Production an distribution of City Club forums and ideastream public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black fond of greater Cleveland, Inc.. Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, August 9th and I'm Kyle Drive, as well as CEO of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.

We are proud.

Sponsors of today' State of the Great Lakes Forum and the City Club's Sustainable Northeast Ohio series.

Freshwater is one of Earth's most precious resources, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Are Earth's freshwater habitats.

Rivers, streams, wetlands, aquifers and lakes.

How is an incredible proportion of the world's biodiversity?

More than 10% of all known animals and 50% of all known fish species call our freshwater habitats home.

As the world's leading conservation organization, the World Wildlife Fund, works in nearly 100 countries to conserve nature and reduce the most pressing threats to biodiversity.

This includes safeguardin the world's freshwater resources and landscapes to support thi diversity and human livelihoods.

Today, I'm happy to introduce our distinguished guest, Jeff Opperman, who serves as global lead scientist for Freshwater for the Fund.

Jeff works across the network and with a range of partners, leveraging his more than 20 years of experience to direct research that strengthens conservatio strategies and integrate science into freshwater programs and projects.

Jeff's expertize in aquatic ecology, water management and floodplain restoration has driven his development of new scientific frameworks to applied conservation.

And he quite literally wrote the book.

The book is called Floodplains, and it's one word which we're so happy about.

It's not two words Opperman has written for a number of publications, including The New York Times and is currentl a regular contributor to Forbes.

We're so fortunate to have Jeff working right here in our own backyard in Chagrin Falls.

The mighty chagrin River watershed, as he is uniquely poised to share with us toda the importance of our freshwater ecosystem to regions like Northeast Ohio.

So if you have a question, which I know you will for today's speaker, you can text it to 33054157943305415794.

And City Club staff will try to work it int the second half of our program.

So members and friend of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Jeff Opperman.

Come on up, Jeff.

Okay.

Thank you.

Very much.

Well, thanks for that great introduction.

And I was just telling Dan multiple story and he encouraged me to tell it.

So I'll start with this hopefully very quick story.

So nine and a half years ago, I was sitting in the previous city club at lunch with a with a speech in my pocket, wondering if I was going to give it.

And that was because my boss at the time, Mark Karasick, who grew up in Cleveland and was the CEO of the Nature Conservancy was supposed to be the speaker, but his plane had bee his flight have been canceled.

He was delayed.

They didn't know if they'd he'd make it.

And at 7:00 this morning they asked me to write a speech and be ready to go.

And so I came I was ready to go.

I was totally excited and scared.

And I didn't know if I was disappoint did or relieved when he walked in the door.

But he walked in the door.

So I didn't give the speech, but I actually and I'm realizing it.

I started with the same story that I'm about to start with.

So that's full circle here.

But today I'm going to tell a big story about how water flow through the history of Cleveland and this region.

It's a story that starts with abundance and optimism, incredible economic growth, but it's a story that then descends into degradation, pollution, literal fire and the most unfortunate cameo ever in Time magazine, a story that then rises agai to become quite possibly a model for the rest of the worl and the characters in the story.

Cleveland.

Lake Erie.

The Cuyahoga River.

They're not always on the same page, but they're like a family.

They tend to rise and fall together because they're always, always connected.

But before that big story, I have to tell you a fish tale.

I was trained as a freshwater scientist in California studying salmon habitat, but my meandering path to those wild western rivers started right here in northeast Ohio.

In my backyard, there wa a creek called Sulfur Springs, which is a tributary of the Chagrin River, which of course flows into the Great Lakes.

As a kid, I slipped down to that creek and I kind of crab walk through a culvert under a road into the south shore green metroparks, and I'd catch crayfish and salamanders.

After 17 years away in my mid-thirties, I returned here to Northeast Ohio, and my family moved into a house in Chagrin Falls, complete with its own backyar tributary to the Chagrin River.

So once I was back, those seasonal changes, the smells and the sounds they felt at once really like a distant memory, but so intensely familiar, kind of like stumbling across a long forgotten but cherished book from childhood.

But compared to California, with its soaring peaks and its giant trees, it fel comfortably familiar, like tame.

But that was before the steelhead came to town on a cool but sun drenched Saturday morning in March, I took a hike to the backyard creek with my kids who are sitting right up there in there a whole lot bigger than in the story.

As we approach the long flat glide in the stream, I saw a dark shape, dark.

And I said, What the what?

Is that an otter?

I could not think of anything else that could be that big in this stream.

It darted again.

But now I was looking right at it and I could see a V-shaped wick cutting through the water and recognition click.

I'd seen that before when I'd seen salmon surging through the shallows of the California River, but I still struggled to reconcile that fish with this creek.

It seemed as logical is seeing a howler monkey swinging from the oak by our deck.

Another step.

Another click of realization.

I said, Steelhead kids.

There are steelhead in our creek.

And now I remember just a year before a huge flood had destroyed a century old mill dam that had been the primary barrier for steelhead to move up that dam.

Gates Mills was the primary barrier preventing steelhead from moving from Lake Erie up the chagrin River.

And now just to clarify steelhead are basically rainbow trou that live the life of a salmon.

They're born in a stream.

They get big in an ocea or in this case, a great lake.

And then they return to where they were to their birthplace when that dam had blown out.

