Category: Great Lakes

Remembering Lee Botts (1928-2019), Environmental Activist, Champion of the Great Lakes and Indiana Dunes

Lee Botts (photo: encore.org)

While Millennials and Gen Zers are leading the way on climate change activism and environmental justice here in 2019, their passion for change and stalwart efforts against seemingly insurmountable barriers are inspired by and built upon the efforts of previous generations of environmental advocates. On such champion — local conservationist, activist, writer, editor, film documentarian, and policymaker Lee Botts (1928-2019) — died this past Saturday in Oak Park, IL.

According to the tribute to Botts posted in the Hyde Park Herald, for which she wrote a garden column in the late ’50s and later served as editor from 1966-69:

“Lee Botts was editor of the Herald during the late 1960s implementation of the urban renewal plans,” said Herald Chairman Bruce Sagan, who has owned the newspaper since 1953. “Her objective journalism was a crucial component of the civic discussion during that complex history.”

In 1968, she joined the staff of the Open Lands Project in Chicago. From 1971 to 1975, she was the founding executive director of the Lake Michigan Federation, which is today the Alliance for the Great Lakes. Under Botts’ leadership, the new organization persuaded Mayor Richard J. Daley to have Chicago become the first Great Lakes city to ban phosphates in laundry detergents, led U.S. advocacy for the first binational Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1972, was a key advocate for the landmark federal Clean Water Act of 1972 and played a key role in persuading Congress to ban PCBs via the 1974 Toxic Chemicals Control Act.

After a short stint with the Environmental Protection Agency Region 5 office in Chicago, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to head to the Great Lakes Basin Commission in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1977. After the agency was eliminated from the federal budget, Botts held a research faculty appointment at Northwestern University from 1981 to 1985.

She joined the senior staff of Mayor Harold Washington in 1985, organizing the city’s first-ever Department of the Environment. In 1986, with Washington’s endorsement and support, Botts ran for the board of the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago but lost by 2%.

Botts relocated to Northwest Indiana in 1988, where she became an adjunct professor at a local college and joined various boards and committees. While living in Gary’s Miller Beach neighborhood, she began advocating for an idea she’d first written about a quarter-century earlier: the Indiana Dunes Environmental Learning Center, which she helped found in 1997.

An independent non-profit located within Indiana Dunes National Park, the Dunes Learning Center offers year-round environmental education programs and overnight nature-camp experiences for grade-school students and teachers. Today, nearly 10,000 students come to the center each year from school systems throughout Indiana, Michigan and Illinois. Botts initially chaired the institution’s board of directors.

For many years, Botts suggested that the modern history of the Indiana Dunes region could become an engaging documentary film. With director Patricia Wisniewski, she began working on making “Lee’s dunes film” in 2010, writing the film’s script, conducting many of the interviews, leading the fundraising effort and traveling to promote the project, even after she was no longer able to drive her own car.

“Shifting Sands: On The Path To Sustainability” was released in 2016 and won a regional Emmy Award. To date, it has been broadcast on more than 70 public-television stations, included in several major film festivals and screened by scores of local citizens’ groups and public libraries throughout the states bordering Lake Michigan.

Botts was awarded a citation from the United Nations Environmental Program for making a difference for the global environment in 1987, the 2008 Gerald I. Lamkin Award from the Society of Innovators at Purdue University Northwest and honorary doctorates from Indiana University and Calumet College of St. Joseph. She was inducted into the Indiana Conservation Hall of Fame in 2009.

A person who did any one of the above accomplishments would rightly be lauded for the impact of their work on behalf of people and the environment. The fact that Lee Botts did all this and more — through her own will, dedication, and fierce advocacy as well as her ability to connect and collaborate with others — is nothing short of astounding.

