Saving Lake Erie may ultimately require the same kind of civil unrest that Americans have seen in protests over the past few years, from the war in the Middle East to civil rights, gun control, and abortion.
That’s the apparent message from attorney Fritz Byers, who is representing the Board of Lucas County Commissioners in a new Lake Erie lawsuit that was filed against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in U.S. District Court last week.
While not directly comparing Lake Erie’s chronic algal bloom to any of those other high-profile issues, Mr. Byers predicted meaningful improvements for the world’s 11th largest freshwater lake will only come as a result of social change.
He said the public at large must stop being numbed into accepting algal blooms as the norm, and should demand regulators act more aggressively to enforce the federal Clean Water Act of 1972.
Algal blooms have occurred in Lake Erie nearly every summer since 1995.
“Legal action alone will not cause social change,” Mr. Byers said, adding that society should metaphorically “lock our arms together and say ‘No more degradation of our necessary, natural resources.’”
This summer’s early forecast for the lake is not good.
Record rainfall for April is expected to make the 2024 bloom one of the larger in recent years, according to the first seasonal projection issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursday.
A lot depends on how much rainfall occurs between now and June 30.
Accountability through the legal system is only the first step, Mr. Byers said during comments made at a Lake Erie conference Thursday at the University of Toledo’s Lake Erie Center.
The all-day event was devoted to discussions about concentrated animal feeding operations, better known as CAFOs. It was arranged by Lake Erie Waterkeeper and two environmental groups based in northern Michigan, Freshwater Future and For Love of Water, also known as FLOW.
Agricultural ties
Sandy Bihn, Lake Erie Waterkeeper founder, began the conference by tying the return of algal blooms to changes within the agricultural community that led to the rise of CAFOs across northwest Ohio in the early 1990s.
Blooms had largely disappeared for about 20 years before returning in 1995. Scientists have said they now are growing all over the world.
Topics ranged from the economics of CAFOs to issues involving animal treatment and efforts to manage the tons of manure generated at such facilities.
Speakers acknowledged that greater consolidation of the agricultural industry has brought in more cash to go along with those bigger numbers of livestock. But they argued that big corporation ownership has also created a greater divide between the have and have-nots in rural communities and hurt their once-idyllic character.
Speakers came from within and outside the Great Lakes region.
During his luncheon keynote address, Mr. Byers said Lucas County commissioners, the city of Toledo, and the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center believe that state and federal bureaucrats intentionally produced a weak planning document to comply with an order issued by U.S. Senior Judge James Carr.
Judge Carr oversaw a previous lawsuit brought by the county and the ELPC, which lasted several years. The long stalemate ended in a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice.
The final Total Maximum Daily Load, or TMDL, plan the Ohio EPA finally produced, for years against its will, has many holes in it, Mr. Byers said.
But he also said that the determination of pro-environment lawyers to get it right is only a start.
Ultimately, there needs to be an awakening by the general public that the norm is not acceptable, Mr. Byers said.
He said the chronic nature of algal blooms has quietly become “one of the most pressing problems we face as a region, as a nation and as a world.”
“People don’t take it well when their government lets them down,” Mr. Byers said.
He went through a brief summary of how the ‘60s environmental movement resulted in a groundswell that led to the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, resulting in the Clean Water Act. Also that year, former President Richard Nixon and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau signed the landmark Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in which the two countries pledged to work harder at restoring their sides of the Great Lakes.
Over the years, there has been a “loss of vision and value” for the lakes, Mr. Byers said, with American politics being much more divisive now than it was when there was bipartisan support for the Clean Water Act.
“It's beyond a cliche that this could not happen again now,” he said, referring to constant gridlock in Congress.
He noted how the Ohio EPA initially balked at declaring western Lake Erie an impaired body of water, knowing that doing so would require more aggressive action. Several administrations now, including the one of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, have relied on a suite of voluntary incentives and cash payments to farmers, hoping that would achieve the same result without imposing heavy-handed regulation on the agricultural industry.
“At every step of the way, our state government and our federal government has failed to uphold its duties for western Lake Erie,” Mr. Byers said. “It took a lawsuit to get the state of Ohio to declare the western basin of Lake Erie impaired.”
“Legally,” he added, “there is no doubt the U.S. EPA acted unlawfully.”
The U.S. EPA declined to be interviewed for this story. Instead, it sent a statement it had prepared a couple of days before when the new lawsuit was filed:
“EPA received the lawsuit from the city of Toledo and is currently reviewing,” the statement reads. “Addressing the problem of algal blooms in the western basin of Lake Erie will take all of us. It will take unflagging commitment and resolve. And it will take time.”