I told my kids, like you know, the steelhead are good people get all the wa to the falls of Chagrin Falls.

But I never though they'd make it to our backyard because even though it is a tributary, its connection to the river was 600 foot culvert buried underground under an apartment complex.

So these wer big fish nearly three feet long.

And it must have been a really high flow with a rainstorm the week before that ha given them the space to come up.

But now the watery habitat was dropping.

It had been dry, the water was dropping around them, exposing them, exposing these huge bodies in this creek.

Four of them huddled together where there was some roots that draped into the stream.

And one of them was trying to hide behind a rock in the middle of the creek.

He was so comically out of proportion with his surroundings.

He looked like a Great Dane riding in a mini Cooper, but they weren't going to last long as the water dropped.

And so the kids begged me to rescue them.

We got a net in a five gallon bucket and the great steelhead rescue was on.

I waded into the deepest part of the pool.

I flushed one of those fish upstream and my son Luca pounced with the net.

The first fish we caught was shockingly beautiful.

It had a blaze of red shot through a constellation of black spots on its glistening flank.

As I as I transferred it from the net to the bucket, I struggle to hold on to its £10 of muscle.

I awkwardly carried that sloshing bucket to the chagrin and dropped it into that much bigger channel, repeating the task for more times.

We sat on the river's bank, exhausted and thrilled, and I told the kids it must have been really unusual conditions that allowed that to happen.

I said, we just experienced a wonderful but rare gift.

The next week there were 25, and so this tim we let nature take its course.

But for a few weeks, the entire neighborhood was captivated.

The kids didn't care that steelhead trout aren't native to the Great Lakes, and for that matter, neither did I.

When ambassadors from the wild come calling to delight your kids and really to delight me, you don't want to get bogged down in the ecological fine print, but let's take a look at that fine print.

How did we get to where we are today?

With huge fish native to the Pacific Ocean, swimming up a tributary to a midwestern lake, par of the biggest freshwater system in the world.

And what do steelhead in our backyard tell us about the state of the Great Lakes?

Well, first, the steelhead encapsulate much of the trajectory o the Great Lakes as an ecosystem, one that's gone from exceptional highs of productivity and diversity to shocking lows of degradation and decline, and then a recovery that was surprisingly rapid but not exactly natural, a recover that was really highly managed and a recovery that remains uncertain.

Centuries ago, the lakes were phenomenally productive for fish.

There were massive lake trout, huge schools of whitefish.

Early settlers reported spawning runs of sturgeon, surging up the tributaries that come from Lake Erie.

But beginning in the 19th century and then accelerating the 20th, overfishing, pollution, the draining of the wetlands along the lake the damming of the tributaries that fish needed for spawning, they all took their toll.

Then the completion of the well and canal allowed connections between the ocean and Lake Erie and the lakes above it.

And so sea lampre and that's a serpent like fish that latches on and sucks the blood of other fish.

They made it to the lakes and they nearly finished off the lake trout, the small marine fish called Alewife.

They're a type of herring.

They made it to Lake Erie and the rest of the lakes.

They basically adapted to a freshwater lifestyle and their populations boomed, but they had a boom and a bust.

So their massive die offs of fish and they would collect in huge mound of stinking fish on the beaches.

So the solution fisheries agencies began stocking the lakes with steelhead and Chinook and Coho salmon.

These are specie native to the West Coast and the West Coast, rivers and ocean.

But they could fill the niche left by the lake trout.

They could keep the alewife populations in control, and they'd be great for sport fishing, too.

And now, decades later, salmon and steelhead are fully part of the Great Lakes ecosystem, and they're key components of a fishery spanning recreational, commercial and tribal that collectively is worth more than 7 billion a year and supports more than 75,000 jobs.

So you se those backyard steelhead weren't really ambassadors of the wild, they were ambassadors of the Anthropocene, which is that new era that many scientists say we're living in, where people themselves have become the dominant forcing environmental mechanism.

Another concep that those steelhead represent is the concept of connectivity.

Now that could be a hydrological or ecological concept.

For example, the Steelhead could only show up in our backyard once river connectivit had been restored by that storm blowing out a century old mill dam.

But connectivity can also encompass economic, emotional and cultural bonds.

And those steelhead really represent the deep connectivity that people have with water.

In fact, the connectivity betwee Cleveland and its water systems is the essential and constan theme to this region's history.

It's so essential that the state of the Great Lakes is in many ways simultaneously the state of Cleveland or the state of any of the other cities or communities around this vast freshwater system.

So let's take a quick tour of how Cleveland's waterways are connected to its history and how they've risen and fallen in parallel.

For centuries befor this area was called Cleveland, the Erie people lived along the shores of the lake that would once, someday come to bear their name.

They and the other tribes depended on the lake, along with the lakes, the tributary rivers and the marshes for food, catch fish, freshwater mussels, waterfowl.

And just a few weeks ago, on July 22nd, we marked Cleveland's birthday, 228 years after the moment when Moses Cleveland, not far from where we are today, proclaimed, I divine that this spot wher I stand with a beautiful, plain covered with luxuriant fores growth, with a river to the west and Lake Erie to the north is a favorable site for a city.

The city's growth accelerated dramatically in the early 1800s after the completion of canals first the Erie Canal and then the Ohio and Erie Canal.

