This article by Mike Ferner appeared on Counter Punch on May 15th, 2019.
A rare, hybrid environmental campaign is underway to save a great lake – in fact, a Great Lake – Erie.
That grand body of water, declared dead in the late 1960s experienced a textbook turnaround by the mid-80s, but is once again in critical condition every summer.
Just as citizens of a previous generation finally held polluters accountable, they’re beginning to mobilize once again. That “Second Battle for Lake Erie” in the late ‘60s and early 70s was necessitated by massive pollution from sewage treatment plants, industrial offal and phosphates in detergents. The current “Third Battle for Lake Erie” is also about eutrophication (premature aging) from excess nutrients, but this time coming nearly 90% from agriculture, particularly hog, poultry and dairy factories.
Using traditional street protests, picketing and public education, people are starting to demand elected officials and the EPA, created in large part because of the last Lake Erie crisis, do their jobs. But it doesn’t stop there – hence the hybrid nature of the campaign.
Not trusting that a stripped-down, rotting-from-the-top EPA can or will do the job this time, Toledoans are also showing what the modern democracy movement can do. Envisioned by the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD) through the 1990’s; turned into a grassroots organizing tool by Move to Amend (MTA); and imbued with the goal to protect the rights of nature by the Community Environmental and Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), that movement, judging by press accounts, has recently literally put the world on notice.
Read the rest of this article at its original source HERE.