Archive for April 2009
By Joe Vaillancourt
Capital News Service
While hunting around 25 years ago, Dennis Fijalkowski used a turkey call on a late April morning in Oscoda County.
A turkey called back—but he couldn’t shoot because it hid behind a sign that said Kirtland’s warbler, the rarest bird in Michigan, was known to inhabit the area so all hunting was prohibited.
By Julia Cechvala
Great Lakes Echo
For the past six years the Dane County Clean Air Coalition has promoted voluntary efforts to reduce air pollution. In February they paid off when the coalition announced that the county meets the federal standards for fine particle pollution.
This means that Dane, along with Brown and Columbia counties, escaped regulations that the Environmental Protection Agency can impose on “non-attainment areas.”
Plenty of air quality challenges have confronted Dane County, including some outside the county’s control. Emissions …
By Jack Johnston
LANSING – In the dead cold of the Upper Peninsula winter, Robert Heyd leaves his snowmobile and approaches an enormous American beech armed with a slingshot, rope and a saw.
Supported by his snowshoes on four feet of snow, Heyd slings a quarter-pound weight attached to parachute cord 80 feet up into the highest branches of the behemoth and uses the rope to haul the 4-foot saw to the top.
A branch falls harmlessly to the ground next to the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) forest health management program …
Some Great Lakes watersheds sweating off the winter freeze are sending huge brown plumes of sediment into Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair.
But are these smudges, visible in satellite photographs, a sign of spring or a sign that something is wrong?
“It’s both,” said the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ John Matthews on the Lake Erie plume. “It’s normal, but it’s also a function of how we’ve affected stream channels in that watershed.”
Lake St. Clair’s plume got a recent boost from the worst flooding in southern Ontario in 20 years, …
Matthew Cimitile
Once seen as a region of endless water, the Great Lakes watershed is under stress thanks to inadequate water management, unrestrained growth and other pressures. Climate change stands only to make conditions worse, experts say, as increasingly thirsty neighbors look for additional water and changing weather harms quality and supply.
By Joe Vaillancourt
LANSING — Twenty years from now, petroleum gasoline may be obsolete. As you pump bio-diesel fuel into your brand-new Ford-GM roadster, you probably won’t think about where the fuel came from.
That’s all right — because Michigan government and business are already thinking about bio-diesel fuel, one aspect of green chemistry.
Green chemistry could bring vast economic benefits to Michigan while reducing waste and harmful exposure and developing better materials in everyday products, experts say.
Jeff Gillies, gilliesj@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
While many Michigan communities struggle with water problems, the state’s poorest city may still be sitting on 100-year-old wood water mains.
“If they’ve got the flu, you can imagine that we’ve got pneumonia,” said Marcus Robinson, president of Benton Harbor’s Consortium for Community Development.
By Matthew Cimitile, cimitile@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
Ohio, New York and Illinois are among a dozen states just awarded funds from the federal Department of Energy for environmental clean up.
The three Great Lakes states along with nine others are getting $6 billion in new funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The investment is expected to create thousands of jobs, federal officials announced Tuesday.
