Yes, you can beat the system

Against all odds, Lake Erie won a Bill of Rights

Here’s an interesting bit of historical trivia: For most of our history, this date – March 4^th – was when new Presidents of the United States were inaugurated.

The founding fathers originally set that date, probably because they thought it usually wouldn’t be clear who had won until after the Electoral College met in December – and because in the world of 1787, travel was bound to be slow and difficult.

That was finally changed to January 20 in 1937. But four years before that, perhaps the most important presidential inauguration in history happened exactly eighty-six years ago today. Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President with this nation close to panic and total economic collapse. All the banks had been closed in Michigan, and FDR would soon close them in the entire country. That was the speech in which he told the nation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  He immediately began trying new things to end the Great Depression.

When a puzzled reporter asked him what his ideology was, Roosevelt gave the classic American answer:  His philosophy was to try something, anything that might work.

“Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something!” he said with his usual million-dollar smile.

I was thinking of that last week, when a band of mostly young environmental activists in Toledo defied the political and agricultural establishments and won a stunning victory.

They got the voters to approve a Lake Erie Bill of Rights that would give citizens the right to sue on the lake’s behalf. They were opposed by just about everyone, including the local Democratic party. Toledoans for Safe Water, led by their 29-year-old organizer, Markie Miller, had spent years collecting signatures to get their bill on the ballot.

The county board of elections tried to keep people from being able to vote on it, even though the organizers plainly had enough valid signatures. They knocked it off, but the idealists went to the Ohio Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor. 

Shadow dark money groups, probably funded by big agricultural interests, ran false and misleading attack ads.  It didn’t work. Last week, more than 61 percent of Toledoans who came to the polls voted in favor of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights.

They weren’t fooled. They remember five years ago this summer, when the water in Toledo all the way up to Monroe, Michigan wasn’t safe to drink or even bathe in for several days.

They knew why this happened: The lake has been polluted by phosphorous from vast amounts of fertilizer and animal manure running into the watershed and getting into the lake.

Two years ago I presided over a forum in Tontogany, Ohio, designed to get farmers to voluntarily reduce the amount of phosphorous they were using by 40 percent. That’s where I met Markie Miller and some of her fellow activists.

It was very clear to me that evening that the farmers, especially those running those huge factory farms, or “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations,” would never behave responsibly unless they were forced to do so, which is why this bill of rights was so necessary.

Farm interests are already filing lawsuits against the bill, of course, claiming it is unconstitutional.  Toledoans for Safe Water and its ally, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, expected this, and are preparing for a long hard fight.

The money is on one side; the right is on theirs.  We’d better hope the good guys win. If we destroy the Great Lakes, the world’s greatest source of fresh water, we really are doomed.