This article by Tom Henry appeared in The Toledo Blade on April 22nd, 2019. There is also a five minute video of Markie Miller of the Toledoans for Safe Water addressing the United Nation embedded in the article.
She’s still numb and was definitely humbled by the experience of speaking before the United Nations.
She’s also eternally grateful for such an opportunity; a rarity for anyone from the Toledo area, activist or not.
Markie Miller is the Toledoans for Safe Water organizer most directly involved with the development of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights and the hard-fought-but-successful campaign to get it passed by voters at Toledo’s Feb. 26 special election. She told The Blade in a telephone interview from New York on Monday afternoon she was “still reeling” from the presentation she made shortly before 11 a.m. to the UN General Assembly.
That she was invited to do it on Earth Day made it extra special to her. She said she also was pleased to have done it as “part of the grassroots community instead of being part of an institution.”
During her 5:18-minute presentation, which can be viewed on YouTube, Ms. Miller, a Lambertville native who still lives there, recounted the confusion surrounding Toledo’s 2014 water crisis. Nearly 500,000 area residents were told not to drink, bathe, or touch their tap water the first weekend of August that year because a potentially deadly algal toxin called microcystin had breached the city’s Collins Park Water Treatment Plant and gotten into the regional distribution system. Microcystin has grown nearly every summer in western Lake Erie since 1995.
To read the rest of this article at its original source click please HERE.