This is a picture of a radical environmentalist: Lee Botts in her backyard at home in Gary, IN (photo provided by Paul Botts, published in the Post-Tribune 6 Oct 2019)

See these sources for more information on Lee Botts:

Environmentalist and former Herald editor Leila “Lee” Botts dies at 91 (Hyde Park Herald)

Lee Botts’ children reflect on her life as pioneering environmentalist, advocate for the Great Lakes (The Times, NY Indiana)

Environmentalist, journalist and documentarian Lee Botts of Gary dead at age 91 (Post-Tribune)

Wasted Water and Environmental Injustice in Chicago

This fall semester, students in my SUST 220 Water class have been studying our American obsession with bottled water, which comes at the expense of (among other things) proper investment in and maintenance of public drinking water infrastructure. While taxpayer-funded repairs to underground water infrastructure are expensive and politically unpopular, the bottled water industry continues to thrive and grow: the International Bottled Water Association reported industry wholesale revenues of more than $14.2 billion in 2015 alone.

The Chicago Region is blessed with one of the best drinking water sources in the world: Lake Michigan, which supplies water to 163 Chicago-area communities.

Water intake crib off Chicago’s shoreline (photo: A. Perez, Chgo Tribune)

But as this important investigative report published online in the Chicago Tribune reveals, billions of gallons of treated drinking water are wasted each year, while communities pay millions of $ for water that never reaches their taps. Meanwhile, wide disparities in drinking water rates, combined with differential amounts of waste via leaks, disproportionately saddle poor and minority communities with extra costs they cannot afford.

Thus does neglected urban infrastructure meet environmental injustice in 21st century America, here along the southern rim of Lake Michigan.

Sources:

Patrick M. O’Connell, Cecilia Reyes, Ted Gregory and Angela Caputo. (25 Oct 2017). Billions Lost, Millions Wasted: Why Chicago-area Residents Pay Millions for Water that Never Reachers Their Taps. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from
http://graphics.chicagotribune.com/news/lake-michigan-drinking-water-rates/loss.html.

——. (25 Oct 2017). Same Lake, Unequal Rates: Why Our Water Rates Are Surging — and Why Black and Poor Suburbs Pay More. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://graphics.chicagotribune.com/news/lake-michigan-drinking-water-rates/index.html.

 

Biodiversity in the News: the Practice of Biology in Modern Times

Daniel Molloy working in Sleepy Hollow Lake, Athens NY (photo: L. Mann/APO)
Daniel Molloy working in Sleepy Hollow Lake, Athens NY (photo: L. Mann/APO)

This past week I’ve come across two fascinating and instructive news articles about biologists in NY and IL doing important research in different contexts, with instructive lessons for how we conserve biodiversity in the face of urbanization and invasive species. Today’s NY Times‘ Science Times section features this piece on Daniel P. Molloy, a biologist at the New York State Museum who has spent his career studying and developing environmentally-safe biological controls for invasive species, such as the notorious zebra and quagga mussels that plague the Great Lakes ecosystem.

David Bohlen in his office (photo: Tom Handy, IL Times)
David Bohlen in his office (photo: Tom Handy, IL Times)

The other story, from my own state of Illinois, appeared on Feb. 6th in Illinois Times (Springfield) — a long feature article on the work of H. David Bohlen, who has studied the bird populations of Sangamon County in Central IL for a continuous 40-year period and just released a massive two-volume report on his research. Bohlen is a biologist with the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. His 2013 report, “A Study of the Birds of Sangamon County, Illinois, 1970-2010,” can be found here as pdfs (Volume 1 and Volume 2).

The valuable work of these two scientists illustrates several points about the impact of biological research in conserving biodiversity and making ecosystems more sustainable. Molloy’s research strives to find and implement natural biological controls (such as a species of bacteria) for invasive species, not just to effectively mitigate their impacts on the food chain but also to avoid using chemical toxins and further polluting freshwater aquatic systems as a means of “saving” them. His work also demonstrates the increasing prominence of microbiology in sustainability science, which is also a key starting point for developing biofuels (itself a really hot topic!).

