One of the Great Lakes region’s best-known scientists and environmental historians said Wednesday the Detroit River and western Lake Erie are “at a defining moment” now because of how they have made progress in some important areas, such as cleanup of industrial sites, but backslid in others, such as algal blooms, since the 1970s.
John Hartig, a visiting scholar at the University of Windsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research and a Great Lakes science-policy adviser for the International Association for Great Lakes Research, the Great Lakes region’s largest group of scientists, made the observation while summarizing the 11th biennial State of the Strait report during a webinar hosted by the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, or SEMCOG.
Drawn from the work of more than 40 Great Lakes science and policy groups, the 516-page report is a health assessment - a checkup, if you will, according to Mr. Hartig - the United States and Canada do once every two years of the confluence between the Detroit River and western Lake Erie, one of the most populated and environmentally dynamic areas within the Great Lakes region.
Northwest Ohio contributors included the University of Toledo, Heidelberg University, and Defiance College.
Mr. Hartig is the lead author of the latest report. He also was the first and for many years the U.S. manager of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, which includes the Detroit and Monroe areas and Canada’s side of the river. It is the only wildlife refuge jointly managed by two countries.
An author of four books, including one which chronicled four Great Lakes rivers once containing so much oily filth and other debris that they caught fire, Mr. Hartig was in 2016 named the John Muir Association's Conservationist of the Year. His most recent book is about the Detroit Riverwalk, one of the models for Metroparks Toledo’s future Glass City Riverwalk along the Maumee River.
“We stand at a defining moment in history,” Mr. Hartig said.
This part of the Great Lakes region - especially the Detroit River - should be proud of significant progress made to clean up polychlorinated biphenyls, or cancer-causing PCBs, and other industrial pollutants in recent decades, he said.
Gone are the threats of having the Rouge River near Detroit and the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland catch fire again because of their oily pollution and sewage waste, Mr. Hartig said.
The other two Great Lakes rivers to catch fire in the past are the Chicago and Buffalo rivers.
The Detroit River especially has been making impressive strides with improving wildlife habitat and greatly reducing impacts to the waterway from major sources such as Detroit’s sewage-treatment plant, one of the nation’s largest.
Two area waterways in particular - the River Raisin in Monroe and the Ottawa River in Toledo - have impressed regulators with their comebacks.
But western Lake Erie languishes behind with myriad problems, many accentuated by algal blooms and the nutrient-enriched water that feeds them after carrying manure and other fertilizers off area farms, the report said.
According to Ohio Environmental Protection Agency data, 88 percent of the Maumee River’s algae-forming phosphorus and 89 percent of the river’s nitrogen, another fertilizer feeding algal blooms, comes from nonpoint sources such as farms.
In the Sandusky River watershed, the impact from that sector is even greater, with an estimated 93 percent of its phosphorus and 94 percent of its nitrogen derived from nonpoint sources. In the Portage River watershed, 87 percent of its phosphorus and 89 percent of its nitrogen comes from nonpoint sources.
Climate change exacerbates problems in this and other parts of the Great Lakes, as do issues such as the continued onslaught of unwanted invasive species, Mr. Hartig said.
“Most of the warming has been in the past 35 years, with five of the warmest years since 2015,” he said. “Warmer, wetter and wilder weather is coming. A multinational climate plan should be developed for the Great Lakes.”
Others on the webinar included Margaret Barondess, Michigan Department of Transportation environmental services section manager, and Marie McCormick, Friends of the Rouge executive director.
Ms. Barondess is in charge of a conservation plan along the first 20 miles of I-75 north of the Ohio-Michigan state line, one of the busiest stretches of I-75 in Michigan. More than 30,000 trucks a day travel it, she said.
Rare plants and wetlands are being protected and invasive plants removed as that part of I-75 is reconstructed five miles at a time for the next several years, Ms. Barondess said.
First Published December 3, 2020, 12:18 a.m.
