Lake Erie, Our Kin Part II

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Springhill Senior Living in Erie, Pennsylvania, offering a wide range of maintenance-free apartments with balconies and patios, and garden homes designed to provide an active and engaging lifestyle, where residents can spend more time focusing on what they want to do, not what they have to do.

Springhill also includes a continuum of quality healthcare services for added peace of mind.

Learn more at springhillerie.org.

An equal opportunity housing provider.

- "Chronicles" was made possible thanks to a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, Springhill Senior Living, support by the Department of Education, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

(bright music) - This is WQLN.

- And she said, "I don't think that Erie folk understand how good they've got it."

For a moment, I had to really take back like, what she meant.

I was down by the water with my wife, and I saw so much filth, not only on the streets, but I saw in the water the pollution.

And that is concerning to me.

- In part one, we got to know Lake Erie, the state of its health, and explored the type of relationship we have with it, from the indigenous relationship of reciprocity rooted in gratitude to the transactional relationship born out of an extractive society.

We also learned about the great strides that have been made to clean up industrial pollution from the past, before environmental laws existed.

But those same laws have failed to prevent other more pervasive problems that plague Lake Erie and the rest of us today.

(soft music) - Lake Erie, in many ways, has come a long way since being mentioned in "The Lorax" and a big fight to make sure that it was out of that Dr. Seuss book.

We're also known in 1969 for being on fire, both in the Cuyahoga River and on Lake Erie itself.

- It's an indicator.

You know, the Cuyahoga, the burning of the Cuyahoga was the impetus for the Clean Water Act.

- Just such a striking example of just allowing anything to run off into the lake.

(soft music) - So the algae issues started in the '90s.

- Yes.

All of a sudden, in the late '90s, the algae came, and we really didn't know why.

Green, and then it kept getting greener and greener and greener.

Sewers and wastewater systems, they overwhelmed the wastewater plants with too much phosphorus because of laundry detergent.

There were 28 states that banned phosphorus and laundry detergent, which is a big driver in helping Lake Erie in the end.

And then the wastewater plants on Lake Erie reduced the amount of phosphorous discharges.

In a while, we had a recovering Lake Erie.

We're the walleye capital of the world.

We still are, thank heavens.

And so, you know, there was a huge comeback for the lake in terms of being a degraded water quality problem lake.

And then it all began to fall apart after the algae came again.

By 2014, the city of Toledo, the algae got so dense, 500,000 people were told not to drink their water.

- 500,000 people were told not to drink their water.

- It lasted for two or three days.

All hell broke loose.

- Leaving over half a million people with no safe drinking water.

- Residents have been served notice.

Stop drinking water, don't shower, and don't let pets come near tap water.

- You know, a community the size of Toledo, it rippled through our whole system here.

The lake should be recovering, and the algae should be going down.

It's not.

And the question is, why isn't it?

In the '90s, this area started attracting something called confined animal feeding operations.

(soft music) By 2019, the Environmental Working Group and Environmental Law & Policy Center came out with a study that actually showed that the number of animals in our watershed had grown exponentially over and over and over again to, you know, over 5 million animals.

Just huge amounts of phosphorous increases, you know?

And cows and pigs now, we used to pasture all our livestock, and now we confine them.

Well, where you confine them, there's too much manure.

And the manure is going into lagoons.

It's put on the fields in a liquid form.

Unlike the last time when the ordinance or resolution was passed to ban phosphorus in laundry detergent, we have no resolutions to speak of anywhere.

In terms of at least stopping the growth, we're still today, right now, I think there's 16,000 hogs coming to the watershed and another 10,000 dairy and 120,000 chickens.

We're still permitting them today and adding to the problem.

I can't seem to get any inroads in making differences or getting facts on manure and the confined animal feeding operations.

Meat and dairy are one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, lobbying group in the nation.

Much more powerful than oil and gas.

- We have to think about global trade.

All of these things affect us every day in a lot of different ways, not just in our pocketbooks, but along the shores of the Great Lakes.

We have ships coming from China down the St. Lawrence waterway going all the way to Duluth, Minnesota.

- Bringing invasive species- - Species.

- along with them.

- Yes.

There are 180 invasive species in the Great Lakes.

I believe the biomass of the invasive species, the weight, overall weight, is greater than the native species.

- How does an invasive species negatively impact the overall health of the lake?

- They all have to eat.

Food that's available is eaten by those non-natives.

Zebras and the quaggas, for example.

Female zebra will have a million little zebra mussels.

And they attach to different hard surfaces.

They filter.

People look at the water, they look down at the water, you can see formations that you couldn't see before.

They go, "Oh, the water's clean."

Well, no, it's clear the nutrients, the sediments, what fish eat and other species eat, has been filtered by those mussels.

And so it puts a negative spin, a negative impact on the native species.

They have more difficult time competing.

- So a lot of the visible pollution that Lake Erie used to be known for when it was called the Dead Lake has been cleaned up.

But a lot of the issues that we see below the surface are complicated and not as visible anymore, but still just as important to tackle.

Presque Isle Bay, in particular, was named as an area of concern under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between the United States and Canada.

The major persistent organic pollutant here in Presque Isle Bay are PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, which we don't need to get into a lot, but know that they were included in a lot of petroleum products, plastics, and a lot of electrical equipment.

They've been phased out for decades, but they're persistent in the environment.

And so they continue to bioaccumulate in fish tissue, which means build up in fish tissue, and biomagnify across the food chain, which means that as a small organism is eaten by a larger organism, those pollutants magnify, or increase, to the point where they're unhealthy and lead to fish consumption advisories like we continue to have today despite Presque Isle being de-listed.

