million in damage annually.

Innocuous as a single mussel may appear, they decimated the base of the food chain with their prolific filter-feeding on plankton. While the water appears more beautifully crystal-clear because of the mussels, that change means less food for native fish, harmful algae growth and other pernicious changes. Meanwhile the mussels cause major damage to drinking water and power plant water intake structures, as they encrust underwater surfaces.

“Thirty years after the zebra mussel invasion, we’re still coming to grips with what the effects are,” says Marc Gaden, legislative liaison for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. “It changed everything. Whereas sea lampreys are top-down predators, killing grown fish with wounds that are very obvious, zebra mussels are a little more insidious. They are at the bottom of the food web, and their impact ripples throughout the ecosystem. If you don’t eat plankton, you eat fish that eat plankton, and zebra mussels are pulling the rug out from under it.”

Protecting the lakes from invaders in ballast water

There’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube; once invasive species establish, they are usually here to stay. But the Alliance and other advocacy groups working with elected officials have made sure the Great Lakes are far better protected from invasion than they were a decade ago.

Since 2006 when a federal district court ruled that ballast water should be covered under the Clean Water Act, the Alliance and allies have worked hard on legislation and policy to implement the requirement. After years of contentious negotiations over regulations, in 2018 the Alliance scored a major victory: federal legislation ensuring that the EPA continues to oversee ballast water regulation, that stricter standards can be developed for the Great Lakes, and making sure all cargo vessels that ply the lakes are subject to clean water standards.

Asian carp: Closing in on Lake Michigan

On another front, Asian carp — specifically bighead and silver carp — colonized many Mississippi River tributaries after escaping from fish farms along the Mississippi River in the 1990s. For years they’ve threatened to enter Lake Michigan through the manmade waterways near Chicago that connect the Great Lakes Basin to the Mississippi River Basin. So far, these dreaded fish have not established populations in the Great Lakes. After five years of study and a major effort by the Alliance, last year the federal government delivered a plan to build massive new Asian carp blockades on the waterway system.

The Obama administration recognized Asian carp as such a serious threat that it created a team of federal agencies to focus on the issue. In 2009, Asian carp eDNA — or loose DNA in the environment — was found in the Chicago River, close to Lake Michigan and beyond any barrier that would block the fish. This sparked rounds of state-on-state litigation, as well as intense monitoring of the fish’s progress toward Lake Michigan that persists today.

A plan to stop invasives from spreading through a man-made connection

The Alliance advocated for separation — severing the artificial connection between the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes — as the only way to truly prevent the spread of Asian carp and other invasive species. The connection was made with the famous reversal of the Chicago River more than a century ago.

“Dozens of government officials, scientists and advocates like the Alliance see separation as the preferred protection for the lakes, but it is fiendishly complex to make happen” said Joel Brammeier. “Thanks to years of hard work, we have a plan for building real protections for the lakes that Congress and the states are ready to get behind.”

Even if the Great Lakes are protected from invasives entering through ballast or from the Mississippi Basin, managing the ones already here is an ongoing challenge.

“Invasive species are the number one example of why prevention is so important,” Brammeier notes. “Because once they are here, there’s no turning back the clock. We can’t undo the damage. Paying for prevention is always money well spent.”

For our 50th anniversary, we commissioned author and journalist Kari Lydersen to look at the Great Lakes and clean water issues that have shaped our region. Read the rest of the series here.

Fighting point source pollution

In 2002, the Lake Michigan Federation sued the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) regarding untreated sewage that the district was discharging into rivers and Lake Michigan during heavy rainfalls.

Sewer overflows have been a chronic type of point source pollution in the Great Lakes and tributaries across the region, resulting – among other reasons – when rain over-whelms sewer systems that combine stormwater and sanitary sewage in pipes.

Point source pollution was the primary target of the Clean Water Act of 1972 — in addition to sewage, the chemicals and waste that factories, refineries and other industry once dumped into the water with abandon, causing the Cuyahoga River to infamously catch on fire.