Together, those canals connecte New York City with New Orleans by boat, with Lake Erie as the hub in a in a set of spokes of economic connectivity in Cleveland was the mos important port and shipbuilding part of that system.

This was a time when the only other option for moving goods and people around the country was by wagon over terrible roads.

So powere by this connectivity of water, the very young state of Ohio quickly became one of the most prosperous states in the country.

The canals and the Great Lakes shipping industry kickstarted manufacturing in Cleveland and the river and lake provided an endless supply of water to fuel industrial processes, cooling water, power itsel and, of course, waste disposal.

And spoiler alert, that last one is going to come to be a bit of a flash point in Cleveland's history.

But long before that notorious events, Cleveland had become the fifth largest city in the country by population and truly one of th wealthiest cities in the world.

At that time that lofty status was built on a foundation of water resources that were underpinning manufacturing productivity.

But for decades, all the associated water and air pollutio that came from that productivity was simply viewed as an unfortunate byproduct of a hard working, successful city.

In fact, in some ways it wa viewed as a marker of success.

But the world was rapidly changing.

And by the 1960s, river and lakes, befouled with waste, were no longer accepted as as byproducts of success.

They in the blink of a cultural eye, they had become the markers of failure.

So many of you here know that the famous 196 fire in the Cuyahoga was not the first fire, in fact, had been about a dozen previous fires.

And it was not close to being the biggest or the most damaging fire.

But that fire, the unlucky 13th, was the one that caught the nation's attention.

And for the next 50 years basically, my whole lifetime has indelibly connected Clevelan to the image of a burning river.

Why did that enduring, enduring connection happen?

Why the 13th fire and why Cleveland?

After all, many other cities had experienced river fires, including Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Buffalo and Philadelphia.

Well, a few months after the June 1969 fire, Time magazine was launching a new section on the environment for its magazine, and the first editio of that new environment section was called Our Ecological Crisis, and they were looking for a sufficiently provocative story to really, you know, hit hit the mark and a river catching fire certainly fit the bill.

And even though it had been months before, because the fire in 1969 was relatively modest, it had been put out before any photographer got there.

There were no photos of the fire.

So Time magazine grabbed a 1952 photo and ran the article.

It just so happened that that issue in August was one week after the moon landing, and it was the same week as the fatal accident at Chappaquiddick.

And Teddy Kennedy was on the cover.

And so it just so happened that that became the highest selling issue in Time magazine's history.

And so 173 years after Moses Cleveland celebrated the beaut of the Cuyahoga and Lake Erie, and because of a story that only became national, national because of a series of quirks and timing and a story that was made vivid, if maybe deceptively real, by a 17 year old photo.

Millions of Americans open Tim magazine and got re-introduced to Cleveland as the city where the river burns.

An unlucky 13th fire, indeed.

Oh, and not to be outdone by its weekly rival, Newsweek had proclaime that Lake Erie was the Dead Sea.

So water had underpinned Cleveland's phenomenal growth and success for a century.

But now suddenly wate had become the defining symbol in the image of Cleveland as a failure.

So the fire and the dead lake represent rock bottom in that connection betwee Cleveland and its water systems.

And that's becaus the connection was so one sided.

It was such a classic case of of an exploitative or extractive relationship.

But when you hit rock bottom you push up towards the light.

And so, again what was notable about that 1960 fire was not that it was the first time that the river had burned or the fifth or the 10th.

It was it was the last time the river burned.

And in fact, rock bottom for the Cuyahoga was probably a decade before local leaders and agencies were already working to improve conditions in the lake and the river.

But it takes some time to turn around a system that that's polluted.

And so even though things are moving in the right direction the river decided to catch fire just one more time for old times sake.

So that 69 fire is often hailed as the catalyst of the Environmental Protection Act, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act.

And the narrative generally holds that it was that federal response that compelled and drove Cleveland to clean up its waterways.

And those were crucial, no doubt, particularly a huge infusion of federal funding.

But Jonathan Adler, he's a law professor here at Case Western, has documented how efforts to to begin cleaning local efforts to begi cleaning up the lake and river were beginning well before the federal effort and in fact, before the fire.

Why were things moving in th right direction before the fire?

Well, two years before the fire, something else remarkable had happened in Cleveland, something that rather tha the fire really should have come come to be the defining moment for the city.

In that era, Cleveland became the first major American city to elect a black mayor.

And while Carl Stokes is remembered for a lot of things, I don't think he gets enough credit for his environmental vision.

While he was campaigning, he emphasized that environmental recovery was essential to the city's recovery, and he was way ahead of his time on several issues.

First, he anticipated the need for Cleveland to diversify beyond manufacturing to be a service oriented economy, one that featured thriving neighborhoods with recreational amenities to attract residents, he said Cleveland was moving from an industrial era to the, quote, Human Resources era, and a clean environment was central to his vision.

He pledged to restore Lake Erie to, quote, the valuable recreational asset that it should be.

So in his recognitio of this fundamental connection between a city success and its environmental health, he was way ahead of his time.

Second, he recognized that it was Cleveland's low income neighborhoods that bore the brunt the burde of the air and water pollution.

