Avoiding the Hard Questions

John Cooper: Lake Erie commercial fishing boat Erieau ~Enlarge

My essays here must often seem churlish in light of the considerable progress made in the last five years of Great Lakes policy.  The 2004 conference on the Great Lakes hosted by philanthropist Peter Wege of Grand Rapids has blossmed into a $475 million new investment in the Lakes by the federal government. Congress has approved the Great Lakes Compact.  Public awareness of Great Lakes problems and protection is as high as it has been in years. All good news, all the result of hard work, particularly by Great Lakes advocates.  Let's celebrate that.

But has anything in the fundamental governmental or personal approach to Great Lakes protection changed, in ways that will have lasting value?

Has the back-scratching alliance among the U.S. Coast Guard, the shipping industry and key members of Congress changed?  The alliance that has killed meaningful ballast water reform for over two decades, exposing the Great Lakes to dozens of invasive aquatic species?

Has anyone come up with a final, meaningful set of Great Lakes indicators of health, an annual "physical" that the public can understand, after almost 20 years.

Has individual stewardship improved to the point where leaving natural vegetation in place or installing the same as pollution buffers on cottage land or farmland is routine, rather than something that needs to be subsidized by the government?

Until all of these things happen and many more like them, the Great Lakes are profoundly vulnerable.