A history-making flight of endangered whooping cranes could begin its trek over the Midwest soon. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach has the story:
Transcript
A historic flight of endangered whooping cranes could begin its trek over the Midwest soon. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach has the story.
A team of wildlife experts in central Wisconsin has been teaching some whooping crane chicks how to fly by using ultra-light aircraft. Now it’s time for at least eight of the birds to hopefully follow the planes to Florida. Pilot deke clark of the group operation migration says the pace of the flight will depend on the strength of the cranes each day.
“The birds will let you know. Pretty much the judgment will be made on how they stay with the aircraft and kind of formation they maintain.”
The cranes are expected to fly over Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, but could veer over adjoining states.
Scientists hope the birds will become the first migrating flock of whooping cranes in the Eastern United States. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Chuck Quirmbach reporting.
Lake Michigan beaches were closed more often this summer than ever before. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports, beach closings can translate into significant economic loss:
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Lake Michigan beaches were closed more often this summer than ever before. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports.
A report from the Lake Michigan Federation shows an all-time high of 600 beach closings in 2001. High levels of bacteria found in the water caused most of the closings. Federation director Cameron Davis says in addition to the environmental problems, the closings have an economic impact on the region:
“Take a look at a place like Chicago that gets 60 million visitors a year to the lakefront. And you get a beach closing Labor Day weekend or a fourth of July weekend. You’re looking at millions of people, some from around the world, that can’t visit the beaches here.”
Davis says the bacteria is getting into the water when heavy rains force wastewater and sewage carrying human and animal waste past treatment plants and into the lake. The Lake Michigan Federation is setting up a center to help citizens and community groups solve bacteria problems at beaches. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jonathan Ahl.
Lake Michigan had a record number of beach closings this year. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl has more:
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Lake Michigan had a record number of beach closings last year. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports.
The Lake Michigan Federation is reporting almost six hundred beach closings on Lake Michigan in 2001. That’s up from just over four hundred last year. Federation director Cameron Davis says most of the closings are due to wastewater carrying bacteria to the lakes when treatment plants are at capacity. He says the solution is to cut back on development near the lakes:
“We need to try to limit the amount of pavement that’s being laid down all across the region, so that rainwater naturally filters through the ground rather than getting shuttled off into a sewage treatment plant.”
Davis says the number of beach closings on Lake Michigan should actually be higher than his report shows. He says Michigan does a poor job testing for bacteria near beaches, and says Wisconsin’s numbers are excluding Sheboygan County where there have been problems in the past. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jonathan Ahl.
A lot of data that was once available on government websites is being removed because of concerns the information might be used by terrorists. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
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A lot of data that was once available on government websites is being removed because of concerns that the information might be used by terrorists. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports.
About ten years ago Congress required a lot of information about chemicals and hazardous wastes stored at local plants be made available to communities. Some of that information was put on the Internet. Other government websites gave public access to maps of gas and oil pipelines in the interest of open government. Much of that information has been removed in the weeks since the terrorist attacks on September 11th. Keith Harley is an attorney who represents communities and citizens who’ve often used the data in legal disputes. He says removing the information might be a good thing.
“It would be better for community safety and public health if” sites which are potential terrorist targets– information about those sites would not be broadly broadcast.”
While not on the Internet, much of the information is still available on paper by request.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
Sturgeon are one of the oldest vertebrates on earth. The giant fish have survived for more than 150 million years. But encroachment by humans, and in some cases poaching, have decimated the fish in many areas, including the Great Lakes. Now the sturgeon is on the brink of extinction. That’s why hundreds of scientists from around the world came to Oshkosh, Wisconsin recently. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Patty Murray reports, they came to witness a sturgeon success story:
Transcript
Sturgeon are one of the oldest vertebrates on earth. The giant fish have survived for more than one hundred fifty million years. But encroachments by humans, and in some cases, poaching, have decimated the fish in many areas including the Great Lakes. Now the sturgeon is near the brink of extinction. That’s why hundreds of scientists from around the world came to Oshkosh, Wisconsin recently. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Patty Murray reports, they came to witness a sturgeon success story.