Previewing the environmenta justice movement of the 1980s, he was emphasizing that it was unfair that pollution was taking thi unacceptable toll on the health and well-being of these neighborhoods.

So decades before we using terms like environmental racism, he was diagnosing those problems and offering solutions.

In summary, Stoke Stokes recognized this essential connection between Cleveland and its environment, and he knew that to provide a healthy future city, that connection had to be two way.

It had to be extraction and investment.

And he also knew that all of Cleveland needed benefit from that healthy connection.

He wasn't just a visionary.

He put political capital behind his vision.

In 1968, he championed $100 million bond to tackle water pollution.

Cleveland voters passed it by a 2 to 1 margin.

So let's jump forward.

Both the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie have made dramatic progress since the 1960s through a combination of federal laws and funding alongside local efforts, including the creation of the agency that sponsors today's forum, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, who now has one of the most brilliant social media people out there.

If you haven't seen, you really should follow John or the the regional sewer district on Twitter, Instagram, everywhere.

So clearl we forge stronger, more balanced connections between Cleveland and its water systems.

However, this is not the end of the story.

Some old challenges remain and new ones keep emerging.

I'll get to those in a moment.

But for now let's broaden out from northern Ohio out to the global significance of the Great Lakes recovery.

Global significance, because the Great Lakes are significant in their own right globally, but also for the lesson that they can teach freshwater conservation around the world.

I'll start with the superlatives that many of you know, the Great Lakes hold 20% o the world's surface freshwater, and they're perhaps the largest freshwater ecosystem on the planet.

The lakes provide drinking water for 40 million people across eight states and two provinces in Canada.

They supply water to the people and industry in a region that has an annual GDP, gros domestic product of $6 trillion.

That, if it were its own country, would be the third largest economy in the world.

Within these superlatives, Lake Erie has some interesting distinctions within all that water.

Lake Erie only ha 2% of the Great Lakes water, but it supports more than 50% of the fish productivity.

Why is that?

Because the lake is by far Lake Erie is by far the shallowest, warmest and most productive of the lakes.

But those assets are also vulnerabilities, as I'll touch on in a second.

Back to the big picture, the crash of the Great Lakes ecosystems is basically a preview of what's happening now all around the world.

At WWF, every two years we released the Living Planet Reports, which features something calle the Living Planet Index or LPI.

The Living Planet Index tracks the status of 30,000 populations of vertebrates all over the worl mammals, birds, fish, reptiles.

Think of it as a global index fund for nature and the way a index fund track the general status of a market.

The LPI tracks the general status of Wildlife around the world.

And that general status is sobering.

Since 1970, basically my lifetime and the time since the Cuyahoga Fire, the LPI has declined by about 70%.

And that overall decline is being dragged down by freshwater populations because the freshwater specifi LBI has declined by nearly 85%.

So in this index, the places where wildlife populations are recovering, like the Great Lakes, are being numerically overwhelmed by the places where they're declining.

And the global decline of freshwater ecosystems is du to the same lists that affected the Great Lakes over harvesting invasive species, the damming of rivers, the draining of wetlands and, of course, pollution.

Just in the past decade, rivers in Chin and India have joined Cuyahoga on that ignominious list o waterways that have caught fire.

But can freshwater, wildlife and these other places also recover?

So can the Great Lakes also be a preview of what could happen around the world?

At WWF we talk about bending the curve, and what we mean by that is if you look at the LPA in the graph it's this long, steady arc down.

What we need to do is stop the decline, hold the lin and bend the curve back upward.

A few years ago, I worked wit a team of scientists to develop an emergency recovery plan for freshwater biodiversity, a six part plan to bend the curve for freshwate systems and wildlife globally.

We wanted the plan to be grounded and realistic, not a set of academic recommendations.

So for each of the six components, we provided a real world example of success.

Well, the Great Lakes can offer an example for each of them.

Most notably, of course, the improvements in water quality, but also replacing overharvesting with sustainable fisheries management.

Removing dams to restore free flowin rivers and river connectivity.

Protecting and restoring wetlands focused management to reduc the effects of invasive species.

Always a challenge and working to prevent further and further invasions such as the huge efforts to keep the Asian carp out.

Although I just heard that now the alligators are here.

So I don't know if you know that, but.

But if the carp get here, at lea The Cuyahoga River could serve as a flagship for bending the curve sections of the river that literally had zero.

Individual fish now have more than 40 specie of fish, including many species that are associated with good water quality.

Ohio also ranks among the leaders in states that are moving, removing obsolete dams to restore free flowing rivers, including five dam removals on the Cuyahoga.

Only one remain the Gorge Dam in Cuyahoga Falls, and that's scheduled to come out in the next couple of years.

And when it does, it will complete the river's transformation from flaming to free flowing.

So much of Mayor Stokes vision about environmental amenities has come to pass.

Cleveland' Lake and River are now assets, vibrant urban ecosystems have sprung up alongside restored natural ecosystems.

Restaurants and Boathouses lined the Cuyahoga ami a growing downtown population.

Lake Erie fisheries generate more than $1,000,000,000 of economic activity per year from northern Ohio.

In Cuyahoga Falls, the dam removal there revealed rapids that now are the place for an amazing kayak race.

So today and today, Cleveland has another young mayor who echoes Stokes themes that to thrive, cities must invest in environmental amenities and to make sure tha those benefit all in Cleveland.

