There’s no doubt what our most important resource is. It isn’t manufacturing and it isn’t the auto industry. It is water. Michigan is surrounded by the largest amount of fresh water in the world’s Northern Hemisphere, and that’s why we should be going strong when Arizona and Southern California and the rest of the Sunbelt run into deep trouble.
Our most important resource is the Great Lakes. But if we ruin them, we will be out of luck forever. And we haven’t been very good stewards. We have allowed invasive species like zebra mussels and worthless Round Goby fish to mess up the lakes, and they are now so firmly established we will never get them out.
We have an oil pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac that is so old that if it were a person, it would be eligible for Social Security. U.S. Senator Gary Peters told me he asked the Coast Guard’s top admiral if they could save Lakes Huron and Michigan if it were to break, and the admiral told him no, they couldn’t.
That should scare something out of us. But closer to home, we are in grave danger of killing Lake Erie, and poisoning the drinking water for 11 million people, because of poop.
Animal excrement. The problem is not the smell and the germs, but the nitrogen and the phosphorus the waste matter contains. They leach into the water table, sometimes into underground streams, get into Lake Erie, and serve as food for giant algae blooms.
The algae, and other dead and decomposing things choke off the oxygen, so that in the middle of the lake a vast “dead zone” forms every summer where essentially nothing can live.
Some years, the dead zone is as big as 10,000 square miles, stretching from Cleveland to Canada. Erie is the warmest and shallowest of the Great Lakes, so it is more at risk for many potential environmental disasters, including the possibility of giant Bighead and Silver Asian carp establishing themselves.
Should the carp take over the lake, say goodbye to recreational boating and much of the fishing industry. But the biggest immediate threat is what animal waste is doing to the lake.
What would you think if a city the size of Sterling Heights or Lansing were to get rid of their wastewater treatment plants and decided to just dump everyone’s excrement into giant ponds called “lagoons”?
We would never tolerate that. But there are giant “factory farms,” mainly for dairy cattle, that produce as much waste every day as one of those cities, and we let that happen. Sometimes misguided farmers spread manure on frozen ground in early spring hoping it will work as fertilizer when the crops are planted. But it merely washes into the lake instead.
Pan Taylor, who has devoted her life to saving Lake Erie and saving ourselves from our own stupidity, thinks we need to make these giant farms construct their own sanitary sewer facilities. True, if we did that, we might have to pay more for our meat.
You probably wouldn’t be able to get a fully cooked chicken from Costco for six dollars. But we might be able to pass clean drinking water on to our children. And that sounds like a pretty fair trade-off to me.