The sturgeon is a really big fish. It can grow six feet long and weigh as much as two hundred pounds. Because of its size it faces few challenges from any other animal, except says Ron Bruch, from humans. Bruch is a fishery biologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. He says most of the twenty-five species of sturgeon found around the world are in trouble, including those living in the lakes here. Years ago, he says the Great Lakes used to be full of sturgeon, but European settlers didn’t like them because they tore up fishing nets.
“Nets were very expensive back then they didn’t have the fancy nylon twine and all the other equipment we have today. So these big fish would get into the nets and rip them up so they didn’t like sturgeon. So they’d just kill the sturgeon, stack them up just to get rid of them. Then they found out the fish had caviar and there was a market for caviar.”
And that meant the sturgeon began facing another threat. Today, a pint of caviar can bring as much as six hundred dollars. That’s enough money to bring out poachers.
(Sound of boat on river)
So with the sturgeon population in rapid decline, scientists are eager to find ways to save those fish that remain. That’s why many of them came to Wisconsin this summer. While most of the sturgeon population in the Great Lakes has long since disappeared, some of the fish still survive here. So scientists gathered on the banks of the Wolf River to watch as DNR wardens plucked a few of the big fish out of the water.
(Natural sounds)
Wisconsin’s Lake sturgeon population is considered to be the healthiest on earth. Sturgeon experts’ say that is because of a strong, two-pronged effort by state officials. First, they have a monitoring program. Many of the sturgeon are fitted with radio monitoring chips to keep track of how each fish is growing and where it is living.
(Sound of measuring, checking for chips)
Then, to make sure the fish remain safe, game wardens regularly patrol for poachers, and volunteers guard riverbanks during spawning season. That’s when the fish are the most vulnerable because they float close to the surface and can be easily speared. But despite these efforts, the state’s sturgeon population still holds a threatened status. Most of the fish live in the Wisconsin’s inland lakes and rivers, while very few remain in Lake Michigan, and it’s that fact which prompted a very unusual donation. An Italian count recently visited Wisconsin and learned of the fish’s decline, so he has donated two thousand dollars to study how to strengthen the population. The count’s money will pay researchers to go into Lake Michigan and Green Bay to see how many fish are left. They’ll also look at what obstacles may block restocking efforts.
Scientists hope what they learn in Lake Michigan can be applied to the rest of the Great Lakes. The money may also help fish elsewhere in the world. The count sent a team of Italian scientists to spend a week shadowing Wisconsin researchers. Darren McKenzie is an English scientist working with the Italians on preserving sturgeon in the Po River.
“Well I hope we can learn a few things about the techniques they use particularly with radio tracking and population issues. Because probably the Wisconsin lake sturgeon rehabilitation management thing, whatever it is called, is one of the best in the world for monitoring sturgeon population.”
For many of the foreign scientists, the importance of the sturgeon was brought home by a visit to a Northern Wisconsin Indian Reservation.
“Welcome to the Menominee tribal reservation. The way we look at it you’re people of the sturgeon just like we are-concerned about the sturgeon.”
For the Menominee, the sturgeon is more than just unusual looking and good tasting. The tribe’s relationship with the sturgeon goes back ten thousand years to the Menominee creation story. Before European settlers came along, the tribe relied on the fish for food and fuel. Then, in the 1890’s a dam went up downstream that stopped the sturgeon from swimming to a traditional spawning ground on Menominee land. Back then, tribal historian David Grignon says, the federal government would not let the Indians go off the reservation to spear sturgeon.
“It was denying us of a resource that we’d had for centuries. You know it was probably like the buffalo to the plains…. a way of life was gone, wouldn’t return anymore.”
But the fish are returning, since they can’t swim to the reservation anymore, the tribe is trucking them in. It is a long-term project. Sturgeon don’t mate until they’re at least twenty-five years old, so some tribal members won’t live long enough to know if their efforts have paid off. But if the tribe’s project and others like it are successful, then humans may claim credit for saving the fish once almost pushed to extinction. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Patty Murray in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Eleven million acres of prime farmland were lost to
urban sprawl in a 15 year period. Some small cities are embracing
the growth and helping developers circumvent so-called Smart Growth
restrictions on sprawl.
The U.S. has lost millions of acres of productive farmland in the last decade to urban sprawl. Researchers say state and county officials are seeing Smart Growth plans circumvented by politicians in small cities. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
The US has lost millions of acres of productive farmland in the last decade to urban sprawl. Researchers say state and county officials are seeing smart growth plans circumvented by politicians in small cities. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports.