Mayor Bibb has pu the connection between Cleveland and its water resources as a centerpiece of his administration, ensuring that the connection between people and nature is available to all, all neighborhoods, not just the high profile riverfront and lakefront will continue to be a challenge.

But there are some promising signs.

The Western Reserve Land Conservancy protects natural areas across northeast Ohio.

That's what land trusts have typically done, but now it combines that with projects to restore urban green spaces, which is aligning with that vision that environmental protection restoration needs to serve everyone, not just the suburbs.

Similarly, while suburban people have long had close access to the metro parks with that emerald necklace, the proliferation of trails from the turnpike I'm sorry, the towpath Trail along the Cuyahoga will benefit neighborhoods that have lacked opportunities to get out into nature.

And the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District is looking how to build nature based solutions.

Put simply, that's using ecosystems and vegetation and greenspace to help control flooding.

They're looking how to combine nature based solutions with giving neighborhoods access to nature and reducing heat stress.

So as I noted earlier, there's a lot of successes here, but big challenges loom on the horizon.

While many of the local connections between cities and their water resources are becoming healthier, we're now seeing the perils of unhealthy global connections coming into play.

The unhealthy connection of ho we move fish and other species all around the world to mix dangerously in ecosystems.

And how the whole world has been pumping out greenhouse gases.

Admittedly, with Cleveland and other industrial powerhouses, at least initially in the lead in that in that process, these unhealthy global connections now threaten to undo these fairly nascent, healthy local connections that we've been rebuilding.

Harmfu algal blooms are happening now with increasing frequency and severity, and climate change could make those worse, largely because Lake Erie is is the most vulnerable to these because it's the most shallow, it's the warmest and most productive.

So all those same thing that turbocharge fish production can also turbocharge algal production.

I remember seeing in a conference, a national conference in 201 and the speaker put up an image of an unnaturally green lake and a boat, kind of cutting a V through that lake.

And of course, it was Lake Erie.

It was during that time when a huge algal bloom had shut down Toledo's water supply for three days.

And I sat there thinking, really, Lake Erie gets, what, 20, 30 years of being the good story?

And now it's back to being the image, the national image of failure between people and water.

It's it shows how tenuous things can be.

So that image and the risk of these harmful alga blooms illustrates the paradox.

Although the Great Lakes are indeed positioned to be more resilient to climate change, after all, being adjacent to 20% of the world's freshwate does make us a climate refuge.

But for many of the things we care about, we are in the same boat as the rest of the world, and that we all need there to be a global healing in the connection between people and nature.

Otherwise, at a planetary scale.

Otherwise, we're going to kee seeing these negative impacts.

And maybe this week reflects that we can talk.

I'm sure people want to talk about that.

But this week's been a pretty rough one in term of storms and floods and such.

And so we'll take bigger and bigger risks with these things that we care about unless we have that healing.

And of course, our country has a pivotal role in that global healing.

And as citizens and voters, we can do our part.

So the Burning River jokes, although they haven't fully faded away, we are moving past water as a symbol of failure for Cleveland.

And if we keep moving forward, it's clear that water clean, healthy, abundant, supporting ecosystems, recreation and industry, that water can once again underpin Cleveland's success.

A close with the last reflection on connectivity.

How rivers how rivers in nature overall can inspire strong emotional and psychological connections between people and place.

They say, you can never go home again, and also that you can't step in the same river twice.

I know what those phrases are trying to say, but I think that you can.

When I moved back to Northeast Ohio 18 years ago, there were lots of familiar things I rediscovered.

But one thing that really struck me about how intensely familiar it was was the smell of the Chagri River when it was flowing high.

It was the same river, that same smell from when I was little.

And I know that the word smell might have negative connotations, like, I mean, stink, but I really don't.

I mean, smel like when you're smelling a wine and just like wine it's a little hard to describe what you're smelling.

So you have to use these evocative and symbolic words.

So for the chagrin, I smelled moss and froth and foam.

I smelled hints of leaves swirling in eddies.

I smelled the woods, but in liquid flowing form and th intensity of that smell memory made me realize that I'd imprinted on the chagrin, just like those steelhead, because they use the smell of water to imprint on a river and a watershed so that they can find their way back home.

So for too long, the watersheds of our region weren't imprinting people.

In fact, they were potentially sending people away with either the real or symbolic smell of a burning river, a dying lake, and pollution.

The state of our Great Lakes and rivers is a huge part of the state of our city and region.

The current trajectory for those water systems represents a turning point in our connection with water and with nature more broadly.

And their recent history represents the full spectrum of possibility of those connections from one sided and unhealthy to economic, cultural and emotional connections that we can invest in.

Because when we invest in those watery resources, they in tur make our communities stronger.

There's been great progress but challenges and work remain to ensure that our lakes and rivers make this a place that people will imprint on a place that they'll call home or come back home to.

Thank you.

We are about to begin the audience Q&A for our live stream and radi audience or those just joining.

I'm Cynthia Connelly, director of programing here at the City Club.

Today we are joined by Jeff Opperman, global freshwater lead scientist at the World Wildlife Fund as part of our annual state of the Great Lakes.

