Great Lakes deserve this kind of great effort
If you want to be a stickler for journalistic ethics, I shouldn't even be writing about the Great Lakes, because I have a bias - especially when it comes to Lake Michigan.
The highlight of my youthful summers were the few weeks my family shared a cottage atop a sand dune at Miller Beach, east of Gary, Ind. Many were the days we would pack a picnic lunch and carry it down the beach to Burns Ditch, where we could splash in the waves, then have our sandwiches and hike back home. A steel mill stands there now.
For the last 50 years, I've enjoyed the same lake, but 250 miles north, at a cabin on Beaver Island, Mich., which my wife's grandfather built almost a century ago. Like everyone who comes under its spell, I love Lake Michigan.
Sitting here in the snows of Washington, despairing about the Congress I cover, it was the rare bit of good news Sunday when Lisa P. Jackson, the director of the Environmental Protection Agency, gave the governors of the Great Lakes states the 40-page "action plan" the federal and state governments have developed to protect and improve these incomparable resources.
The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative is a bipartisan and binational enterprise, involving eight states, innumerable communities, the two major political parties, plus Canada.
Back in 2004, when President George W. Bush, campaigning for re-election, stopped in Traverse City, Mich., he vowed to save the Great Lakes, one of the largest repositories of freshwater on Earth. In 2008, Barack Obama, who knew the issue from his service in the Illinois Legislature and the U.S. Senate, made it a priority. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who had pushed for action as a Chicago congressman, saw to it that he kept his commitment. Obama's first budget included an unprecedented $475 million for Great Lakes restoration, and this year, despite all the other demands, he has asked for $300 million more.
Before the first deadline was reached in January, the EPA had received more than 1,000 proposals for using the money. The plan handed to the governors, itself the product of 18 meetings with various stakeholders in the summer of 2009, focuses on five major initiatives.
The first goal is to clean up some of the most threatened hot spots, from St. Louis Bay at the western end of Lake Superior almost to the St. Lawrence River on the east, where it leaves Lake Ontario. Previous studies have identified 31 "areas of concern," imperiled by polluted sediments. One of them, the Oswego River in New York, has come off the list.
In a trial run in 2008, the EPA financed a Great Lakes cleanup campaign that removed approximately 5 million pounds of abandoned electronic gear and 5 million discarded medical pills. Much more remains to be done.
The second goal is to resist invasive species. The latest threat comes from the Asian carp, closing in on Lake Michigan from the Chicago drainage canal, but there are also threats from sea lampreys, zebra mussels and others - all of which must be turned back to protect native fisheries.
The third goal is to protect beaches and water for swimming, boating and fishing. This requires reducing the drainage of phosphorus and other chemicals from farms and cities. The fourth goal is to protect and restore the habitat for native creatures. The Great Lakes' largest fish, the sturgeon, is in decline because so many of its spawning grounds are polluted or blocked. The fifth goal is to make this effort credible to American taxpayers by showing real results.
The 30 million people who live in this region are a major political battleground. In an age of rampant distrust, I can't think of a better way to show that government can work.
© 2010, Washington Post Writers Group