Most states have passed legislation or are looking at doing so to reduce urban sprawl. Even some counties are working to restrict development to certain areas. But often developers approach small cities, promising increased tax revenues and infrastructure if the town annexes large areas of surrounding land for the developers. Rich Green is a geographer at Northern Illinois University. He says some small town officials don’t see past their own city limits.
“And in some respects, they may overlook the regional concerns to benefit their own territory, developers, shopping malls, retailers, playing one municipality off the other in terms of getting the best deal to locate.”
And so long debated plans to manage growth become nothing more than lines on a map, while natural areas and farmland are replaced by subdivisions and parking lots. Green says that’s led to eleven million acres of prime farmland being taken out of production in the fertile Midwest and East in a 15 year period due to urban sprawl. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
Eleven million acres of prime farmland were lost to
urban sprawl in a 15 year period. Some small cities are embracing
the growth and helping developers circumvent so-called Smart Growth
restrictions on sprawl.
Researchers have found that small towns hungry for new tax dollars are making it possible for developers to get around Smart Growth plans. Often the result is urban sprawl that paves over farmland and natural areas. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has the story:
Transcript
Researchers have found that small towns hungry for new tax dollars are making it possible for developers to get around Smart Growth Plans. Often the result is urban sprawl that paves over farmland and natural areas. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports.
Despite the best efforts of some politicians to slow down the pace of turning farmland into suburbia, the 2000 Census shows population growth is exploding at the edges of Metropolitan areas, and all those people need somewhere to live and shop. So, in the Midwest, often housing developments and shopping malls are built where corn or soybeans grew just the year before.
For example, Kane County, Illinois, as recently as the 1970’s was predominately farmland. Now with more and more people moving there, only about half the county is left for farming.
Randall Road cuts through the heart of the county, although housing developments and retail stores are starting to infringe on the country setting, on one side of the road you can still see rows of crops and pasture, and on the other side of Randall Road, it’s nearly solid shopping malls and subdivisions. But in the middle of all that development, there’s still one dairy farm. Mike Kenyon and his family still grow hay and corn, and milk cows here. But their fields are surrounded by three sprawling towns. Kenyon says Randall Road used to be the line where planners said urban sprawl would stop. They were so confident that they even said so in their planning document for the year 2020.
“And they drew a line in the county and they said ‘we want the growth to occur here and we want to maintain this as rural, as farms. Well, how did developers get around that? Well they go to a little village and they say ‘Well, we’ll put a big housing development over here. Please, annex us and this’ll be more revenue and they’ll even have a sewer system when we get done.’ So, that’s what happens; they kind of bribe the villages so they get around the 2020 plan.”
And that, Kenyon says, is what’s now happening on the other side of Randall Road where Kane County was supposed to remain rural. Kane County officials are trying to implement all kinds of programs to save the remaining farmland from urban sprawl, or at least keep urbanization to certain areas of the county. But at the town and village level, many local politicians see growth as nothing but good and are willing to expand their city limits to include developments. That’s because those developments help increase their tax revenue.
The story is not unique to the Chicago region. It’s being repeated throughout the Midwest and the Great Lakes, as well as across the United States.
So much so that millions, yes millions of acres of prime farmland in the U.S. have been lost in a little more than a decade. Rich Green is a geographer at Northern Illinois University. He’s been tracking the fringes of the ever-growing Chicago Metropolitan area. He’s been adding up just how much former cropland has been turned into suburban lawns and parking lots.
“What we found is this: the nation between 1982 and 1997, that’s a 15 year time period, lost about eleven million acres of prime farmland, cropland, to urban development.”
Green also found, perhaps coincidentally, that an identical amount of land, eleven million acres of rangeland was plowed up and put into crop production during the same period.
“What we’ve been looking at is losing the nation’s best farmland in places like Chicago and other metropolitan areas in the Midwest, and replacing it with marginal lands in the arid West which requires more inputs, particularly water, irrigation.”
Green says shifting farming to less productive and more environmentally damaging land might not be the intent of the small towns that want to grow, but that’s the apparent result.