We welcome questions from everyone city club members, guests and those joining via our live stream at City Club Dawg or Radio broadcast at 89 seven WKSU Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for our speaker, please text it to 3305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And City Club staff will try your best to work it into the program.

Maybe we have a first question.

Yes.

I'm Bob Heat of the Cleveland Water Alliance.

And first of all, I want to congratulate you on a wonderful, upbeat, very well-researched talk.

In fact, maybe it's too upbeat where, you know, we're going to attract a lot of people here into this region because of the availability of the freshwater resources.

So I'm wondering, what would you suggest that we need to pay attention to in terms of proactively addressing the increase in population that I think is inevitable.

Thank you.

Great.

Well, thanks for that and great question.

And I would have to say I'd b a very hobbyist urban planner.

I do like to think about it.

And, you know, there's probably people here who could answer that question better.

I mean, certainly things like transit oriented development.

And it's it's really heartening to see the demand for downtown housing and the you know, a lot of construction of of apartment buildings, a lot of conversion of apartment buildings, a lot of demand for people to live in walkable areas.

And I think there's been some early movements, including in some of the first ring suburbs, to build transit oriented development.

And that would be a great way.

I mean, that's these Great Lakes cities have room.

Cleveland had a population within the boundaries of Cleveland of 950,000.

We I don't know if we ever had a million.

We got so close to a million.

I think sometime in the fifties.

But now within the boundary population I think is just under 400,000.

So there's room with really development to give a lot of people access to that urban, walkable, thriving lifestyle.

But again, I'm not an urban planner, but that would be something that seems to make sense.

I wonder if you could comment on the solutions to the algal bloom bloom problem.

And one of the specific issues that I think the state of Ohio is ignoring is the combined agricultural feeding operations, otherwise known as CFOs, and wondered what your and your organization thoughts are on that topic.

Yeah.

So I work for WWF and we, we, we actually not active in Ohio or the or the Great Lakes or of us i not active in the Great Lakes.

I used to work for the Nature Conservancy, which is very active.

And I know that the health of Lake Erie is one of their top priorities.

And, yo know, I know there's H2O, Ohio.

They have a for our program really focused on how fertilizer is being managed because it's so close.

The intense animal feedlots and their waste is a big part of the nutrient loading in Lake Erie.

And then there's just the broade agricultural land use, the crops and how fertilizer those are applied.

And so there's movement towards, you know, ensuring that farmers are applying the right fertilizer at the right time at in the right amounts and the right type of fertilizer, all that, the four RS.

And, you know, if you do that well, they'll actually save a lot of mone by using much less fertilizer.

And less of it will be running into Lake.

But I'm not probably the best person to talk about the policies for for CFOs or that just other than then we clearly have to make some decisions about how land use is affecting our freshwater resources and that we had a couple of decades of succes and now we've got real challenge with the increased phosphorus loading.

And it's coming at a time where climate change is driving more intense rainfalls, which flushes it out, and warmer conditions in the summer both of those making it worse.

So, you know, we don't have time to lose, too, to get on top of it.

So we have a text question.

Water quality has been making headlines lately, in part due to the Paris Olympics.

Paris invested heavily in control, rainwater and sewage runoff, but to no avail.

If Paris, a multibillion dollar budget with with Paris and the multibillion dollar budget behind it, cannot get a grip on water quality.

What advice do you have for smaller municipalities who are struggling with protecting their own watersheds?

Well, I think that, you know I think it could be that Paris what Paris has done would be define as a success by most measures.

I think they dramatically improved water quality in the Senate.

And there's a whole bunch of value that you can get out of a river probably.

Well, the highest I have seen somebody whose goal is it to go around the world and make rivers drinkable again, as in just you dip in surgery, that' probably a little too ambitious.

Swimmable.

Swimmable is the next level, but it's a very, very ambitious rate for an urban river to become swimmable.

But an urban river can come a long way to be a whole lot better and safe for wildlife and fish, and safe as as a place to recreate.

And then even, you know, swimming could be safe under most conditions, but not immediately after a rainstorm.

And so we all saw the opening ceremonies.

So what happened in Paris They had an opening rainstorm.

That was really I can't imagine what the people who were in charge of managing the water quality must have thought when they look at that forecast and they saw that rainstorm because it it really was just unlucky roll of the dice, I think.

I think if we if it hadn't rain like that, we might be talking about how the Senate made this dramatic transformation.

So just to keep it in perspective.

So, yeah, I'm sure they did a lot of the same things that that that our sewer district here has been doing.

I mean, their state of the art technologies that people work on, there's upgrading these aging sewer systems and there's integrating nature, nature based solutions into how we manage runoff because citie are full of impervious surfaces.

If we can start putting a lot more greenspace, parks, daylighting, creeks, floodplains with one word for floodplains that helps deal with all that rainfall and keeping it out of our sewer system as much as possible.

And as I mentioned earlier, all those things can double a recreational spaces for people.

And so we can build cities that are really green sponge.

They call them sponge cities because they soak up water.

But what's what's the sponge?

It's not a bunch of giant sponges, which would look kind of weird.

It's a bunch of ecosystems and parks and nature, and that's a city that people want to live in.

So that's a that should be a big par of our water quality solution.

I'm wondering for all the good that we could do here.

