Let’s imagine that Southfield and Troy decide they are tired of paying to process human waste in a sanitary, environmentally-friendly way. That costs, after all, money. So instead, from now on, they plan to just store it all in big ponds they call “lagoons.”
From time to time, they’ll spread some of it as fertilizer on the city parks. True, some of it might get into local rivers, especially if the ground is partly frozen in spring – but gotta have green grass!
If they did try that, my guess is that within hours, officials from the federal and state EPAs (Environmental Protection Agencies) would be on their way, as would other government agencies.
They’d bring high-powered attorneys and give those city officials an attitude adjustment right quick. At least, I’d certainly hope so. But in fact, we are really allowing something just as bad to happen. Those who own and run the horrible factory farms are polluting the ground water in just the way I described with the waste their animals produce – and some of the biggest produce just as much animal poop every day as either of those cities.
Disgusting?
Actually, highly dangerous is the right term. Many of those “farms,” some with as many at 30,000 dairy cattle or two million chickens, produce as much, or more, daily excrement as the two cities mentioned above. The technical name for them is “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations,” or CAFOs.
They are, in fact, about the most horrible places you can imagine, and resemble a traditional farm about as much as Auschwitz resembled Camp Tamarack. Animals are kept in cruel and extremely confined conditions without sunlight or room to move around.
They exist only to be quickly fattened and then brutally slaughtered, and all should be closed down on the grounds of cruelty. That, however, is a separate issue which I’ll explore another day.
But there is a clear and real danger to our water from the vast tons of excrement produced by these farms. Yes, the stuff is germy too, and we’ve been seeing beaches closed because of contamination from E. Coli and sometimes other bacteria.
The greater problem, however, is the minerals contained in the waste products – nitrates and heavy concentrations of phosphorous.
Every summer, giant algae blooms form in Lake Erie. “The algae explode primarily because of the high concentrations of phosphorous in the water,” Dr. Jeffrey Reutter, the recently retired longtime director of the Ohio Sea Grant program told me.
Reutter, who spent 44 years studying and trying to save the lake at his Stone Laboratory not far from Toledo, once showed me a picture of his hand covered in blue-green algae glop about 1971 – and again around 2015. The algae blooms are smelly, gross and unsightly – but that’s not the real problem: Cyanobacteria is.
Cyanobacteria live in the colonies of algae and emit microcystin, a highly poisonous toxin. Four years ago, it got into the water supply in Toledo, and for several days, people in Toledo and Monroe County, Michigan couldn’t drink, cook with or bathe with it.
Eventually, the toxic levels went down, and since then, Toledo has spent millions upgrading their water purification system.
That doesn’t mean the water supply won’t be shut down again, however; in fact, it is very likely to, unless governments get serious about cracking down on pollution. Toledoans are much more aware of the threat than Detroiters, simply because they know what it is like to not have a supply of safe and clean water for a few days.
Markie Miller, an organizer for a group called Toledoans for Safe Water, pounds the pavement trying to get signatures for a ballot proposal to establish a Lake Erie Bill of Rights.
Longtime activist Mike Ferner is the founder of a group called ACLE, Advocates for a Clean Lake Erie, which fought for years in an attempt to get Kasich to declare western Lake Erie “impaired.”
That designation is a first step towards identifying who the polluters and making them stop. Ohio is really horrible about this,” Ferner told me on my radio program last week.
“They – and especially (Gov. John) Kasich care about the rich interests, not the people,” he said. Kasich, however, finally declared the lake impaired in May; Michigan had done so in 2016.
Everyone knows, however, where the vast majority of Lake Erie’s pollution comes from: Fertilizer and, mainly, the vast amounts of manure flowing into the water table from the factory farms.
Pam Taylor is one of the environmental movement’s too little-known heroes. A retired teacher, she grew up on a family farm (as a opposed to a factory farm) in Lenawee County; her family has been farming there since 1837, the year Michigan became a state.
When I first met her and asked what she did, she told me, “I study poop,” a line you don’t usually hear at most parties.
In fact, she is a selfless, largely full-time volunteer for a group called the Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central Michigan. She has facts, statistics and reams of evidence about what our irresponsible agricultural policies are doing to Lake Erie.
And she knows — as we all should – that it isn’t Lake Erie alone that is threatened. Microcystin has been detected in Lake Huron, where Detroit drinking water comes from. The highest concentration of factory farms in the state is in the Saginaw Bay-Lake Huron area.
Unless we do something about it, it is only a matter of time. For years, the goal of many environmental groups has been to get Ohio and Michigan farmers to voluntarily reduce the amount of phosphorous going into the water by 40 percent.
That hasn’t happened, though they have considerably reduced their use of purchased chemical fertilizers.
There is a way to save the lakes, however, one that makes perfect sense. “These big farms should have to build their own sewage plants for the processing of animal waste just like human waste – there’s no difference,” she said.
Naturally, big agricultural interests will fight that tooth and nail, something Taylor knows. She suggests that maybe the government should subsidize that, instead of some of the things they do. She’d also like to see the Department of Agriculture “spend money to help crops people can eat, especially fruits and vegetables.”
Naturally, it is likely nothing will happen, till the day we wake up without any water we can use. President Trump, by the way, has tried every year to end funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, and severely cut spending for the EPA in this region.
If he ever succeeds, Dr. Reutter told me, “I can no longer guarantee safe drinking water for 11 million people.”
Think about that, and then do something.
***
Severe Personality Disorder: America has, as most of us know, no closer or more important economic partner than Canada — one of the few countries with which we actually have a trade surplus.
So why did Trump slap new tariffs on steel and aluminum, tariffs that will hurt U.S. consumers and our economy, and calling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “dishonest and weak?”
I asked former Ambassador James J. Blanchard, who is also a former governor of Michigan, about that last week on my radio show. “It makes no sense, but he clearly has a huge personality disorder,” Blanchard told me. That’s remarkably candid, I thought.
