Campaigning on Great Lakes Cleanup

Cleaning up the Great Lakes has become part of the environment platform for at least one party in Canada’s national election campaign. Canadian Prime minister Paul Martin’s liberals are promising to spend one billion dollars toward cleaning up the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk reports:

Transcript

Cleaning up the Great Lakes has become part of the environment
platform for at least one party in Canada’s national election campaign.
Canadian Prime minister Paul Martin’s liberals are promising to spend
one billion dollars toward cleaning up the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence
Seaway. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk reports:


Paul Martin says the pledge is another aspect of the Liberal party’s green
plan. Martin says the one billion dollars would be spent over ten years in
an effort to clean up toxic hot spots along the world’s largest freshwater
ecosystem.


“By taking action we will better protect our water and our wildlife, we’ll
make our waterfronts more vibrant and healthy, and we will ensure that
the revitalization of these ecosystems stands out as our collective
legacy.”


Martin says half the money, about five hundred million dollars, would be
earmarked for sites that have been used for decades as a dump for
industrial and household waste. Some of the money would also go to
assessing ecological threats posed by pharmaceuticals and other
pollutants, and researching the effects of human action on these
ecosystems.


For the GLRC, I’m Dan Karpenchuk.

Related Links

Kids Build Loon Nests

The haunting call of the Common Loon has become a symbol of wild northern lakes. But as homes, marinas, and resorts are built on these lakes, the loons are losing the places where they like to nest. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports, some people are hoping artificial nests might help:

Transcript

The haunting call of the Common Loon has become a symbol of wild
northern lakes. But as homes, marinas, and resorts are built on these
lakes, the loons are losing the places where they like to nest. As the
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports, some people are
hoping artificial nests might help:


The Common Loon doesn’t move around well on land, so they like to nest as
close to the water as possible. But this makes them vulnerable to being pushed
out by development and washed out by boat wakes and floods.


Dan Truscott of Ducks Unlimited recently helped a group of elementary school kids build
floating nest platforms out of PVC pipes and Styrofoam for loons in northern Michigan. Truscott
got started making artificial nesting platforms after he saw what happened to a pair of loons on a
lake near his home.


“They had nested and we had a large rainfall and the dam couldn’t keep up with the water so the
nests got washed out, and so I went home and built one and put it out and it
worked.”


Loon protection groups in the Northeast and the Great Lakes regions
promote the use of these platforms as one tool to help improve the breeding success
of the birds.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tamar Charney.