There are so many risks that can come from further north, from other Great Lakes that we don't even hear about, let alone know how to respond to, like proposed copper mining in Lake Superior.

Pipeline five running the Enbridge line.

What is being done to protect us from what's happening outside of our jurisdiction, I guess.

Is the best way to put it?

Well, and so, yeah, this this will also exceed my my typical what I work on.

I do know that the Great Lakes has been hailed as one of the first and probably one of the more successful examples of binational cooperation for a for a resource.

And that is it.

So I have I work o river systems around the world and you take a river like the Mekong, it flows through five countries and it has this incredible fishery, the most productiv freshwater fishery in the world.

But that depends on fish being able to move long distances and the upstream countries are building dams that block the migration and the downstream countries like Cambodia and Vietnam can't do anything about it.

So that's a little digressio here.

But what it says is that transboundary cooperation is really rare in water resources.

You have Sudan and Egypt almost, you know, threatening, threatening military intervention, Egypt threatening military intervention against Suda because they're building a dam.

So Canada and the US began cooperating in the fifties or sixties and really worked together on water quality issues.

International Joint Commission, is that what it's called?

The IJC that's still in place?

That's still a priority for the State Department.

So there's a lot of ways tha the countries are communicating.

And of course, I mean, to a certain level, we we rely on this federal system of federal and state laws that will that when things are affecting other states, you know they would trigger federal laws like the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act comes into play.

So, I mean, it's maybe not the best answer, but we do have a whole regulatory system in place to try to accoun for these transboundary impacts.

For your for your talk, it was, as Bob said, very inspiring and keeping on that theme.

I love your thoughts on this as a place to work for folks that are considering their career and coming into this profession.

It really seems to me that we're talking about the most complex issues that have to be solved.

Law, policy.

Finance, economics.

Engineering.

So your thoughts for folks that are considering they want to come into the environmental field, they want to make a difference.

It really seems like this is a place to be.

And I I'd love your thoughts on that.

Yeah.

Well, so I clearly think it's one of the most interesting jobs you could do.

And I do think because it's I think that there was a time where people thought of environmental issues as sort of a nice to have, you know, we want to and you might look at WWF and we have a panda symbol and we focus you know, people might think, oh, you protect the tigers and nothing against tigers.

I want there to be a world with lots of tigers in it.

But the environmental movement and what WWF focus on is that plus so much more because we're really talking about things that are now existential.

How are we going to fee 10 billion people with healthy, nutritious food that's done in a way that doesn't convert the rest of the remaining forests and that doesn't exacerbate the climate.

We risk solving the energy side of the climate challenge and then the agricultural side of the climate challenge, just pushing us continuing into dangerous territory.

We really have to get the agricultural system working as well.

So how do we feed people?

How do we keep this?

How do we keep the, you know, within these safe planetary boundaries?

How do we keep people safe from floods?

And that's a major thing that I focus on.

Flooding is going to become more it's already the biggest, most expensive disaster annually around the world, consistently, river floods are the most damaging.

And if you look at the climate forecast, it's pretty scary with the increase of flood frequency and intensity in much of the world in basically in the most populated parts of the world.

And so we need to figure ou how to how to keep people safe and to do it in ways that that are also accomplishing other goals.

And so I think that what's exciting about this moment is that we're moving into a time where we should be recognizing that solving environmental issues is fairly existential to solving having a world that we can live in and want to live in.

So maybe that's a bit more grandiose than what you were asking for.

Speaking of climate change, for the last three or four years, we really haven' had any ice cover on Lake Erie.

And I was wondering what the biological effect is on fish populations and other species in the lake when there's no ice cover and it doesn't really get col and we don't really have snow.

Yeah, I think that.

Yeah.

So it is interesting that that the lack of ice cover, there has been some research suggesting that it has some negative impacts on fish.

There are some fish that spaw on, you know, Rocky structures.

And then when the lakes get locked in with ice, they're very stable as opposed to an unfrozen lake and winter storms and all of that turbulence that can can disrupt the spawning and the eggs.

And so that's one way I think the ice covers as is moving to spring an algal film forms at the bottom of ice that begins to kick start the food webs so that the fish are gettin an early start on feeding as the is beginning to warm without ice cover you're losin that kind of initial kick start and of course effects on the amount that's evaporating and water levels erosion of shorelines probably impacts on coastal marshes, increased wave energ hitting coastal marsh vegetation that might be disruptive.

And they're very important for juvenile fish.

So yeah, there's a number of ways.

And then of course, another thing that people I think probably many of you recognize this, but when the Lake Erie is frozen we don't have lake effect snow.

It shuts that down.

Lake effect snow requires a lake.

And when the lake is frozen, it's a field, it's a field of snow.

So we get we'll get more snow in some ways if we.

I love the snow, but I know a lot of people don't.

Yeah.

So that the ice cover is our friend.

Does World Wildlife hav a position on plant based diet?

You mentioned food.

We know that by not eating animals, that would help shut down the agricultural aspect of the blooms.

Runoff diversion of the food we're feeding.

The cattle could feed people diversion of water to feed cattl can provide for our environment.

So has your organization taken a position on advocating for a plant based diet?

Is this being recorded.

In the room?

In part.

People are afraid to talk about it.

No, no, I think I have the answer.

