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Doni: As you probably remember from high school.

There are five Great Lakes.

One of them, Lake Erie, is right in our backyard.

Lake Erie is facing a number of challenges, ones that we need to talk about.

Ones that can't be ignored.

Why should we care?

Well, if you're watching this show, chances are high that Lake Erie is your source of drinking water.

Join me as we talk about the health of this critical resource.

On to the point.

Connect with us on our social media pages.

You can email me at doni _miller@wgte.orgfor this episode and other additional extras.

Please go to wgte.org/to the point.

Welcome today.

I am so excited to be joined by Dr. Thomas Bridgman, who is a professor of ecology and the director of the University of Toledo, Lake Erie Center.

Doctor has been the director of the Lake Erie Center since 2018 and a professor of ecology at the University of Toledo since 2001.

Very long time.

Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining us.

First of all, let's tell people who don't know what actually happens at the Lake Erie Center.

Thomas: With Lake Erie Center is a facility of the University of Toledo.

And we concentrate on Great Lakes science and right now, there are three major efforts going on there.

We do a lot of work with harmful algal blooms, which many people have heard about.

We have professors working on invasive species such as grass carp, which are one of the invasive species threatening the Great Lakes issues such as road salt runoff.

We use a lot of road salt in our area and that affects the lakes and the organisms and wetlands as well.

We are involved in a lot of wetland research, the coastal wetlands that stretch all the way from Toledo to Sandusky area.

Doni: You guys have a lot going on there.

I think what we're going to trying to do today, though, is to have a sort of an ecology 101 course for our viewers because we really want them to understand two of the major topics that we're talking about when it comes to the Great Lakes, Lake Erie in particular.

We want to talk about climate change a little bit, the impact that it's having.

We also want to talk about the effect of the algal blooms that is in our news all of the time.

And this is a topic that people should be paying significant attention to, but I don't think that they understand why.

So what what would you say to folks about why these topics are important?

Thomas: Well, first of all, just to give some perspective on the Great Lakes, people might not be aware that in this age of global water shortage, the Great Lakes region contains 20% of the Earth's fresh surface freshwater.

It's amazing.

We sometimes take it for granted because we live here, but it is a it is a worldwide treasure.

These lakes that we have and something like 35 million people live around the Great Lakes and 30 million people get their drinking water from the Great Lakes.

So it's literally our lifeblood.

We are drinking the water from the Great Lakes economically, the tourism brings in $16 billion a year.

Fisheries bring in another $7 billion a year.

So it's an economic driver as well as our lifeblood.

Doni: All of those are exactly the reasons that we're talking about, that this topic today, especially in light of a study that was released in just two years ago, 2020, to the headline of which was the Great Lakes are in their worst shape ever and not getting any better.

Do you agree with that?

Thomas: No, I don't agree that the Great Lakes are in their worst shape ever.

There are severe problems, but there are also success stories.

So it's a mixed bag there.

Sometimes we will issue a report card for Lake Erie or the Great Lakes, and some things are good.

Some things are less than good.

For example, our fisheries are doing very well.

We have the best sport fisheries in the world here in western Lake Erie, Walleye and Perch, those are at record breaking numbers right now.

So some things are good, some things are less good.

We have severe algal blooms and that's not great.

Doni: Yeah, I think that most everybody will remember was it 2014 when we had the water crisis here in Toledo?

We couldn't use tap water for several days.

I think they'd be surprised to know to remember that that was directly related to the growth of of the algal blooms.

Thomas: Right.

We've been having severe algal blooms for the past 20 years.

Doni: What are they?

First of all, well.

Thomas: Just a little science, one on one here.

Algae are microscopic plant like organisms that are just tiny little specks of green in the water, and generally they're good algae feed the little crustaceans, little shrimp like organisms that are eaten by fish, which are eaten by bigger fish.

So algae grow.

The fish that we fish for and eat.

So we like algae.

But when you have too much nutrient runoff, too many fertilizers, then you grow a particular kind of algae.

That's not really algae at all.

It's called cyanobacteria.

It's also green.

Looks like algae, but technically it's a bacterium.

It produces toxins.

And that's the real problem.

These toxins are very poisonous.

And if they get into our drinking water supply or if a pet goes down to the beach and laps up the water in this contaminated water, it can be deadly.

So we are we're very concerned about harmful algal blooms keeping them out of our water supply, keeping ourselves safe from them.

Doni: Are we winning this battle?

What could we have done differently to avoid that 2014 crisis?

