She’s still numb and was definitely humbled by the experience of speaking before the United Nations.
She’s also eternally grateful for such an opportunity; a rarity for anyone from the Toledo area, activist or not.
Markie Miller is the Toledoans for Safe Water organizer most directly involved with the development of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights and the hard-fought-but-successful campaign to get it passed by voters at Toledo’s Feb. 26 special election. She told The Blade in a telephone interview from New York on Monday afternoon she was “still reeling” from the presentation she made shortly before 11 a.m. to the UN General Assembly.
That she was invited to do it on Earth Day made it extra special to her. She said she also was pleased to have done it as “part of the grassroots community instead of being part of an institution.”
During her 5:18-minute presentation, which can be viewed on YouTube, Ms. Miller, a Lambertville native who still lives there, recounted the confusion surrounding Toledo’s 2014 water crisis. Nearly 500,000 area residents were told not to drink, bathe, or touch their tap water the first weekend of August that year because a potentially deadly algal toxin called microcystin had breached the city’s Collins Park Water Treatment Plant and gotten into the regional distribution system. Microcystin has grown nearly every summer in western Lake Erie since 1995.
Grocery stores were ordered to throw out produce. Hospitals scrambled for water to accommodate patients, including expectant mothers in labor. Restaurants were closed by order of the Toledo Lucas County Health Department. The Ohio National Guard was called in. Bottled water “became a scarce and overpriced commodity, available only to those who could locate it and afford it,” Ms. Miller recalled.
“In 2014, I experienced firsthand what it felt like to be vulnerable in the face of environmental disaster,” she told the UN group. “We were held captive by a situation that, by all accounts, could have been prevented.”
But for as much of an imposition the water crisis was over those three days, the lingering effects of it — and what many people now view as inadequate government response to it — has been more difficult over the five years since, Ms. Miller said.
She told the UN that officials got lost in a morass of government bureaucracy, and continued to use existing laws to protect special interests. She didn’t cite agriculture by name, but her group and others have often pointed to it and the growth of large livestock facilities known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.
“We were told to be patient, obedient, and silent,” Ms Miller told the UN panel. “Instead, we mobilized and came up with the [Lake Erie] Bill of Rights.”
She said the overriding theme of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights is to “hold polluters accountable” and turn around the regulatory thinking in a way that the first priority is Lake Erie’s health, not exceptions for businesses that pollute it.
The referendum came under attack by a political committee that called itself the Toledo Jobs & Growth Coalition. Campaign finance records show most of the money spent in the anti-LEBOR campaign came from a $302,000 donation from Houston-based BP Corp. North America.
The measure passed by a 61-39 percent margin at a election that drew only 9 percent of Toledo’s registered voters. Organizers agreed the hardest part was getting it on the ballot, not securing the win.
The first of what is expected to be multiple lawsuits challenging it was filed in U.S. District Court hours after the victory by attorneys representing Drewes Farms Partnership of Custar, Ohio. The plaintiff claims the successful ballot initiative needs to be thrown out on the grounds it is “unconstitutional and unlawful.”
Online federal court records show that Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, on behalf of the DeWine administration, filed a motion to intervene on behalf of Drewes Farms on March 29.
Mr. Yost began his motion by claiming the Lake Erie Bill of Rights “contradicts” state of Ohio efforts to control water pollution.
Tish O’Dell, an Ohio representative for the national Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which helped Toledoans for Safe Water develop its proposal, said the state’s support of the plaintiff shows the administration is more interested in corporate agriculture than Lake Erie.
But a spokesman for Mr. Yost, Dominic Binkley, said the state’s involvement in the case is simply the result of its “significant interest in the protection of Lake Erie.”
“Attorney General Yost, as Ohio's chief law enforcement officer, is moving to intervene to protect the rights of all Ohio citizens and to ensure that Ohio's ability to regulate Lake Erie is not impeded or impaired,” Mr. Binkley said. “No current party to the action can adequately represent this interest."
Last night, the Ohio Attorney General’s Office followed that statement up with one it attributed directly to Mr. Yost:
“I appreciate her courage and her passion,” Mr. Yost’s statement reads. “They are helping to drive the debate about how to protect our beautiful Lake Erie. The DeWine administration has advanced a serious proposal, backed by real money, to protect the Lake. LEBOR, though, is unconstitutional, and while well-intentioned, ineffective. I hope my friends in northwest Ohio will join the governor in his real-world solution.”
Dale Emch, Toledo law director, told The Blade in an interview last week the measure is now part of the city charter, and that the city law department will defend it. Activist-lawyer Terry Lodge also has filed a motion to intervene on behalf of the defendants.
Sue Carter was one of eight people who gathered at the Point Place Library to watch the Ms. Miller’s speech streamed live on a library computer.
“She did a great job. It was wonderful,” Ms. Carter said. “She did such a powerful job.”
Ms. Carter is a Point Place resident and longtime activist associated with another group formed in response to the 2014 water crisis, Advocates for a Clean Lake Erie.
“A couple of us were crying,” Ms. Carter said, adding that it was especially gratifying to see the message delivered by a young person. “We don’t do this [activism] for fun. This is a battle for the environment. This is a battle for the lake.”
Sean Nestor, another Toledo activist who worked on the campaign, agreed.
“Markie gave a great speech that underscored the need for major changes to our system of environmental law,” Mr. Nestor said. “We're lucky to have her voice speaking up for Toledoans and Lake Erie to a global audience.”
Ms. Miller also used part of her presentation to riff about climate change, saying that the public’s education of it “must evolve beyond an understanding of the consequences.”
“It must expose the legal systems that render sustainability illegal,” Ms. Miller said. “Injustice will only triumph if we choose to remain hostage to an oppressive system of laws that support the needs of industry and greed over the very real and dire needs of our planet. And now, more than ever, we the people must organize to dismantle the immoral laws by which we are trapped.”
Accompanying Ms. Miller in New York for the UN presentation were three other Toledoans for Safe Water members — Crystal Jankowski, Julian Mack, and Ariel Grube — as well as one of their friends, Ruth Leonard.
Mr. Mack also addressed a UN panel later in the day by saying environmental stewardship is “a quest we all need to be in together” and noted the ongoing problems with drinking water in Flint, Mich. as an example of environmental injustice.
In a Facebook post, he is shown describing Toledoans for Safe Water as a “scrappy group of activists” that raised about $6,000 and was outspent nearly 50-1 on the Lake Erie Bill of Rights campaign while opponents “ironically accused us of being out-of-town activists.”
First Published April 22, 2019, 5:47 p.m.
