Increasing temperatures may make Michigan summers feel more like Arkansas while those in Illinois may start to feel like Texas.

Some Great Lakes decision makers plan how to mitigate that impact.

The Great Lakes region was nicely bookended recently with recognition by the Society of Environmental Journalists of some of North America’s finest environmental reporting
The organization recognized Michael Hawthorne of the Chicago Tribune and Michelle Lalonde of the Montreal Gazette as outstanding environmental reporters. Both won second place for beat reporting in their publications’ circulation size.
Beat reporting is one tough category. You have to be a committed, aggressive reporter and a skillful writer. Perhaps the hardest part is that you need to be consistently good at covering diverse environmental issues. Here’s …

Detroit and Milwaukee are luring businesses with water. Could it boost economies?
Can discounted water rates and investment in water technologies transform the region?

myBeachCast app. Image: Limno Tech

A new smartphone app provides beach advisories and other environmental information in real time.
The myBeachCast app provides hourly updates from beach databases in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, said Christine Manninen, communications and web programming director at the Great Lakes Commission, the Ann Arbor-based agency that developed the widget.
Illinois will join soon.
The other four Great Lakes states will be added before next May when the second version of the app will be launched, she said.
The app also provides weather conditions and a five-day forecast and wave height …

It’s one thing to advocate support for the tough decisions that are required to mitigate climate change. And it’s quite another to make those decisions consistently across the board.

By Brian Bienkowski
Thousands of jobs, millions of dollars and a more stable climate are possible if Illinois aggressively pursues clean energy, according to a report released by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
The peer-reviewed report, dubbed “Bright Future for the Heartland,” predicts what would happen if Midwestern states reached two goals: produced 30 percent of its electricity supply from renewables by 2030; and reduced power consumption 2 percent every year starting in 2015. The goals came from policy recommendations that were …

They are deadly for aquatic life and take years of pollution to develop, yet dead zones can be created in a flash by bubbling nitrogen through a lake. Are they a solution for invading carp?

That little animation you just saw to the left of this text is pretty cool for a couple of reasons.
The first is for what it does rather simply.
The Upending the Basin logo is meant to communicate Echo’s desire to explore journalism and the Great Lakes environment from nontraditional points of view.
But it is surprising how few people  recognize the Great Lakes basin when you stand a static image on its ear like this.
Lifelong Michigan residents are baffled when they see their state’s mitten in anything but an  upright position.
“That’s just …

With more than 10,000 miles of coastal, inland and island shorelines, the Great Lakes have the most freshwater access in the world — at least, in theory.

A western Michigan court case embodies the abiding conflict between private property owners and the public over rights to Great Lakes shorelines at road ends.