I mean, it's I don't I don't envy my colleagues who work in food because we're a network of is a network.

And so we have a lot of European offices that are 100% behind the plant based diet and then we have other offices that are not I have a my my fellow, my colleagu who is the lead food scientist.

He developed a report called A Planet Based Diet.

So it's a little play on the words.

You could almost hear the word plant based diet, but it's a plant based diet and it's really focused on the end result, the end goals, not necessarily determining that a plant based diet is the only one.

There's a couple of reasons for that.

There are parts of the world where people do not currently get enough protein.

And when people do studies about the quickest way to give more protein to developing children, animal based resources would be the most efficient way to do that.

There are places where grazing cattle or buffalo is actually a very sustainable land use, and when that land use isn't happening, it gets converted to soybean or wheat.

We have talked a lot about some of the large organizations, cities, government, big organizations in this area.

But there is a lot of little organizations and we're out there on the ground like friends of you get creek trying to change hearts and minds of people.

And it's a battle.

It's a battle.

I'm telling you.

You know, that also.

Do you have any suggestions of how or what we can do to reach people?

Because we find them just simply ignoring us.

We're in the streets screaming about things, showing them pictures talking them, pounding on doors.

Practically, the media is finally, finally starting to push ideas out.

What else can we do?

Well, I was thinking of some things that I would recommend, and I was thinking I bet you're already doing them.

And I wouldn't wouldn' want to sound as if you weren't.

But I mean, you're tryin to get people to connect around the importance of a healthy Euclid Creek, I imagine.

I mean, I do think that appealing to people, you know, finding ways to reall appeal to their self-interest, of course.

I mean, that's really just how the essence of forming political coalitions and other things is getting you know, recognizing collective self-interest or share overlap of self-interest.

And, you know, creeks that are beautiful and integrated with parks generally improve housing values.

There's research that shows that proximity to greenways and parks increase housing values.

So emphasizing that, hey this isn't just about a healthier creek and nature, this is about better housing values, or if the park can be managed in a way that's safe for kids to really explore on their own it's there's a lot of research showing how critical that is for kids to have autonomy, to have time and ability to explore in nature.

I mean, we're hearing an awful lot about, you know, the anxious generation and the phone based childhood that has replaced the play play based childhood and how it's so important for a lot of emotional, psychological, educational reasons to get that back into balance and maybe emphasizing that healthy greenspace in your community is essential to giving kids the option to have that classic play based childhood that they might remember.

We're all so fond of that time when we stayed out after dark until the mo rather than the bell and maybe, you know, evoking those kind of images.

QUESTION Considering your work across the globe in freshwater systems, are you seeing more red flags or green flags and Great Lakes biodiversity recovery as compared to other at risk watersheds across the globe?

Well, I think that big pictur you'd have to say that Lake Erie or the Great Lakes are moving in the right direction more than most of the world, because most of the world is being reflected in that Living Planet index that shows a fairly steady decline.

And the Great Lakes would be interesting to d an LPI just for the Great Lakes.

And I bet if you if you're able to do it, you'd see a big decline.

Then you'd see the curve bending upward and then you'd see a lot of volatility and maybe kind of a flat line and volatility.

I, you know, I've heard like the whitefish populations, which was a mainstay of the commercial fishery, they really recovered and then they've really kind of just dropped again and nobody quite knows why.

And they're doing research.

Why have these huge school of whitefish just disappeared?

So it's not all good news.

There's invasive species like the round goby that are exploding, but those in turn provided foo for the Lake Erie water snake.

And I think it got off the endangered species list because there were so many of these invasive goby for i to eat that its population grew.

So I think the lakes are super complicated that way.

It's a lot of up and down, but it' better than most of the world, which is still in that declining stage.

And so yeah, so I guess that's how it ends with it.

Okay We have another text question.

Wild recovery on the Great Lakes is happening and possible.

Are we going to address the quiet and easily unseen challenges of micro and nanoplastics?

So you guys want?

So this would be like the defense and for chemicals and things like that.

Oh yeah.

Well, I do that.

So again, somewhat beyond my my expertize here, I really focus on like migrator fish and rivers and hydropower and the Mekong River.

So I know that one of the issues is, well, let's look at the source.

You know what are the products that we're using?

Can we start substituting products that won't shed microplastics, won't she perhaps or other these things?

And, you know, we do have history of replacing chemicals.

The ozone layer was what CFC is, and we basically found a substitute for and that was an example.

The world came together.

Now it's you can't quite say, well, why can't we do that with climate change?

We did it with the ozone hole.

Well, with the ozone hole, basically, scientists came up with a fairly easy substitute and everybody just switched, although arguably wind and solar are almost at that point for being the easy, cheaper substitute.

Should I wrap it up?

So yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I think just dealing with things at their source is probably the best way to start.

And then figuring ou how to get it out of the water.

Yeah.

So I think thank you so.

Much to Jeff Opperma for joining us at the City Club today for our 2024 State of the Great Lakes.

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Up next at the City Club on Friday, August 16th, we will welcome Kathryn Lehman, assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education you can learn more about this form and others at City Club, Dawg.

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Thank you once again to our speaker and to our members and friends of the City Club.

I'm Cynthia Connolly And this forum is now adjourned.

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