Thomas: We are winning the battle in the respect that our drinking water is much safer than it was in 2014, and that is because improvements to water treatment plants, not just Toledo, but drinking water plants around the area have improved their their capacity to remove the algae and remove the toxins from the water.

So we've we've succeeded on that front.

Where we have not succeeded is in preventing these blooms in the first place.

Going back to 2014, if we had had some sort of early warning.

We now have buoys in the water with sensors that told the water plants when the blooms are happening, when they're growing so that they can be have forewarning and take put measures in place ahead of time to take care of that.

They didn't have any warning in 2014 when this big bloom came into the water treatment plant.

So just those sorts of things are protecting our water supply now.

Doni: So you think that there's not the possibility that that sort of crisis would happen again?

Thomas: I think would be very, very unlikely.

Just speaking about the Toledo water plant, they have the forewarning now.

They have additional treatment processes, They have additional chlorine capacity, additional carbon, which absorbs the toxin.

They have many more measures in place now.

So that I don't foresee that we would ever have another Toledo water crisis crisis.

Doni: We are, though, facing threats from agricultural influences in our water.

Is that correct?

Thomas: Yes.

The Miami River watershed, which is the largest single watershed on the Great Lakes, it's a huge area, goes all the way to Fort Wayne, Indiana.

It's about 75, 80% agricultural and whenever we get a huge rainfall, which we're getting more and talking about climate change, we're getting more intense rainfall.

Now, it's really difficult to keep that water on the land.

And of course, when the water runs off into the ditches and rivers to Lake Erie, it's carrying with it nutrients in the form of fertilizers and manure into Lake Erie.

And so that's that's what's growing these blooms.

There are contributions from cities as well.

We have municipal stormwater runoff combines who are overflows.

We have faulty septic systems.

So it's it's a little bit of everything, but it's because we are such a large agricultural area, that's that's the biggest source.

Doni: How do we begin to get that particular influence under control?

This is a heavily an area that's heavily influenced by agriculture.

That's not going to go away.

So how do we marry the needs of both?

Thomas: Well, yes, that is a big, big problem.

And there's a lot of effort going on now.

There's a program called H2 Ohio, which the governor has put into place, which contains nine or ten agricultural practices to reduce runoff.

And I'm not an agricultural expert.

I can't go into a lot of detail, but it involves putting fertilizer in the right place at the right time, using cover crops in the wintertime to help hold the soil and nutrients in buffer strips and extra streams that will capture runoff.

There's a whole suite of practices that farmers can use and are being incentivized to use to reduce or reduce runoff of fertilizers.

Doni: So while we're seeing while we're doing a better job of actually giving ourselves information about the growth of algal blooms in the Great Lakes, do you see the growth of that?

Do you see their growth diminishing?

Thomas: Unfortunately, no.

We are still having blooms just like we did before, and that could be for a couple of reasons.

One is these things just take time.

There is there's we've been doing farming practices, putting fertilizers into the soils for over 50 years, probably at rates that were greater than needed.

So there's a lot of nutrients in the soil already from our fathers and grandfathers.

And so that's having an effect.

Also, we are having more animal operations in the in the mommy River watershed, more hogs, chickens, cattle and their manure may be contributing to the to the to the problem.

So even as we're as we're making some steps forward, we might be taking equal steps back in terms of adding manure to the watershed, even while we're reducing runoff from from corn and soybeans and things.

Doni: Yeah, And this is an issue that people really should not be ignoring the condition of the Great Lakes or Lake Erie, specifically.

Let's talk about Lake Erie specifically because of the influence on our freshwater, but also because of other issues that you've mentioned today.

The ability to use it for recreation that's affected the ability to including fishing.

All of those things are affected right.

Thomas: And and we get back to climate change.

How is climate change impacting all of these things?

We know that, for example, our weather is becoming more extreme.

We're not getting as much sort of gentle rains.

We get rain, we get it in buckets now.

And that's very difficult to contain on the land and it washes off into streams and causes flooding.

We are getting warmer weather in the summertime, so we have more 90 degrees days now.

The lake is warming up faster.

And these cyanobacteria, this this harmful algae, they love warm weather.

Doni: I'm going to ask you to hold that thought.

I'd like to talk more about climate change when we come back.

So that's a little start.

We're going to go away for just a moment, but promise.

We'll be right back.

I'm Jaden Jefferson and we are at one point this week with a topic some would say is very difficult to address climate change.

What do you think the impact of climate change is going to be in the future?

We're going to have more about that.

