The thorny problem of who will pay the $4 million to close down the Ohio commercial industry appears to have been solved. McGregor says it has been a good year for Ohio, which has taken in $35 million more than expected. Taft and Speaker of the House Jon Husted are comfortable with using general revenue funds to buy out the trap net fishermen. Ohio's gill net industry was eliminated in 1982.
"The Division of Wildlife and sportsmen's funds should not have to pay for the buyout," said McGregor. He said it will improve sportfishing and benefit Ohio's tourism industry along Lake Erie. Taft said the Lake Erie counties attract one of three tourists visiting Ohio.
http://www.cleveland.com/sports/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/sports/1151570554122510.xml&coll=2
"Keeping Asian carp out of the Great Lakes is one of our top priorities," said Jennifer Nalbone, campaign director for Great Lakes United.
"Unfortunately, every year we have to fight to fund the barrier. It's time to permanently fund the barrier so that we don't have to play this annual game of Russian roulette with the health of the Great Lakes."
With another summer of beach closings looming, two Illinois congressmen unveiled the bipartisan Great Lakes Water Protection Act establishing a federal deadline to end sewage dumping in the Great Lakes.
http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/newssun/city/5_1_WA27_KIRKSLAKE_S10627.htm
Protection comes in 20 years...
Kirk and Lipinski's legislation gives cities until 2026 to build the full infrastructure needed to prevent sewage dumping into the Great Lakes. Those who violate EPA sewage dumping regulations after the federal deadline will be fined $100,000 for every day they are in violation.
Could the development of Midwestern ethanol increase the pressure to transfer water out of the Great Lakes?
Jun. 25--Open less than a year, the Granite Falls, Minn., ethanol plant already is looking for help to quench its thirst for water.
So far, it has been pulling all it needs from an underground aquifer. But with supply dwindling, the plant wants to pipe its water from the nearby Minnesota River.
That the Granite Falls Energy plant could run short of groundwater so soon illustrates a problem faced by a flurry of new and proposed ethanol plants that could quadruple annual ethanol production in Minnesota.
Most have been built or are being proposed for south-central and southwestern Minnesota. While rich in the corn used to make the clean-burning, alternative fuel, those areas are short on another key ingredient -- water. Moreover, that water isn't evenly distributed.
With so many plants on the horizon and water shortages possible, the state is ramping up warnings to companies to be extra careful about choosing where to build. Preventing future groundwater depletion ensures water for homes and businesses.
Put all of those together and the volume of ethanol produced in Minnesota each year could quadruple, from 550 million gallons to more than 2 billion gallons. Because it takes 4 to 5 gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol, ethanol-related demand for water could increase from 2.5 billion gallons to 10 billion gallons a year.i>
An archaeologist and some students are examining a shipwreck about 200 feet from the 40 Mile Point Lighthouse to see whether they can confirm it is the Joseph S. Fay.
For years, historical accounts have attached the name to the wreck and there is little doubt that the section of ship on the beach is a portion of the wooden steamer, The Alpena News reported Friday.
An Open Letter regarding the case of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation vs. Nestlé Waters North America, now before the Michigan Supreme Court:
We understand that, since the time of the Magna Carta, a clear set of public trust principles and standards have been developed: Water is a commons which cannot be owned, diverted, nor sold for profit.
Yet, a private company, Nestlé Waters, seeks to divert 400 US Gallons per minute, from Sanctuary Springs in Michigan for bottled water sales and its own private profits.
Nestlé Waters, in 2003, led the American bottled water market with a one-third share of total sales or almost $2.7 billion (US). All profits are directed to shareholders of Swiss parent Nestlé SA who cumulatively enjoyed profits in 2005 of $10.26 billion (US).
Previous courts in Michigan determined in this case that harm would result to riparian values, and to the rights of downstream users in the flow of the impacted stream and lakes. The courts ruled that the removal and export of water from a watershed could not interfere with these established common law property rights.
Yet Nestlé Waters pushed for, and the Court of Appeals adopted, an "all purpose balancing test" for all water uses anywhere, regardless of existing laws. This would subject landowner’s property rights to those who want to divert and export water without regard to harm.
Nestlé has made the argument that the few jobs and taxes it provides are sufficient compensation for this affront. Yet any company can provide jobs and taxes: Such a rule would simply allow the wealthy to pay for the right to export and divert water, even if harm to the watershed is substantial.
http://www.polarisinstitute.org/polaris_project/water_lords/News/June_19_06.html
Antonin Scalia must be an engineer, too.
Sorry to be so snarky, but this is complete and total crap. It’s hard for the public to see it because of the esoteric language, but this is simply a judicially-imposed political preference dressed up in legalese. Using a Webster’s Dictionary as statutory text, Scalia amends “waters” to mean “permanent, standing or flowing bodies of water.” That is what my good friend Robert Bork calls illegitimate.