Ty Higgins, Ohio Farm Bureau Federation senior director of communications and media relations, said Ohio farmers have taken part “in the very successful H2Ohio program and other voluntary initiatives across millions of acres in the western Lake Erie basin to put best practices in place.”
He said those are protective of water quality while allowing the agricultural sector to be productive.
“When county and city leaders sue EPA over a TMDL that they fought so hard for and use the lawsuit to spread decades-old misconceptions about animal agriculture, it's blatantly obvious that their end goal goes well beyond clean water,” Mr. Higgins said. “Despite the misinformation being spewed by those bringing the lawsuit, Ohio has one of the most comprehensive regulatory systems in the nation.”
H2Ohio’s start
H2Ohio was initiated by Mr. DeWine in 2019. State officials have repeatedly spoken in favor of it.
The agricultural component provides larger and more diverse voluntary incentives and cash payments to agricultural producers than in the past.
In a recent interview with The Blade, Governor DeWine and Ohio Department of Agriculture Director Brian Baldridge said they are pleased by the participation in H2Ohio.
Mr. DeWine asserts there has been progress, though acknowledging not at the pace that his H2Ohio critics want.
One of many other speakers at the CAFO conference was Jeff Reutter, retired Ohio Sea Grant and Ohio State University Stone Laboratory director.
Mr. Reutter has served as a Lake Erie adviser for past administrations in that capacity, and represented the state of Ohio when it joined Michigan and Ontario nine years ago in a pledge to reduce algae-forming phosphorus runoff 40 percent by 2025.
He also represented Ohio on many science collaborations with other Great Lakes states in the past.
Mr. Reutter said he likes the general concept of H2Ohio, but not the agricultural component of it. He said he likes how the program has led to new and expanded wetlands through the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and improvements to waterlines through the Ohio EPA.
He said again in no uncertain terms, as he has at other talks recently, that voluntary incentives offered through H2Ohio aren’t working. He walked attendees through science based on water samples collected by Heidelberg University’s National Center for Water Quality, especially from the Maumee River station near Waterville.
“To date, we've seen zero progress,” Mr. Reutter said of the goal of reducing phosphorus 40 percent by next year. “We're not halfway there. We're not even 1 percent there. We're where we started.”
The smallest bloom in recent years occurred in 2012, when the region was in a prolonged drought.
Blooms will likely never be eliminated for a number of reasons, Mr. Reutter said.
The goal is to reduce runoff enough that there are more years with blooms as mild as 2012, even when there aren’t droughts, he said.
“Blooms like 2012 or less nine years out of 10 is the goal. That's what success looks like,” Mr. Reutter said.
Much of the problem comes back to crop fields having too much manure and commercial fertilizer applied to them, even those in compliance with an agronomic rate that appears to be set too high, he said.
“We should not hurt agricultural production if we keep our levels low,” Mr. Reutter said. “We're putting on more than four times the amount of fertilizer necessary. That's allowed. That's within their guidelines. Every time we allow more [large-scale] animal operations into our area, that problem is going to grow, because we'll have to spread it on more land.”
Corporate takeover
Joe Logan, a fifth-generation family farmer from northeast Ohio who serves as the Ohio Farmers Union president and as a board member of the National Farmers Union, said the dominance of corporate agriculture and the CAFOs they own have drastically changed what used to be idyllic countryside settings.
“I have been extremely proud to have been a farmer,” Mr. Logan, a dairy farmer for more than 25 years, said while addressing the conference. “In my latter years, I have been struggling to maintain that pride. What I don't love is what agriculture has become.”
As a lifetime farmer, he grew used to the scent of manure.
“I rather like the scent of good manure,” Mr. Logan said.
But he said his experience with building a relatively small lagoon by today’s standards in 1988 did not end well. He dismantled it in 2000.
To Mr. Byers, a lot of Lake Erie’s ongoing problems come back to low expectations.
After Ohio submitted its long-awaited TMDL plan last summer, he and ELPC attorneys met with U.S. EPA brass at the agency’s regional office in Chicago.
Mr. Byers said they invited agency leaders to spend time observing Lake Erie algal blooms in person.
They declined.
“I respect these people, but not their decisions,” he said.
Mr. Byers said he’s afraid Ohio gets dismissed as “flyover” country by high-ranking officials in cities such as Chicago. He said there is “not a chance” they would get away with letting Lake Michigan have chronic algal blooms for years and tell angry Chicagoans that the remedy will be based upon voluntary efforts.
“If you see it, you will not tolerate it,” he said. “We asked them three times and they never came.”
He said the agency’s claim that it lacked the authority to reject Ohio’s TMDL plan was “nonsense.”
First Published May 4, 2024, 5:36 p.m.