I agree it's going to be working the way for the last couple of years.

I just make time for the weather.

What do you think the impact of climate change is going to be in the future?

I am very nervous that climate change when it comes to my children.

I have three kids, so I'm I'm nervous to see how it's going to affect them and their children and their grandchildren.

I hope it's a safe place for them to live, though.

Well, I believe, you know, unless we do something, they can make big differences.

I think we're going to have a lot more catastrophic weather events.

Things are going to shift and not to get them.

What do you think the impact of climate change is going to be on the future?

I think negative.

Let's put it that way.

Now, like I said, nothing good.

Let's put it that way, especially since there's still some people that don't believe in it.

So what do you think the impact of climate change is going to be on the future?

I know I hear a lot about global warming, but I've been hearing about that since I was a little kid.

I don't really think that's going to happen.

And that's this week's On Point from Swan Creek.

Badger Park.

I'm Jaden Jefferson and you're watching to the Point.

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Doni: Connect with us on our social media pages.

But you know that.

You can also email me at doni _miller@wgte.org for this episode and other additional extras.

Please go to wgte.org/to the point and welcome back.

We are talking to Dr. Thomas Bridgman who is a professor of ecology and the director of the University of Toledo, Lake Erie Center.

We spent the first segment of this show talking, giving people a framework about why they should care about the condition of the Great Lakes and Lake Erie specifically.

And thank you for giving us that ecology one on one discussion.

I am interested, though, is, as we saw at our break about your feelings regarding climate change, you've alluded several times to its impact on the Great Lakes, which has me to believe makes me believe that you think climate change is absolutely real and serious.

Thomas: I do believe climate change is real and serious, and it's very difficult to tease out the various factors because in the Great Lakes there are sort of 20 year cycles and 100 year cycles.

So determining the extent of climate change on top of these natural cycles can be a little bit complicated.

But there is agreement now that the Great Lakes are warming.

They're slowly warming.

We are getting hotter.

Summer temperatures, which as I mentioned, helps to drive those algal blooms.

The algae love the warm weather.

And so where we used to see the harmful algae appearing in late July and August and then going away, now they're starting to peer towards the end of June and last year extended all the way to November so that harmful algae season instead of a short season now is becoming a longer season.

In addition, we're getting less ice during the winter, so the lakes are not freezing.

To the extent that they did.

They freeze later and then thaw earlier.

So the ice days are shorter and that has several effects.

For one, that helps drive all that lake effect snow.

When the lakes don't freeze in the winter, the wind comes across, evaporates water, and then dumps that water as snow on to Buffalo, Cleveland and those areas.

And you get those four or five, six feet of snow.

So that's a direct effect on people of of climate change on Lake Erie and some of the other Great Lakes as well.

The lake levels have been going up and down.

So those are going to cycle.

Lake levels were dropping for about ten, 20 years.

But then they came back up again in 2019, 2020.

We had record high levels of water in Lake Erie.

So that's a. Doni: Hardware you I that worries me that the lake levels go up and down.

Thomas: Well, it's an expected thing and people people know that maybe ten years from now it's going to be three or four feet high or three or four feet lower.

And that's sort of an expected thing.

But I think those levels are going up and down faster now instead of a 20 year cycle.

It might be a five year cycle now.

Doni: Right.

And again, to put this in a perspective that our listeners will understand the impact of every one of these things that you mentioned has a direct influence upon our access to freshwater and our access to using the Great Lakes, Lake Erie, for many of the things that we use them for, is there is there any connection between the health of beaches and the lakes?

Thomas: Yes, direct effects.

When we get those harmful algal blooms and those wash up on beaches, those beaches become closed so people can they can use them.

They will be posted by the Ohio Department of Health saying high levels of toxic blue green algae on this beach and you can't use it.

Likewise, when we have the severe rain runoffs that can flush the rivers and flush ditches and then you get e coli coming onto the beaches as well.

So there can be bacterial contamination or algae contamination.

So a lot of our beaches become closed.

That becomes an economic detriment because then tourism drops and and all the businesses that along Lake Erie suffer.

Doni: It sounds as though there might be some health implications in that as well.

Thomas: Yes, definitely don't want it.

You can be poisoned by E coli bacteria.

And if you if you had toddlers that happen to ingest this green water on the beach or if you took pets to the beach and they ingested that water, they could get really sick or even or even die.

Doni: So I asked you earlier if you thought we were getting our arms around this and if you thought we were heading in the right direction.

