The 33-year-old Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement is up for review. At a recent hearing in Bay City, longtime environmental champion and hero Terry Miller had this to say:
I was thirty-three when I first answered the summons to become an activist...I am now 59, and although I will never quit, I am getting very tired of fighting the same battles, over and over – often with new opponents, but the same business greed, the same desire for short term profit over long term sustainability; the same governmental apathy or actually antipathy towards environmental protection or restoration. And the new ideological grassroots, that sees private property as inviolate, with politicians and citizens committed to defending its personal and private use regardless of the impact on the greater public; blind to the concept of public trust.
My teenage son recently received an Ipod, that amazing device, so tiny, capable of storing so much information, an icon of the communication revolution. And yet, in the ecosystem we are so dependent upon, like 14th century medieval villages we continue to treat our rivers as sewers. It is incredibly discouraging to read in local newspapers, after even minor rain falls, that hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw or partially treated human sewage has been dumped in the Saginaw River and ultimately the bay, the source of our drinking water. ..
In 2002...we discovered from documents obtained from the DEQ through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that the entire length of the Tittabawassee River downstream from the Dow Chemical Company was contaminated with dioxin levels 80 times the state action level. The Tittabawassee, of course, flows into the Saginaw River and subsequent testing has discovered levels as high as 19,000 ppt.
It has been nearly four years since the state regulators became aware of the problem and not a foot of sediment or soils have been remediated. In many ways this problem is a microcosm of the national inaction on serious environmental contamination.
The responsible party, the Dow Chemical Company, has run an effective campaign of “manufacturing uncertainty” as the American Journal of Public Health has described it. The Company denies that dioxin is toxic, and that the unwanted chemical is responsible only for a skin rash called chloracne. This despite testimony from state and federal toxicologists, and hundreds of laboratory and real-life studies that implicate dioxin in cancer, reproductive and developmental illnesses. And a 15-year study that concluded that dioxin in the Great Lakes was responsible for the disappearance of lake trout.
The Company has donated $26,000 to the Saginaw County Health Department, salvaged funding for the Saginaw Civic Center, renaming it the DowEvent center, and spread thousands of dollars in highly visible charitable contributions in Saginaw and Bay City. Meanwhile, Republican legislators from Midland, as well as Midland activists, attacked the MDEQ as too aggressive, and threatened funding.
http://www.davedempsey.org/lone_tree_statement.pdf
Posted by Dave at November 12, 2005 09:50 PM