Commentary – Love Thy Pet

Recent challenges to the ingredients in commercial pet food have more than pet owners concerned. A whole new debate is brewing over how Americans treat their pets. But Great Lakes Radio Consortium Commentator Lisa Bartel says how we treat others—human or non-human—says more about who we are as people than we realize:

Commentary – Toilet Trade

The falling Canadian dollar created an enticing market for cross-border shoppers coming in from the U.S. And as Great Lakes Radio Consortium Commentator Suzanne Elston discovered, there’s one item in particular that they are eager to flush out:

Superfund Remediation – The Next Step

Just outside the city of Rochester, New York is one of nearly a thousand inactive hazardous waste sites tagged by that state’s officials for cleanup under New York’s Environmental Superfund Program. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Bud Lowell has been following New York’s efforts to clean up this site and has this report:

Marsh Monitoring Program

Marshes and other wetlands across the Great Lakes region are disappearing. Others are polluted. And that means trouble for the animals that live in them, especially birds and frogs. The four-year-old Marsh Monitoring Program based in Ontario uses hundreds of volunteers across the region to keep track of wildlife in wetland areas. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Andy Robins reports:

Mass Balance Study Underway

For the past four years, scientists have been hard at work around Lake Michigan, taking hundreds of water, sediment, and air samples and analyzing the data. It’s part of a study like no other—the largest of it’s kind. And the results are expected to have world-wide applications. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports: