Where there’s water, there’s life.
If the water is threatened, however, so is the life. That’s the message
environmentalists have been trying to get across for years concerning the Great
Lakes basin, which, in the later half of the 20th century, has taken a huge hit
from development and misuse.
           Finally,
the message may be getting across. A number of Great Lakes management reforms
are scheduled to be enacted this summer, and, in anticipation, the New York
State Assembly held a public hearing in Rochester last week to address the
threats to the basin and surrounding region.
           Issues
ranged from water quality to the agricultural consequences of heavy pollution
and overuse of the area and its wetlands. Many are the same problems that have
been a plague to the basin for decades, and environmentalists are hoping the
issues may finally be addressed.
           “We
need a better system of managing water usage in both legal and moral
terms,” said Reg Gilbert, the senior coordinator of Great Lakes United,
one of nearly a dozen witnesses asked to testify.
           “We
need to protect that water from the long-term plan of an increasingly thirsty
world,” Gilbert said.
The Great Lakes basin is the world’s largest freshwater ecosystem. It consists of almost 20 percent
of the world’s, and 95 percent of the country’s, fresh surface water. In total,
the lakes encompasses an estimated 700 miles of shoreline.
           In
1985, as part of an effort to reverse decades worth of environmental damage
caused by pollution and water withdrawals, the eight states bordering the lakes
joined the provinces of Quebec and Ontario to adopt the Great Lakes Charter.
The charter was amended in 2001 to tighten controls of the lakes’ resources and
to close loopholes that allowed high-pollutant development to occur in the
area. The amendment, titled Annex 2001, is expected to be finalized and
implemented this summer.
           The
damage caused by pollution and sprawl to the lakes’ ecosystems could have
catastrophic ramifications, several of the witnesses said. A “delicate
balance” must be maintained between water usage and supply refill of the
basin to ensure the lakes’ survival, said Donald Zelazny, the Great Lakes program
coordinator for the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
           “Overuse
would be catastrophic environmentally and to the water supply,” Zelazny
said. Using brownfield laws and congressional protections, “we will be
able to restore New York’s indispensable water resources,” he said.
One reason the last 15 years or so have not brought about a reversal in the basin’s
troubled condition is the “no net loss” policy initially enacted by
President George Bush Sr., Gilbert said in a telephone interview after the
hearing. The law was meant to protect wetlands and halt the decline of overall
wetland acreage in the country. The program allows developers and
landowners to destroy wetlands if they create or restore others at another
site.
           But the policy
says only that the same acreage must be restored. It says nothing about how
efficient the new wetlands must be in sustaining a vital ecosystem. “We’re
losing wetlands,” Gilbert says. “Someone pours water in a low-lying
area and thinks that’s a wetland.”
           A panel convened
by the National Academy of the Sciences several years ago found many instances
where the construction of
substitute wetlands was often delayed or left incomplete. When the projects
were finished, many failed to meet required environmental standards and many
others simply did not duplicate the ecological functions of the natural
wetlands that were buried.
           Environmentalists
offer several solutions they say must be implemented to put a halt to the
damage caused to the basin. One of the biggest threats to the basin and its
resources is sprawl, where development consumes land at a faster rate than the
growth of the population.
           This
is one of the most heavily developed basins in the area, and without controls,
the environment will continue to deteriorate. Gilbert’s group, Great Lakes
United, published an “action agenda for restoring the Great Lakes”
that addresses this issue:
           “We
need to use land and re-use buildings within existing urban boundaries,”
the advisory reads. The solution, according to the group, is to require future
land-use plans to take into account surrounding ecosystems. Projects should be
planned around the environment to ensure minimal loss of vital lands and
wetlands. Provisions from the agenda have been included in Annex 2001.
The hearing was led by
Thomas DiNapoli, the chair of the Environmental Conservation Committee, who was
joined by state assemblymembers Richard Smith and David Koon.
           In
addition to pollution and development, several additional areas of concern were
addressed, among them the issue of water withdrawal from the lakes.
           Gilbert
described an incident in 1998 when a private company, the Nova Group, intended
to export 60 million gallons of water per year from Lake Superior to various
clients in Asia. Political uproar eventually killed the idea, but Gilbert said
groups with similar intentions and greater funding could eventually succeed.
The easing of global trade restrictions over the last decade has increased this
possibility
           “Though
these trade agreements may not be a problem today, the trend is they will be a
problem,” Gilbert said.
           The
Great Lakes basin needs to “protect itself from the long-term threat by
changing the basis of its water-use laws,” Gilbert said.
           “Making
this water source available to people outside of the basin could have a
detrimental effect,” Gilbert said. Local governments must reject
potentially lucrative water-diversion projects because they are harmful to the
lakes and their vital ecosystems, he told the panel.
           “The
question is, as a region, are we willing to put up with the inconveniences of
higher standards?” Gilbert said. “Wisdom and care for our children
and our grandchildren’s welfare” demand that we must, he added.
In addition to monitoring the levels of water removed from the lakes, the basin’s managers must
also be careful about what is brought into the lakes. Severe damage can be done
to basin’s ecosystems by foreign species introduced by ships from ports all
over the world, several of the witnesses testified.
           Many
of these foreign species are brought to the lakes through the ballast waters of
ships passing through the basin, said Raymond Vaughan, an environmental
scientist with the Attorney General’s Office. When an ocean liner is on the
open sea, it pumps water in and out of internal tanks, picking up organisms and
dropping them off in completely foreign ecosystems.
           “Once
aquatic invasive species are introduced, control and eradication become
impossible,” Zelazny said. It is a “global problem with local
ramifications.”
           One
long-term solution to address all these matters, suggest some
environmentalists, is to establish a non-partisan, scientific institute or
laboratory of some kind in the basin region to study large lake development and
management. New York is the only basin state or province that does not
have such a facility.
           “One
would hope that as we move forward, the science would overcome the
politics,” DiNapoli said.
This article appears in Jun 2-8, 2004.