Bohlen’s field-based research method, by contrast, is a throwback to the organismal field studies of natural history that were common in the 19th century but have largely fallen out of favor with the biological mainstream’s emphasis on cellular- and molecular-level work. Yet Bohlen’s phenomenal 40-year record of avian biodiversity in a representative Midwestern farm county shows how the land use changes resulting from decades of urbanization and industrial agriculture have negatively impacted the diversity and abundance of bird species in the Illinois landscape. It also illustrates what you can accomplish by walking around, observing, and recording systematic phenological data over a long-term timeframe.

Introducing Sandra Steingraber at the Great Lakes Bioneers Conference

Back on November 1st, the opening day of the Great Lakes Bioneers environmental sustainability conference on “Community Resilience” hosted by Roosevelt, I had the honor of introducing Dr. Sandra Steingraber, that evening’s keynote speaker. Here’s the text of my introductory comments.

Connection. It’s a basic tenet of ecology as well of human relations. Nothing and no-one are truly disconnected. The water cycle flows through the ground, the ocean, the air . . . and each of us. We throw away our trash and flush our bodily wastes; but ecology teaches us there is no “away.” That is a falsely comforting myth of our disposable and fossil-fueled society, in which pollution and toxicity — in our lakes and streams, in our food, even in human breast milk — are accepted as normal.

Normal? That is where I first met our distinguished keynote speaker this evening, Dr. Sandra Steingraber, back in the late 1980s. More precisely, I mean the campus of Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, where I had gone for a poetry reading upon the recommendation of my creative writing professor at nearby Illinois Wesleyan, Jim McGowan. He had rightly admonished me for being a lazy writer, too content with a quick semi-catchy draft of a poem. “Go hear my former student, Sandy Steingraber,” he said. “Then you’ll understand the difference between just dashing something off and really working at your craft.” Boy, he was right.

Science. At the time of being blown away by Steingraber’s poetry in Normal, I didn’t know she was a scientist, too. Like me, only a few years earlier, she had studied biology and English at Illinois Wesleyan; then she had gone on to get a masters in creative writing and a PhD in ecology. I remember my brother David attending Columbia College here in Chicago as a theater major and telling me, “I’m taking this amazing class on evolution. It’s taught by a really cool professor, Sandra Steingraber. Do you know her?” I thought, wow — anyone who can get young hipster actors to dig Charles Darwin has to be really good.

That far from eloquent assessment turns out to be uncannily accurate and widely shared. Since the original publication of her acclaimed book, Living Downstream, in 1997, Dr. Steingraber has become an award-winning author of several subsequent books; an influential environmental journalist for Orion, the Huffington Post, and other publications; a sought-after speaker and scientific consultant; an internationally recognized authority on the links between cancer and the chemical pollution of our environment; and a passionate yet scientifically rigorous critic of the environmentally devastating gas and oil extraction process called fracking.

It’s a distinct honor and privilege to have Sandra Steingraber speak at this year’s Great Lakes Bioneers conference at my longtime academic home, Roosevelt University. Her writing and life’s work — as an environmental activist, an artist, and a parent — truly embodies the spirit of this gathering and the ethos of sustainability. As Steingraber argues in Living Downstream and elsewhere, as Rachel Carson knew more than fifty years ago as she wrote the complacency-shattering book Silent Spring, it is not enough to know something scientifically, or to express that knowledge poetically. We must also act — to change policy for the better, to fight for environmental justice in all communities, and to become true stewards rather than reckless exploiters of nature.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Sandra Steingraber.

Great Lakes Commission Releases Asian Carp Study

For the last several months, the Great Lakes Commission and the US Army Corps of Engineers have been conducting parallel studies on the feasibility of re-separating the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds here in the Chicago Region. This challenging process is motivated by the threat of Asian Carp moving northward from the Illinois Waterway system through the Chicago and/or Calumet Rivers and into the Great Lakes.

While the Corps’ study is wide-ranging and focused on the Asian Carp threat throughout the Mississippi River and Great Lakes basins — and thus on a much slower timetable, to the frustration of many environmentalists and regional governmental leaders — the Great Lakes Commission has just released its full report, “Restoring the Natural Divide,” to the public. As noted here by the Chicago Tribune’s Andrew Stern and Sandra Maler,

Keeping the invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes will involve re-reversing the flow of the Chicago River — an engineering marvel completed a century ago through a complex network of rivers, canals, and locks, a new study said on Tuesday.

