Back in the 1980s, I lived in a small ranch house in a subdivision in northern Southfield. I used to ride my bike around the neighborhood, and a small tributary of the River Rouge flowed through it.Sometimes I would sit on the bank and watch the Mallard ducks.
The water appeared clean to me, though I never swam in it. I knew that further downstream, the Rouge was heavily polluted from industrial waste, but I frankly didn’t think a lot about it at the time; I was writing and thinking about other things.
It wasn’t until I read Joel Thurtell and Patricia Beck’s magnificent little book Up the Rouge that I had any idea how ghastly the situation was with Michigan’s dirtiest river.
They don’t try to gross you out or shock you, but they can’t help it. They took their canoe trip up the Rouge thirteen years ago, and I would like to think things are much better now.
But I am not all that sure, and it is clear that things are still not good enough. When they did their hands-on-oars research,the Friends of the Rouge had already been trying to clean up the river for nearly twenty years, so things might have been even worse a couple decades before their trip. The reasons why the River Rouge is so polluted aren’t a mystery.
Human beings are large animals who, quite aside from our massive volumes of industrial waste, produce a lot of excrement. And there are more than four million of us in the Detroit metropolitan area. That has caused the poor river to be heavily burdened.
People aren’t about to go away, and I am not arguing in favor of massive depopulation. But we need to learn to be stewards of the earth, and not destroy it.
Our politicians have plainly not gotten the lesson, or have perhaps forgotten how important the environment is. Among a host of bad legislation that is being considered in the current lame-duck session of the legislature is Senate Bill 1188, which would prevent local units of government from doing anything to prevent the removal of vegetation.
Plants, after all, are essential to cleaning up a river or reduce storm water. Another Senate bill, 1211, would stop protecting wetlands smaller than ten acres.
Currently, wetlands that are more than five acres are protected. This bill, like the first introduced by the pliable and frequently ignorant Tom Casperson, would clearly be a boon to developers hungry to make a buck by whatever means necessary.
Friends of the Rouge says the state admits this would strip regulation away from more than 70,000 Michigan wetlands and more than a third of all our small inland lakes, which means they could be drained, filled in and built on without permits.
This might also wipe out our already vanishing toad and especially frog populations. This would also damage efforts to help restore the Rouge and other rivers.
Sadly, many of Michigan’s outgoing lawmakers either don’t understand this or don’t care. They’ll be out of office in three weeks,and if history is any guide, some will be looking for jobs with the same special interest they are helping now.
To me, this is as obscene as the oceans of raw sewage that cascade into the Rouge when heavy rains overburden the sanitary sewer system. The Native Americans understood that we are supposed to be stewards,not despoilers of the earth.
We can only ignore that for so long before we turn much of the planet into a place of irredeemable ugliness that will, in the end, destroy us too.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