On a more general level, it’s border-line high comedy listening to Supreme Court Justices and their fresh-out-of-law-school clerks draw upon their extensive scientific expertise to dictate the nation’s water policy by effectively amending both legislative text and the expert agency’s administrative regulations
http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/
3.4 earthquake shakes part of Ohio
NORTH PERRY | A small earthquake that was felt along the Lake Erie coast hit near Cleveland on Tuesday afternoon but caused no damage.
The quake was recorded at 4:11 p.m. about 3 miles into Lake Erie near North Perry, about 40 miles east of Cleveland. Preliminary data show it registered a magnitude of 3.4, said Michael Hansen, coordinator of the Ohio Seismic Network, a division of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources that tracks earthquakes.
Reports of the ground shaking came from as far west as Westlake and as far east as Madison, Hansen said.
"It caused a lot of excitement with people," he said.
Hansen said researchers are particularly intrigued because it was the 10th and largest quake in northern Ohio this year. The second-biggest was a 3.0 magnitude March 11, 2006, also beneath the lake.
"This is a fairly good amount, more than usual. What that means exactly I don't know. I don't think anybody can make much of a prediction on that," Hansen said.
Scientists say Ohio's earthquakes are linked to an ancient scar six-thousand feet deep that is known as the Akron Magnetic Boundary. The fault runs diagonally through Summit County and into Geauga, Lake and Ashtabula counties and was formed when North America tried unsuccessfully to split a billion years ago.
When the Earth shifts the fault sometimes shifts, causing an earthquake.
Ohio's largest earthquake registered 5.4 in 1937 in Shelby County, a rural area between Toledo and Dayton. The quake toppled chimneys, gravestones and a school in the town of Anna.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the U.S. government can block development on hundreds of millions of acres of wetlands- even if these wetlands are miles away from waterways.
The deciding vote was cast by Justice Anthony Kennedy - who, despite not agreeing entirely with the decision, came down on the side of the Court's liberals that the Clean Water Act's regulations can apply to land adjacent to tributaries. Even tributaries that are not filled with water all the time and year-round.
I want you to realize how close this vote was, and how narrowly a path toward environmental degradation was averted.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-shaw/todays-clean-water-act-s_b_23365.html
...have to be learned again.
Then, the scandal and outrage of northern wastelands and killer forest fires prompted a generation of Great Lakes region conservationists to argue successfully for separating conservation policy from politics, reforesting the north, and renewing fish and wildlife. It worked well for 70 years.
Now politics governs conservation and...
MN's share of the general fund devoted to conservation is close to its lowest point in 30 years.
Same in Michigan, according to the Detroit Free Press story linked below.
But even the Free Press is not talking about the solution that MN green groups are promoting -- a state constitutional amendment earmarking revenue for fish, wildlife, and clean water.
How else we this trend be reversed? It is one thing to say the public should elect legislators who make better budget decisions. All the incentives for legislators today, however, are "future be damned." That's why putting conservation funding in the constitution is a cause whose time has come.
..[I}f you take a look at the state budget numbers, you see a slow but steady erosion in the commitment to protect Michigan's outdoor bounty. The departments of Natural Resources and Environmental Quality each operate on a shoestring. Both will crash and burn in the next few years without more support. By 2008, the DEQ faces the loss of its entire brownfield cleanup program -- now funded solely by Clean Michigan bonds. By 2010, the DNR's Game and Fish Fund will have a $47.5-million deficit.
This has resulted from a decade-plus of pushing more and more costs onto user fees and other programs such as the bond issue. Ten years ago, the DNR got 24%
($50 million) of its budget from the general fund; now it's 11% ($25 million). For the DEQ, the general fund contribution has skidded even more drastically, from 28% ($101 million) to 9% ($33 million) over five years.
http://freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060618/OPINION01/606180551/1068/OPINION
An armor plate of clay and shale that for thousands of years has prevented surface pollution from contaminating vast underground vaults of fresh water is being breached, alarming water scientists in Wisconsin and possibly affecting national water policy.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is working on enacting new regulations to protect water purity of deep aquifers that are thousands of feet below ground and near-surface shallow aquifers. The new regulations likely will contain health standards based, in part, on the findings of the Wisconsin health study funded by the EPA, Borchardt said.
"More than half of the U.S. population relies on groundwater for its drinking water, and research shows that groundwater can become contaminated with waterborne infectious agents like viruses," he said. "Groundwater is perceived as being pure, but between 1991 and 2000, more than two-thirds of the 163 waterborne infectious disease outbreaks in the U.S. were attributed to groundwater contaminated by viral, bacterial and disease-producing agents."
Melissa Scanlan, executive director of Midwest Environmental Advocates, said the Madison study reinforces the idea that all water is connected.
"We now have a water management system that does not reflect science," she said. "We don't connect the two. The research shows that water is constantly in motion and shows the need for an integrated management system that looks at ground and surface water as interconnected, as pieces of the whole. Any other approach is missing the boat."
