Environment & Science

The Obama administration enacted regulations to protect some sensitive bodies of water, but the Trump administration removed those protections.

Now the Biden administration plans to protect them again.

Changing the Waters of the U.S. protections under the Clean Water Act meant about 25% of the waterways were no longer protected. Some headwater streams and wetlands don’t have water all the time, but when they do, they need to be protected from pollution and silt. Keeping them pristine is important to wildlife such as fish and frogs downstream.

What does Michigan’s future look like if we adequately prepare the state’s water resources for climate change? Goodbye to septics and shorehugging homes. Hello to more diversified crops on Michigan farms.

The year is 2050, and you’re visiting family in Detroit.

Arriving, you grab coffee on the ground floor of a nine-floor building filled with offices and apartments, designed to house a growing Great Lakes city without pushing out longtime residents.

Around the corner, people gather for walks and picnics in a wetland park, one of dozens constructed around the city. With their wet meadows, flowers and gently winding trails, the parks absorb rainwater from frequent storms, reduce water treatment costs and alleviate the basement backups of water and sewage that once plagued Detroit.

LOOK UP!

On Thursday, June 10, 2021, people across the northern hemisphere – including here in Michigan – will have the chance to experience an annular or partial eclipse of the Sun.

Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) are forecasting the cyanobacterial bloom in western Lake Erie is likely to be smaller than average this year. But, it’s early in the season and things could change.

If you buy some kinds of bagged fertilizer for your garden, you might be getting more than you want.

The Ecology Center and Sierra Club sampled different kinds of fertilizers made from biosolids. That’s the sludge left at a wastewater treatment plant after water is cleaned up. Almost all of them had PFAS compounds in them.

There are a lot of ideas about how the State of Michigan should spend federal dollars from the American Rescue Plan. An environmental group thinks one of the top priorities is cleaning up water.

The Michigan Supreme Court says a group of property owners in West Michigan will get the chance to challenge a real estate developer’s plan to build on sand dunes along Lake Michigan.

This dispute has been winding its way through the courts since 2014.

The developer is Dune Ridge. It bought 130 acres in Saugatuck. But the former church camp is located in what the state calls a critical dune area. So it’s subject to special protection and management rules to protect them.

The University of Michigan has adopted a plan to achieve net zero carbon emissions by the year 2040.

Net zero means the combination of reducing the burning of fossil fuels with actions to remove carbon dioxide from the environment, such as re-forestation, or sequestering carbon in geologic formations.

Drew Horning is special advisor to U of M President Mark Schlissel for carbon neutrality strategy. 

He says by 2025, the University plans to get all its outside purchased electricity from carbon dioxide-free sources like wind.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have found an association between an ingredient found in a common weed killer and preterm births.

The chemical in question is glyphosate which used in herbicides such as Roundup.

Three environmental groups have notified the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency they plan to sue because the agency has not come up with a plan to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions in areas of Detroit and Baltimore.

The Center for Biological Diversity, the Center for Environmental Health, and the Sierra club filed a notice this week.

Water ran from a fire hydrant, down the street and into a recently redesigned street median in Detroit last week.

It was both unassuming and a demonstration of the city’s single largest investment in green stormwater infrastructure: infrastructure that uses natural processes like the ability of soil and plants to filter and store water. The 10 reworked street medians on Oakman Boulevard will help manage 37.3 million gallons of stormwater a year, easing the burden on the city’s wastewater system and reduce basement flooding.

Some coal fired power plants are being closed. Still, most of Michigan’s utilities heavily rely on coal.

“In 2019, coal still fueled the largest share of Michigan’s electric generation, about 32 percent. DTE Energy in particular is still heavily reliant on coal generation, with close to 60 percent (56%) of its energy coming from coal fired power plants,” Charlotte Jameson with the Michigan Environmental Council (MEC) said.

She is one of the authors of an updated report on pollutants that come from burning coal.

Researchers at the University of Michigan are looking at how willing the public is to accept using carbon dioxide emissions in products. There are cases where capturing CO2 emissions could be used to make other products such as fuel or the carbon dioxide in your soft drink.

While people are not as keen about using CO2 emissions from a smokestack to carbonate their Coca-Cola, they do see the practicality of how carbon dioxide could be used in ways better than seeing it increase the amount of greenhouse gases causing climate change.

A bald eagle was rescued in Ann Arbor after being found tangled in fishing line.

The wire was wrapped around his wing, tying him to a log where he was trapped.

The Humane Society of Huron Valley made the rescue and did an initial exam. They found no major injuries.

The eagle was transported to the Howell Nature Center for further care and rehabilitation.

Minnesota-based company 3M is suing the state of Michigan over its regulations of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or the PFAS family of chemicals. Michigan's regulations on PFAS in drinking water were finalized in August 2020, and are among the most stringent in the country.

If Line 5 is still pumping petroleum through the Straits of Mackinac on Thursday, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has notified Enbridge Energy, she will consider all resulting profits to be property of the state of Michigan.

When Monica Evans gets together with her friends they talk economics, politics, the weather. They also discuss a subject that arises periodically in the news - the prospect that Great Lakes water could be diverted to other parts of the country. 

Evans, who is known in the Traverse City region as an effective environmental activist, has long worried that water could become in the 21st century what oil was in the 20th. As the global climate warms and water scarcity mounts, Great Lakes water is more valuable than ever before. 

Microplastic pollution has been building up in the Great Lakes for at least four decades, but our understanding of its impact on fish and other aquatic creatures is only just catching up.

Now new research from the University of Toronto shows the harm to wildlife is due to a wide range of factors that is not generally considered in toxicology testing – the plastics’ size, shape and chemical makeup.

Access to ample water supplies could make Michigan a climate refuge. That scenario is attracting considerable attention in the Great Lakes State.

But climate change also is disrupting the earth’s meteorological cycles. Which means more fierce Great Lakes region storms and more floods.

The consequences are not evenly distributed. Or, in the words of Jeremy Porter, the head of research and development at First Street Foundation, a Brooklyn-based research group, flooding tells “two different stories.”