The largest annual gathering of Great Lakes scientists began Tuesday and will continue through the end of the week in Windsor, Ont.
More than 700 freshwater researchers and practitioners are attending the 67th annual conference hosted by the International Association for Great Lakes Research. The event is at Caesars Windsor.
More than 600 presentations are being made in nearly 50 sessions, with topics including western Lake Erie algal blooms, Great Lakes climate change, the emergence of PFAS chemicals, also known as “forever chemicals,” and pollution cause by microplastics. There also is research being presented from Africa’s Lake Victoria and parts of China that have biological parallels to the Great Lakes.
In her keynote address, the first of three plenary talks, Palencia Mobley, former deputy director and chief engineer of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, said many Great Lakes port cities, including Detroit, have long been overlooked and are poised for major investments in manufacturing because of their built infrastructure, available labor, and access to large volumes of treated water that industry needs.
The founder and chief executive officer of Mode Collective, Ms. Mobley said she was surprised to learn from Columbus officials while being courted for a job there about the water investment that Ohio capital city was making to accommodate the future Intel semiconductor plant.
Intel broke ground during the fall of 2022 on a project in nearby Licking County that the manufacturing giant now values at $28 billion. An updated completion date has not been announced.
Ms. Mobley used that project to illustrate why the Detroit area should be more attractive to manufacturers: water.
Southeast Michigan has the capacity to treat 1.8 billion gallons of water a day, but is using only 300 million to 400 million gallons a day. As water becomes scarcer across the planet, and more “climate refugees” migrate north, Detroit and other Great Lakes cities are well-poised because of their unused, excess capacity to produce clean and healthy tap water.
“Why do we make investments in places that do not serve our needs?” she asked. “We have to start looking in places we don't always think to look.”
Ms. Mobley, who is Black, said nobody asked her to become an engineer.
“I just decided I was going to be one,” she said.
Now with the automotive industry promoting electric vehicles, the world has a humanitarian responsibility regarding minerals extracted from parts of Africa, such as the Congo, Ms. Mobley said.
She said society needs “to be kinder in what we’re doing.”
“As much as we love advances in tech, we need to think about the full life cycle of everything,” Ms. Mobley said. “There's a human aspect to why we do what we do.”
There also are several forward-thinking discussions at the conference, including a new center designed to improve transboundary research between the Great Lakes region and Canada, and the Southwest and Mexico.
One session also focused on the relatively new concept of a “decadal strategy” that will try to address future issues instead of simply reacting to legacy pollution of the past.
Examples include climate change and microplastics.
“The challenges have changed dramatically the last 20 years and are going to change more dramatically over the next 20 years,” J. Val Klump said. “This is not restoration. That’s to correct problems of the past. This is to prevent problems of the future.”
Mr. Klump is former dean and a professor emeritus of the School of Freshwater Sciences at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received IAGLR’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022.
Joining him on that panel was Gail Krantzberg, professor of engineering and public policy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.
“Climate change has come,” she said. “If we can't predict the future, we can't avoid fatal mistakes.”
Such an initiative must involve several universities and institutions.
“This is not an IJC ‘Do-it-Alone’ plan,” Ms. Krantzberg said, referring to the U.S.-Canada International Joint Commission, a State Department-level agency that advises the U.S. and Canadian governments on environmental policy decisions affecting their border.
Many familiar issues of the past are likely to continue well into the future, too.
One is the nagging impact of vampire-like sea lampreys, an invasive that has been sucking blood out of native Great Lakes fish for decades.
Marc Gaden, executive director of the Ann Arbor-based Great Lakes Fishery Commission, said the destructive lamprey was the impetus for the creation of that commission in 1954. The commission sets catch limits for Great Lakes fish, but also includes sea lamprey control among its mandates.
He calls sea lamprey the worst of all invasives, akin to the unwelcome relative at a picnic.
Unfortunately, he added, despite all of the millions of dollars spent to trap and chemically try to eradicate lamprey, it appears they “will be with us like fleas on a dog from now on,” Mr. Gaden said.
First Published May 21, 2024, 9:49 p.m.