Just off campus at Northern Illinois’ Social Sciences Research Institute, Director Harvey Smith says Midwest states such as Illinois should take the time to better learn and weigh the costs of continued urban sprawl.
“Economically, Illinois relies very, very heavily on its agriculture. And, it is also the case that a lot of the very rich farmland is in the northern tier of the state which is closest to the moving fringe of the suburbs.”
Many times government at a more regional level, such as at the county level, is struggling with balancing development and farmland preservation. Even though it’s something of a contradiction, Smith says the people who move to the suburbs’ fringes causing further urban sprawl, actually want to preserve some of the farmland.
“The fact is that many of the people who move into the suburbs, while they like the sort of scenic quality of a farm or two over the hill, aren’t in a position to stop the disappearance of the farms themselves. It requires cooperation between local and regional governmental agencies to make a real effort to protect these qualities that are likely to disappear if they don’t.”
For some towns, it’s too late to recover the rural character and small town charm they lost to development, but for those at the fringes of the sprawling large metro areas with adherence to Smart Growth planning, some planners believe there’s still the opportunity to preserve a little of the setting of the suburbs that drew so many people there in the first place.
Some environmentalists are concerned that the terrorist attacks on September 11th will hurt the environmental movement. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports:
Transcript
Some environmentalists are concerned that the terrorist attacks on September
11th will hurt the environmental movement. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports.
Tom Lowe is a professor of environmental management at Ball State University in
Munice, Indiana. He says the reaction to the attacks could lead to bad decisions that would devastate the environment down the road.
“If we continue to spoil the environment, the tragedy of 9-11 is going to be amplified many times by what is going to happen with the environmental impact of global warming and other kinds of problems.”
Lowe says one example is drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife refuge. He says national security interests may push for that now, even though it will be damaging in the long run. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jonathan Ahl.
Americans, often independent and splintered, learned on September 11th that – like it or not – we are tethered to our neighbors in ways we never imagined. As the world awaits the next phase of the U.S. response to the terrorist attack, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Julia King examines the ethical paradox of a just war:
Transcript
Americans, often independent and splintered, learned on September 11th that – like it or not, we are tethered to our neighbors in ways we never imagined. As the world awaits the next phase of the U.S. response to the terrorist attack, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Julia King examines the ethical paradox of a just war.
On one side of my home, there lives a jovial, white-haired grandpa who likes feeding birds and playing soccer with his granddaughters. A retired cop and staunch patriot, he plans to cheer out loud when the United States retaliates for the World Trade Center attack.
On the other side of my home, there lives a quiet, soft-spoken Mennonite couple. Thin, gentle people, they spend their time tending an organic garden and often share their tomatoes and flowers with my young daughter. They are pacifists, bracing themselves for the coming horrors of American warfare.
Sandwiched between committed Hawks and Doves, I’m lonely with my ambivalence.
Americans overwhelmingly say they support a military response. But how many of us answered the question with true contemplation, instead of simple reflex?
“My God,” we said as the buildings smoldered, “do something!” Our minds were made up before we even had time to think.
I both envy and mistrust such certainty. Some of my neighbors are as unyielding in their pacifism as others are in their wish to fight. Both sides are unwilling to consider that the answer might lie somewhere beyond the confines of their own firm beliefs. (Or maybe that there’s no answer at all.)
There are Americans who believe we can bomb Evil from the earth, while others believe that if we are just kind enough; Evil will wander off on its own, like a child without a playmate. And if we believe that our path — whether it be military action or inaction — offers the final solution, we seem to think we have no moral culpability, no blood on our own hands.
And yet we all must know by now, especially now, that with our convictions come ethical burdens. All we can do is follow the paths of our ideals to their logical ends and hope against all odds that they remain intact.
But they won’t, and that is the true horror of war. To fight means that innocent, precious human life will be lost. To refuse to fight means that innocent, precious human life will be lost. And either way, Evil will remain standing. Guilt clings to us all — like original sin — because none of us has been able to end hate.
This is why Americans weep. It’s why our nights are sleepless and our days are clouded with sadness. It’s why we hold to one another and light candles and why we have flooded our places of worship.
We know now what we never wanted to know: there is no such thing as innocence.