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=437452
This new report by Midwest Environmental Advocates is well worth reading. It calls for the eight Great Lakes states to pass legislation going well beyond the minimum requirements of the new Great Lakes interstate water compact, toughening the compact's water conservation requirements and shutting down the special diversion exemption for water in containers under 5.7 gallons that is shipped out of the Basin.
http://www.midwestadvocates.org/advocacy/water/annex/index.htm
Back in the 1960s, foul gobs of algae along Great Lakes shorelines made swimmers and sunbathers miserable before a crackdown on phosphorus pollution repelled the invasion.
Now, the algae are mounting a comeback and controlling it may be tougher this time, according to the Michigan Environmental Council, an umbrella organization for a host of environmental and public interest organizations in the state.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13319179/
In a series of lawsuits and statehouse debates that reached critical mass in the past year, activists and lawmakers have questioned whether bottling companies have become too greedy about the water they take from the ground, and -- in some cases -- what gives them the right to take it at all.
"The problem of bottled water is it's a new, unexpected and 100 percent consumptive use," unlike irrigation, for instance, which allows some water to return to the soil, said Robert Glennon, a law professor at the University of Arizona who has written about the bottling industry. "Once you put water in a bottle, it's gone."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/11/AR2006061100797.html
MARQUETTE — The study of a lesser-known cousin of the common lake trout has brought officials from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to the deepest depths of Lake Superior.
Every three years, the DNR — in collaboration with several other agencies — surveys the Siscowet, the higher-body fat offshoot of the more common lean lake trout.
http://www.miningjournal.net/stories/articles.asp?articleID=4165
The 150-foot-tall turbine needs a breeze of 8 mph to generate power, and at 31 mph achieves its peak output of 225 kilowatts.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/wews/20060609/lo_wews/9347413
During a ceremony, Anishinabe Mide leader Eddie Benton-Bania prophesied: "If we continue with our negligence, an ounce of drinking water will cost the same as an ounce of gold."
http://www.ashland-wi.com/dailypress/index.php?sect_rank=1&story_id=209876
We've grown accustomed to seeing planes in the sky, telephone and electric wires and towers in every landscape, monstrous coal plants on our rivers, and polluting mills, shipping industries, and nuclear plants along the shores of the Great Lakes...the sight of windmills would be a wondrous one indeed, one that would represent moving toward a cleaner, safer future instead of staying dangerously mired in the past.
http://www.dispatch.com/issue/issue.php?story=190987
The world’s second largest fresh water body, Lake Victoria, has seriously become a victim of environmental degradation. Leaders of nations in the region should have shown a marching concern. However, that does not seem to be the case.
Should the lake dry up, the consequences for their peoples would be very grave. Emmanuel Kihaule writing for JET from Kampala, reminds them of the pending horror as the world celebrates its Environment Day.
http://www.ippmedia.com/ipp/guardian/2006/06/05/67770.html
MARQUETTE, Mich. (AP) — One of the world's rarest bird species may have migrated to the Yellow Dog Plains area of Marquette County, another potential complication for a proposed nickel and copper mining project.
Several bird experts have spotted a male Kirtland's warbler in the area, said Michelle Halley, local attorney for the National Wildlife Federation.
"It has been documented over and over again," she said Monday.
If Congress won't act, perhaps natural forces will.
PEORIA — There has been a major fish die-off in the Illinois River, but state conservation officials are far from worried about it. If anything, they wish it had been even worse — because the dying fish are invasive Asian carp.
Since Tuesday evening, thousands of dead carp have been seen floating down the river. Their bodies have been spotted from the Starved Rock area to as far downstream as Havana.
CASEVILLE - Warner Price's beach is sick.
He and others call it ''crud.'' The gray, grassy material keeps piling up in front of his Saginaw Bay home, every time it storms. It's gotten as thick as 2 feet deep. It stinks, and is sometimes soaked with high levels of E. coli, a bacteria found in human and animal feces.
http://www.mlive.com/news/bctimes/index.ssf?/base/news-7/114941616886070.xml&coll=4
Tourists can get a handy new online guide to many of the attractions in the Sandusky, Ohio and Lake Erie Islands area.
The complimentary guide, “Lake Erie Islands Visitor’s Guide 2006” is available at: http://www.staysandusky.com/Lake-Erie-Islands.html
The islands are gorgeous and so are the views. Let's hope this summer the waters surrounding them remain healthy.
The city could have a lot of sludge on its hands this August.
A Michigan landfill site will no longer accept 30 trucks a day of treated sewage sludge as of August 1 because locals who live in the area are complaining about the smell.
http://www.cbc.ca/toronto/story/tosludge20060531.html?ref=rss
It would only be fair for Toronto and SW Ontario to ask Michigan to please stop sending its ozone pollution to Canada in return.