It may come as something of a surprise...or probably not...but after almost two decades of a clean water agreement between Canada and the United States regarding the Great Lakes, a panel of researchers is urging the two nations to include HUMAN HEALTH as a factor in the agreement language.
I suppose we can see where this is progress if our original benchmark was seeing to it that our water doesn't burst into flames. Mission accomplished. Unless you're anywhere near hydrofracking.
Now let's focus on making the water not kill us, and stay a habitable place for wildlife. On that, we seem to be dropping the ball.
After about twenty years of progress fighting phosphorous levels and other pollutants on the Great Lakes, phosphorous levels are again on the rise.
Why is that a problem?
Because algae LOVES phosphorous.
Okay. So what?
Because TOXIC blue-green algae loves phosphorous...and it's TOXIC. To people. And other animals. It also creates oxygen depleted dead zones.
Why the rise in phosphorous?
Well....that's a good question.
See, the programs that used to figure that sort of thing are either gone or on the budgetary chopping block. Apparently after 20 years of progress many elected officials dusted off their hands and said "Done"
"We don't know where the phosphorous is coming from," Bill Bowerman, chair of the IJC's science advisory board and a wildlife ecologist at South Carolina's Clemson University, said during Wednesday's IJC news conference.
"Some of our monitoring programs that would allow us to understand this either are under threat or have disappeared over the past 15 years."
One theory is that farms, in an attempt to constantly increase yield, are using more and more potent fertilizers. Another theory is that aging septic and sewer systems are creating an increase in runoff.
But this is just a revisitation of the problems that vexed the Great Lakes in the 60s and 70's and created vast slimy algae blooms.
There are new and modern toxins entering the Great Lakes:
The biennial report, aimed at improving water quality in a lake system that contains 20 per cent of all fresh surface water on Earth, also highlighted problems with chemicals of "emerging concern." That includes veterinary and human pharmaceuticals, flame retardants and pthalates used to make plastic flexible.
Mmmm...pharmaceuticals.
That's the conservative version of universal health care! Turning the Great Lakes into a cure-all tonic.