There are many critics who think we are not heading in the right direction.

You would disagree?

Thomas: I would agree with the critics in terms that we are we have not been we've not seen any progress at this point.

We are we are putting in a lot of effort.

The state of Ohio, the taxpayers of Ohio, federal government is spending a lot of money on the Great Lakes trying to improve things in terms of the harmful algal blooms.

Things have not improved.

We're still there, but we have done a lot of good things as well.

We've restored we're restoring a lot of wetlands that may not affect algal blooms that much, but it's certainly great habitat for eagles and and waterfowl.

So we're doing a lot of good things around the lake, around the Great Lakes, but we're still haven't really made a dent in the problem of harmful algal blooms.

Doni: Hmm.

Is there anything that the ordinary citizen can do to help with that?

Thomas: That's that's a really tough question.

I don't know that there's anything that we can really do.

You could try to get your produce from a local farmer who's who's growing produce in a sustainable way.

You could, you know, if you can join a a farm cooperative, you could get your eggs from your local, your local farm.

Doni: Why does that make a difference?

If we if we buy from our local farmers?

Thomas: Well, to the extent that these large animal operations are contributing manure to the area that the less we can, the more we can support our local farmers so that they can stay in business and not sell their land to a big conglomerate.

I think that's a good thing.

We want to keep our small local farmers in business, I think.

Doni: Yeah, I would agree with that.

So is there is there legislative work going on that helps put parameters on the amount of waste that the larger organizations can?

Thomas: There there are there are regulations in place.

If you have a very large animal operation, they're called these are called carrefour's, concentrated animal feeding operations.

If you have a large number of animals, then there's certain regulations in place.

But if you have a smaller number, you're still a very large farm, but you're belly beneath that threshold and there's much less regulatory constraints.

Right now, most of the most of the action is incentivizing farmers to to to use good farming practices.

So it's a lot of carrots, but there's not very many sticks attached.

Doni: Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it seems like we have an awful lot at risk here and we don't have many off ramps for improving it there.

Thomas: There may be ways that we can modify agriculture.

We can incentivize farmers in different ways.

We can improve our our wastewater treatment plants in our cities and municipalities.

We can we can work at this and keep going.

But it's going to be it's going to be difficult.

Doni: It's going to be difficult.

Is there does when you're studying Lake Erie, is there an influence as to what is being done in other cities, For instance, Chicago?

Does there the way that they practice their business and their agriculture, it's not a highly agricultural urban area.

But do those behaviors have an influence on the health of Lake Erie?

Thomas: Not really, because Lake Michigan and Chicago, that area is so different from where we are.

We have the shallowest warmest part of the entire great Lakes.

So all that warm water and the shallowness makes it very sunny.

There's a lot of sunlight.

And then having this large agricultural watershed, it's just it all feeds into to growing these blooms.

Lake Michigan is much deeper, colder.

And the city of Chicago sit rerouted to the Illinois River and center.

It sends their water down the Mississippi.

So that's that was their solution.

They just rerouted their river.

Doni: That you know, that I when I was reading about this topic, I did notice that one of the one of the important facts is that Lake Erie is one of the shallowest rivers lakes, perhaps the shallowest lake.

And that does make it more vulnerable to the kinds of concerns that we're talking about today.

Thomas: Yeah, it's a double edged sword.

Western Lake Erie is the one of the best fisheries on the planet.

We grow more walleye, perch, more fish than all of the other Great Lakes combined right here in western Lake Erie.

But that also makes it vulnerable to those harmful algal blooms.

Doni: Yeah, which, which means that we need to find ways, I think, to pay more attention to the issues that you're raising today.

I mean, everybody remembers the chaos of 2014 when water was not available.

It reminds me of that Joni Mitchell song.

Doesn't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got till it's gone?

And we didn't really notice?

I think the importance of water.

And so until that particular year, fresh water.

Thomas: Yes, we tend to take water for granted.

And I think we're wising up.

I think all of us are learning more about our water, where it comes from and what it's going to take to protect it.

Doni: Well, I am so glad that you are with us today.

If people want to reach out and learn more about this particular topic, they can just call the Lake Erie Center.

Thomas: They can call the Lake Erie Center and they can come and visit.

We're open to the public.

Doni: What a wonderful resource.

I'm glad that you're talking to us because I think that many people don't know that you're out there and that they can come out and learn more about you.

Thomas: Thanks for getting the word out.

Doni: You are so welcome.

Thank you as well for joining us today.

And we will see you next time.

On to the Point.

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