Today MMSD has dramatically reduced sewer overflows, thanks to ambitious work building a deep tunnel to store overflow, reducing stormwater runoff through green infrastructure, and Clean Water Act oversight by the state of Wisconsin and local advocates.

The Alliance and MMSD are now both advancing the fight for a cleaner Great Lakes. And MMSD is a model for cities around the region that still struggle with CSOs.

Nonpoint source pollution rears its head

Drops in sewage overflows are a Clean Water Act success story, though they still persist as a major issue, especially with climate change and record-shattering rainfall overwhelming old Great Lakes sewer systems.

But the most problematic type of pollution now may be nonpoint source pollution in the form of runoff from agricultural fields into rivers and then the lakes, carrying nutrients from fertilizer that feed harmful algal blooms. These blooms can make water toxic to drink and touch, and lead to low-oxygen “dead zones.”

Agricultural runoff feeds harmful algal blooms

Algal blooms re-emerged in the 1990s as a serious Great Lakes problem after a respite achieved in the 1980s thanks to bans on high-phosphate laundry detergent adopted under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1972. Founder Lee Botts led the Lake Michigan Federation in advocating strenuously for the bans, and Chicago under Mayor Richard M. Daley became the first city to institute a ban thanks to the Federation’s work.

But while such bans can address phosphorus from wastewater as a point source of pollution, there is currently no meaningful federal regulation of nonpoint source agricultural runoff.

The Clean Water Act doesn’t address it, and it’s not an easy thing to regulate since without one point of release, quantifying and proving the origin of pollution is complicated. But there are steps farmers and communities can take to drastically reduce runoff while providing other ecological and economic benefits. And regulations at the state and local level should mandate and increasingly incentivize best practices be used.

MMSD is also a leader in such efforts, working with farmers in the Milwaukee region and urban residents to reduce runoff. Among other things, the district has purchased more than 4,000 acres of undeveloped land for its Greenseams program, so that the land will remain as wetland and forest, providing buffers between farmland and waterways.

“The biggest key point is you have to look at this from a watershed perspective,” says MMSD executive director Kevin Shafer. “And we have to partner with farmers — they understand the water cycle as well as or better than anyone. They know that clean water helps them grow crops, feed cows.”

Dan Stoffel farms with his two brothers about 50 miles north of Milwaukee. Almost 30 years ago, he adopted no-till farming — meaning that he doesn’t plow under crop detritus at the end of the season but rather leaves it on the ground, which can mean much less fertilizer running off. Stoffel has also turned strips of his land into habitat for pollinators, growing beautiful native plants that block runoff from entering streams and rivers.

Stoffel says that while he likes helping the lakes and rivers, his main motivation is economic. “We’re trying to make a buck out here,” he says. “We’re finding that all these things dovetail into a profitable venture.”

Urban runoff pollutes the lakes

Urban runoff is also a damaging form of nonpoint source pollution, as water running off streets carries oil, chemicals, salt and debris into waterways and ultimately the lakes. MMSD partners with community residents and groups to help reduce runoff both directly into the rivers and into storm drains. Backed up combined sewers, along with polluting the rivers and lakes, also cause basement flooding that is devastating for many residents.

Shafer notes that older, lower-income neighborhoods tend to experience the worst flooding, so MMSD has prioritized creating partnerships and gaining residents’ trust in those communities — not always an easy task if people see the district as “big bad MMSD.”

Yvonne McCaskill is a retired Milwaukee schoolteacher and administrator who started a community group, the Century City Triangle Neighborhood Association, in North Milwaukee. Basement flooding was one of the big issues troubling residents, as in cities around the region.

So McCaskill began working with MMSD and the environmental group Clean Wisconsin to help residents install rain barrels and plant rain gardens with native plants that effectively soak up stormwater, keeping it out of sewers and the rivers. Clean Wisconsin Milwaukee Program Director and Staff Attorney Pam Ritger noted that over seven years the program has helped provide 53 rain gardens and 571 rain barrels, which are estimated to soak up 2.17 million gallons of rain a year.

“It’s wonderful to connect with communities and neighborhoods, to see how enthusiastic people are to be a part of solving the problem of polluted rivers and polluted lakes,” said Ritger, adding that there’s typically a celebration each summer for participants in the program, and many families come year after year.

McCaskill notes that partnerships between larger organizations and people in the com-munity are crucial, especially since larger policy groups may not understand the local needs and cultural context. For example, many of her neighbors are senior citizens who worried about the labor needed to install and maintain rain barrels. So she and her organization enlisted young people to install and maintain the barrels, and artists worked with locals to decorate them.

Just as reducing runoff has major economic benefits for farmers like Stoffel, working with other groups and agencies to reduce flooding and runoff in cities has to merge with efforts to increase civic participation and empower communities that have too long been marginalized.

“It’s not a one and done, we’re constantly having to respond to what’s going on in our environment,” McCaskill says. “Across the city these coalitions we’re building are really going to be important, and even more important for communities of color, because we have always been left behind. This is a great opportunity and a great time for communities of color to claim our spot.”

Sweeping change in the works for Lake Michigan’s Green Bay

Up the coast from Milwaukee in Green Bay, the stakes are high and sweeping change is in the works, thanks in part to work and collaborations fostered by the Alliance. Green Bay in Lake Michigan and the western basin of Lake Erie are arguably the parts of the Great Lakes most challenged by nutrient pollution, “shallow basins that have pretty large-scale problems” as Alliance senior policy manager Todd Brennan puts it.

In Green Bay and the Fox River that feeds it, much of the pollution emanates from manure from dairies; whereas in Lake Erie the main culprit is fertilizer running off agricultural fields into the Maumee River and its tributaries, with manure playing a significant role too.

One of the reasons tackling nonpoint source pollution is so challenging, Brennan ex-plains, is that the watersheds cut across numerous governmental jurisdictions. In the Green Bay area the Alliance has spearheaded collaborations between government, industry, farmers, and other community members including the Oneida Nation in planning and decision-making with a watershed-wide approach.

“The cities, farmers and businesses weren’t yet acting together, even though all of them were obligated to reduce pollution,” Brennan explained. “And there was a lot of opportunity and power in the different jurisdictions, cities, counties, and villages in the region coming together. Everyone had to come a deep understanding that we share the problem, and we are going to share in the solution.”

For five years the Alliance has hosted an annual farmer round table, where farmers come together for a day in a banquet hall and discuss their conservation practices and learn from each other. One of the Alliance’s partners in working with farmers is the Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance.

Jessica Schultz, executive director of that alliance, emphasizes that rather than the “doom and gloom and finger-pointing” that often characterize discussions of nonpoint source pollution, they aim to highlight positive work and possibilities. The Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance also helps county land conservation departments secure funds to deal with nutrient pollution.

“We need funding to help [farmers] change the way they are currently doing things, and we also need to make sure everyone who lives here takes ownership of the water,” Schultz said. “We need to provide people the support for change, and we need to build a culture where people want to continue that practice on their own.”

Brennan said it’s important to emphasize both annual actions — like tillage and cover crops — and permanent practices, like the Agricultural Runoff Treatment Systems that the Outagamie County Conservation Department instituted to treat farm field runoff somewhat like urban runoff: capturing, storing and harvesting the nutrients and sediment permanently. ““This is a game changer” Brennan said, “to make progress on our goals we need to get a chunk of reductions that we can count on and the permanent practices are the way to get that.”

Dan Diedrich is one of the Green Bay-area farmers helping to make a difference. His family has been farming there for more than a century; he runs a dairy and grows crops. Diedrich says concern for the environment has long been a family value, and he practices no-till farming as much as possible and has manure from the dairy injected into the ground so it won’t run off. He notes that purchasing equipment for such practices is costly and it can take time for the economic benefits of conservation to kick in. But he sees farmers increasingly moving in that direction.

“Clean water adds a lot to the lifestyle for the entire community,” he noted. “It means a more attractive place to live, which makes it easier to get and keep employees, which impacts every business.”

Lake Erie: a wakeup call and growing momentum

Most summers in recent times, Lake Erie’s western basin turns into a toxic pea-soup-colored broth. In 2014 the city of Toledo had to shut down its drinking water distribution systems and tell half a million people not to drink the water for three days because of toxic contamination from the algae — fueled by fertilizer runoff from farm fields.