The study proposed three options to separate the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River basin near Chicago and keep Asian carp and other invaders out but all three would require re-reversing the flow of Chicago river which now carries Chicago’s treated waste water away from its Lake Michigan drinking water.

“Physically separating the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds is the best long-term solution for preventing the movement of Asian carp and other aquatic invasive species, and our report demonstrates that it can be done,” said Tim Eder, executive director of the Great Lakes Commission, sponsor of the study with several other interest groups.

The prolific Asian carp have populated the Mississippi River and many of its tributaries and now threaten the $7 billion fishery in the lakes, which contain one-fifth of the world’s fresh surface water and supply 35 million people with drinking water.

The invasions by Silver and Bighead carp, first introduced to control algae in commercial fish ponds, have prompted promotional efforts to catch them as a source of cheap protein or for sport fishing, but their populations have exploded.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is conducting its own long-term study on possible separation of the watersheds that is due to be completed in 2015, has erected electric underwater barriers at a canal bottleneck near Chicago to try to keep the carp at bay, but some marine experts fear the carp may have already bypassed the barriers.

Several states bordering the lakes have demanded stronger action and have filed a suit against the Army Corps calling for quick action to erect separation barriers and speed up its study.

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, who is pursuing the states’ lawsuit, praised the Commission’s study, saying “with thousands of jobs and a spectacular ecological resource at stake, we can no longer afford to wait for the federal government.”

Commercial shippers and the recreational and tour boat industries have opposed closing locks and dams between the two watersheds, saying it would destroy their businesses. Previous federal court rulings have also noted closing locks permanently would worsen flooding during storms.

Four Indiana congressmen issued statements objecting to the economic cost to the northwest corner of the state if plans are undertaken to permanently divide the two watersheds. . . .

Environmental groups backed the separation plans, with Marc Smith of the National Wildlife Federation saying the study “puts solutions on the table that are both feasible and affordable.”

The Commission’s 18-month-long study estimated the total cost of erecting barriers to achieve ecological separation and measures to address water quality, flood prevention and alternative transportation at up to $9.5 billion.

The least costly option, the “Mid System” approach, would cost between $3.3 billion and $4.3 billion and involve erecting four barriers including one near the existing O’Brien Lock nearly Lake Calumet. At that point, a facility could be built to transfer cargo between river barges and trains, trucks, or lake-going boats. A second barrier on the Chicago River could be equipped with a system to lift and transfer recreational boats from one side to the other.

Another option would place five barriers in waterways closer to Lake Michigan, and a third would place one barrier further downstream. Both pose significant transportation and flood management challenges, raising the costs to more than $9.5 billion, the study said.

The study projected a two-phase implementation of the plans with an initial target to erect barriers by 2022. Flood protection depends in part on completion by 2029 of a $3.7 billion system of tunnels and reservoirs designed to divert Chicago area’s stormwater, a project begun in the early 1970s.

Besides Asian carp and its ability to scour the lakes’ food supply and out-compete other fish species, the Army Corps has identified 39 other invasive species — 10 poised to enter the lakes and 29 ready to invade the rivers — that could traverse the two watersheds and threaten the ecological balance. Those include fish such as the northern snakehead, plants such as the water chestnut and mat-forming hydrilla, and crustaceans such as the spiny water flea.

A total of 180 non-native aquatic species are established in the Great Lakes, and 163 are established in the Mississippi River basin.

What will be interesting to see is how the Great Lakes Commission’s report impacts the current dialogue about the best way to proceed in keeping the Asian Carp at bay while simultaneously assuring the economic and environmental sustainability of the Great Lakes-to-the-Gulf of Mexico shipping connection. In the meantime, I recommend the Report’s extensive website, which also features abundant video and image resources.