State health departments, emergency management agencies and doctors throughout the Great Lakes region are re-examining their emergency plans after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Officials say they need to increase their planning to prepare for a bioterrorist attack. Such an attack could mean the release of deadly diseases into a general population and officials say there’s no way the public health structure could handle such an outbreak right now. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tom Scheck has more:
Transcript
State health departments, emergency management agencies and doctors throughout the Great Lakes region are re-examining their emergency plans after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Officials say they need to increase their planning to prepare for a bioterrorist attack. Such an attack could mean the release of deadly diseases into a general population and officials say there’s no way the public health structure could handle such an outbreak right now. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tom Scheck reports…
As the nation tries to recover from the terrorist attacks in Pennsylvania, New York and Washington DC, infectious disease experts are using the tragedies to highlight that the nation’s skies and borders are not the only things the federal government needs to worry about. Those experts say the nation needs to also start preparing for a bioterrorist attack. The University of Minnesota’s Michael Osterholm is one of the leading experts on infectious disease and bioterrorism in the nation. He says it’s unlikely that a terrorist is equipped at this time to release a deadly disease like anthrax or small pox. But he says the events on Tuesday, September 11th have redefined terrorism in the United States. And he says the country is currently ill equipped to handle a biological outbreak.
“We’re a country right now, that if we have a slight increase of influenza cases in the wintertime we close down our hospitals because we have no excess capacity, we don’t have the health care workers or the beds. Now you tell me, given that backdrop, what it will mean when 250 or 300,000 or 400,000 people suddenly come down with smallpox or anthrax.”
Osterholm says if those biologic agents, or others like them are released in an American city, it could, over time, make thousands of people sick. And he says the highly contagious diseases would rapidly transfer from person to person, making it difficult for doctors and public health officials to contain the outbreak. On top of that, Osterholm says most such diseases wouldn’t show their symptoms for 3 or four days. He says that could stretch the state’s public health departments thin as they try to track down who’s infected and who’s not.
“We run much of public health in this country on what I would call the equivalent of running O’Hare air traffic control tower on tin cans and string. Yet that’s going to be the system that’s going to respond to bioterrorism.”
Osterholm and others are lobbying the federal government to allocate billions of dollars to improve the community response rates of public health and emergency personnel throughout the country. He also says the country needs to start stockpiling vaccines for smallpox and anthrax. Since the last human case of small pox was eradicated in 1979,
Osterholm says officials haven’t seen the need to continue vaccinating against the disease. Anthrax, on the other hand, has a vaccine but can also be treated with antibiotics if the disease is caught early enough.
The threat of a bioterrorist attack is not only worrying public health officials but also the emergency room doctors who will be treating infected patients. In addition to running the risk of contracting the same infections they’re treating, emergency room doctors say the threat of bioterrorism adds to an already busy schedule of treating cuts, gashes and gun shot wounds. Now physicians, like Pat Lilja who works at North Memorial Medical Center in the Twin Cities, say they have to watch out for rare illnesses as well; for instance, rare flu-like cases in the summer.
“You don’t know about it until people three or four or five days later suddenly start coming into hospitals sick. So you don’t have this big, all of a sudden, something’s going on. What you have to rely upon are your hospitals, primarily your emergency departments, to say we’ve seen twenty patients today all with this same problem and we usually see one a month.”
Lilja and other emergency room physicians’ say they’ve been conducting mock drills of biological and chemical disasters to prepare for any outbreaks. But he says the emergency plans at many hospitals are stuck on the dusty shelves of an administrator too worried about a declining budget rather than an event that they think could never occur. That worries Randall Larson, the director of the Anser Institute for Homeland Security in Virginia. He says hospitals need to increase their security and monitoring methods to make sure they catch any outbreak that does occur.
“We mad e a decision in this country that we didn’t want the federal government or the state government running our hospitals. They’re private corporations. Thirty percent of them are in the red today. Fifty percent of our teaching hospitals are in the red. They don’t have time to do the exercises and the training they need to be prepared to respond to a biological or a chemical attack. They got to just keep the doors open and stay out of the red.”
Larsen and others say the new federal office of Homeland Security needs to make bioterrorism a priority in the coming years. He says the FBI, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and doctors need to coordinate their efforts to make sure they respond quickly to a biological or chemical outbreak. He says the responsiveness is just as critical for those who work in public health as the quickness expected from a police officer or a firefighter. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tom Scheck.