That was a wakeup call.

“We’d spent so much time protecting our water supply from diversion in the 2000s. Then one day hundreds of thousands of people woke up and could no longer rely on the Great Lakes for their most basic need – drinking water,” said Alliance president and CEO Joel Brammeier. “There was plenty of water but no one could use it safely. That shocked the Great Lakes region.”

In June of 2015, thanks to strenuous advocacy by the Alliance and other partners, Ohio, Michigan and Ontario agreed to reduce phosphorus in Lake Erie by 40%. Last summer, at a meeting of the Conference of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine recommitted to the 40% goal, along with Michigan and Ontario again. The work of the Alliance and other stakeholders was crucial to this commitment.

The momentum was driven in part by people directly affected by the Toledo crisis, like Alexis Smith, restorative justice director at the organization Junction Coalition, who went door to door to make sure senior citizens in their community were informed not to drink the contaminated water. Smith notes that historic incidents like the one in Toledo rein-force feelings that their tap water cannot be trusted.

The Alliance and its community partners have continued to keep the pressure on the Ohio government, and last year DeWine created the H2Ohio program, a multi-million-dollar fund to improve Great Lakes water quality, with a particular focus on reducing agricultural runoff. Already about 2,000 Ohio farmers are signed up to receive incentives for adopting best practices in nutrient management, and the program also involves restoring thousands of acres of wetlands to act as buffers absorbing nutrient pollution before it reaches waterways.

“We are absolutely thrilled that Governor DeWine is so invested in the health of Lake Erie and the water quality of Ohio,” said Joy Mulinex, director of the Lake Erie Commission, a governmental body that makes policy recommendations and otherwise works with the governor on protecting the lake. “It’s going to take a number of years to see the fruits of all the work being done — algal blooms will still happen for the next couple of summers. But we’re hopeful we’ll see progress.”

Brammeier notes that in Wisconsin, where there is a clear and measurable path to reducing nutrient pollution across Green Bay, the work of the Alliance is possible partly because of an ambitious regulatory framework that includes a limit on the “total maxi-mum daily load” (or TMDL) of nutrients that can be released into Green Bay, and other mandatory pollution control measures.

In Ohio, the government has committed to creating a TMDL but so far there are not meaningful enforceable limits on nutrient pollution. The Alliance and its allies want such limits, which are critical for two reasons: to hold government accountable, and to communicate to everyone what the expectations are for reducing nutrient pollution and protecting clean drinking water.

Involving the voices and leadership of those most affected

Crystal Davis, the Alliance’s Cleveland-based vice-president for policy and strategic engagement, notes that the state can only truly tackle nutrient pollution if the process includes the voices and leadership of those most affected — the millions of residents of Toledo, Cleveland and other Lake Erie cities who see their drinking water and health at risk because of nutrient pollution.

Along with the health impacts of toxic algal blooms, economic consequences of cleanup are imposed on those who can least afford them. If cities need to spend more to clean and manage water fouled by nutrient pollution and toxic algae, those costs are ultimately passed on to ratepayers. And low-income and minority communities in Ohio and across the Great Lakes region are especially vulnerable to water shut-offs and shouldering the burden of high water bills or bottled water when they can’t trust their tap. The Alliance’s work includes working with residents to understand the full impact and ripple effects of issues like nutrient pollution, and make sure policymakers are aware and take action.

“People are suffering in silence, and we don’t know a lot of these stories until people feel comfortable enough to talk about it,” Davis noted.

Davis and her colleagues help people make their voices heard in various ways. They educate and activate community members young and old on the issues, fight for water service line replacement to reduce lead in tap water, and work to support legislation on safe and affordable water services for all.

Davis hosted an event in Akron called “Water, Women & Wellness Summit,” where women from all walks of life discussed their relationship with water. And she works with community groups on the ground that also focus on issues like police misconduct, youth empowerment and fair housing, exploring the way that water rights are interconnected.

“I’m not a traditional environmentalist. I don’t like going outside unless it’s a tropical beach,” says Davis. “For me to be passionate about this, it has to be not about habitat, but about people.”

Paul Botts — son of Lake Michigan Federation founder Lee Botts, and former board member of the Alliance — works with farmers on reducing nutrient pollution in his role as executive director of the Wetlands Initiative. He knows many stakeholders are leery of regulations targeting nonpoint source pollution, and that developing programs and mandates to address such a multi-faceted and sprawling problem is a huge challenge. But he reminds people that the victories against point source pollution — like the Clean Water Act and Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement — involved balancing complicated and competing interests and bringing diverse stakeholders together.

“Farmers are not a monolith at all — there’s vast differences of opinion in row crop farming about this issue and what they’re up for doing,” Botts says. “There are generational differences, differences of place, that’s normal, that’s human beings, we have to work with it. It is complicated, it’s frustrating in some ways. But I am fundamentally optimistic.”

This year the Alliance for the Great Lakes celebrates its 50^th anniversary. From a tiny but influential startup called the Lake Michigan Federation, the Alliance for the Great Lakes has grown into a leading voice for the protection of the Great Lakes and for all the ways that people and wildlife are dependent on them.

The Great Lakes are far healthier and better protected than they were 50 years ago, and I hope you will share the celebration of this tremendous achievement. The early American environmental movement that launched the Lake Michigan Federation, and many other groups 50 years ago, signaled a fundamental change in respect for our planet. The Great Lakes movement helped lead that change, change with a distinct difference.

Our Great Lakes environmental movement

The Great Lakes and clean water are well understood by the public. It’s probably because the lakes have such a large and diverse presence in our daily lives. Water from the lakes flows into our water glasses at home and work. For many of us, a lakefront park is just a short drive, ride or even walk away. The lakes change our weather, producing legendary gales and snow squalls. We swim, boat, and respect the abundance of nature their waters provide. And the waters of the lakes drive our regional economy. So, it’s not surprising that support for their protection transcends political and geographic divisions like few other environmental issues. It’s a legacy that, like the lakes themselves, is worth protecting.

But broad support doesn’t mean those protections have come easy. In conversations informing these articles, Paul Botts, son of Lake Michigan Federation founder Lee Botts, reminded us just how difficult and compromise-laden the work of creating and implementing the Clean Water Act really was 50 years ago. Nostalgia can certainly blind us to fresh opportunities for growing the Great Lakes movement. So, as we celebrate, I also ask “What’s next, and how can we do better?”

Looking forward

Sustainable progress for the Great Lakes depends on many voices from many corners, from the political left and right, from our neighbors to the north, from cities and rural communities. This was true of the campaigns that resulted in landmark pollution protections via the Clean Water Act, the Great Lakes Compact’s ban on most water diversions, and the cleanup of toxic hotspots left over from industrial pollution. Hammering out these agreements took tough conversations. It took leaders willing to sit down with those who had strongly opposing viewpoints. It took a willingness to stay focused on both today and future generations. We face down big problems today, so we better look sharp, stay focused and make sure the table is set for everyone who has a stake in keeping the Great Lakes clean.

After we have reflected on 50 years of progress, what is left is the choice of how we are part of shaping the future. One where each person’s connection to the Great Lakes is reflected and respected in the goals of policy and in the actions we take. Where collaboration comes naturally because we do the hard work to build a cause that is inclusive and just, reflecting the whole of the Great Lakes.

To mark our 50^th anniversary, we commissioned Kari Lydersen, a writer and reporter who’s written about Great Lakes issues for regional and national news outlets, to take a look back on a few issues that shaped the Great Lakes movement. But we didn’t want to just look to the past. The following stories, with in-depth interviews with our staff and regional experts, challenge us to look forward to a Great Lakes movement that’s ready to ensure our lakes are safe, clean, and accessible to all.

Depending on people like you

None of this would have been possible without the support of tens of thousands of people who have donated, volunteered, and spoken out in favor of the Great Lakes over the past 50 years. We are here today because more people support the Alliance today than ever before in our history. This movement depends on people like you. Thank you.