So there was a lot of work to clean up the PCBs that are in the bay, but you can still, for many fish species, only eat one meal per month for what you take from the lake.

- Well, you know, a big concern in Lake Erie today is plastics.

We know from scientists that there are more plastic in the lakes and ocean than there are fish.

We're talking about single-use plastics, which finally more people are starting to realize, and we're trying to eliminate some of them from our lifestyle.

They all need to be eliminated.

We're talking about plastic pellets, flakes, and microplastics.

We really have to control how it's being processed, how it's being used in our society.

- I think that is one of the biggest concerns right now, is we're trying to find out, as new industries, such as, you know, plastics recycling, things like that, as they come into this area and want to establish themselves along the lake, what is going to be their environmental impact?

When industry comes in, they present, they're gonna produce jobs.

Everybody's all about economic development.

We live in a very depressed economy and area, former industrial economy.

So when someone offers an opportunity for growth and the community to have jobs and work plans, that everybody wants to jump on board with it.

So environmental concerns seem more as a blockade or a barrier to it when it's only presented in terms of these glowing economic benefits that it may or may not bring.

Greenwashing.

- What's greenwashing?

- Taking spots like, well, this is recycling, so it must be good.

Or painting things with that kind of brush that makes them look as if it's a green alternative when actually it's much more of a corporate investment without much regard to the environment.

(soft music) - Two years ago, I decided I'm not going to shut up anymore.

And then the pandemic happened, and I said, "(beep) it."

Things are a mess.

We're really hanging on by a shoestring here in a lot of different ways.

You have all of these ongoing issues.

You can't even eat the fish.

You're not supposed to eat the fish out of the Great Lakes.

What kind of relationship is that?

I don't wanna follow that one anymore.

It's not one that makes sense.

What binds people together binds all of us together.

Nature is alive and nature has agency, and so we have to treat nature like we would one another.

- What do you think of this idea that ecosystems like Lake Erie are living entities?

- They are.

They definitely are.

There's flows in, there's flows out.

The water gets used constantly.

And so I believe that.

- A living entity.

I think spiritually it is a living entity.

Our interaction with the lake, the respect that everyone has for it, how it plays a part in everyone's daily lives who live in and around Erie.

- If we're gonna have interpersonal relationships, we have to engage nature in much the same ways.

- Every day I get up, you know, instead of seeing the same thing over and over, one day she can be flat as a pancake and a sheet of glass, and the next day she can be raging and nasty.

And the ducks in the spring.

You know, the fox mating on the ice.

This is just an amazing place, and I feel very blessed.

And part of that is the reason I do what I do, is to try and give back and help these waters so that people in the future can enjoy them.

- You referred to the lake as she.

- Mm-hmm.

- Why is that?

- I don't know.

Just always have done it.

- As you see the storm clouds come over or lightening flash over the lake, these are all pieces to what we are.

And we're living beings.

(soft music) - How can we save the lake, ourselves, and each other from such daunting threats as chemical pollution, toxic algae, invasive species, microplastics, climate change, and overdevelopment?

What needs to change so that our laws actually prevent harm?

- Well, there's a group, I think it was in Toledo, that looked at giving rights to the lake, something that's only been done a few other times around the country, to take a natural resource and give it its own rights.

Almost like it's a human, but it's its own entity.

- Hold on, a lake with rights?

What began as a small-town municipal law, giving rights to nature in Eastern Pennsylvania, has become an international rights of nature movement.

Since the first municipal bill passed in 2006, nations, states, tribes, and communities across the globe have legally recognized nature's rights to exist, thrive, and flourish.

But the effort has also failed in some places, including Lake Erie.

In 2019, the residents of Toledo, Ohio passed the Lake Erie Bill of Rights by majority vote, which gave the city and its residents the right to sue polluters on behalf of the lake did.

- Breaking news tonight.

The results are in.

- The Lake Erie Bill of Rights has passed by a wide margin.

- Lake Erie has earned some of the same legal rights as humans.

- The same rights as a human being.

It happened.

- But a farming operation quickly sued the city, claiming that the threat of lawsuits if the farm polluted the lake were unfair.

A federal court sided with the farmer, declaring the Bill of Rights unconstitutional.

In the United States, corporations are considered people under federal law and enjoy some of the same constitutional rights that humans have.

If we can stretch the meaning of the word "person" to include businesses, could we also expand that legal definition to include living beings who have hearts that beat, lungs and gills that breathe, or contain the very elements that are essential to life itself?

- We looked at doing that here in Erie as a group of us studied it.

It required a lot of effort, a lot of signatures to put on the ballot, have people vote.

If we did it for Erie County, like 10,000 signatures.

So it would really take a movement just to bring the idea up.

But we're within our rights to try something like that if we want to.

- In March 2022, New York assemblyman Pat Burke made a bold move to declare Lake Erie and its fellow Great Lakes as living entities in state law.

Burke introduced a bill to establish the Great Lakes Bill of Rights.

So tell us about the Great Lakes Bill of Rights.

What is it exactly?

- So it essentially gives the Great Lakes protections from polluters.

So it gives them the right to exist and to flourish, and the ecosystem to grow in a healthful way.

Currently, we regulate polluters.

They're allowed a certain amount of pollution.

Most people, if you talk to them, they wouldn't know it, and they would think that that's crazy that we allow for that to happen.

This creates the opportunity for one environmental conservation commissioner and also local governments to protect lakes and take action if polluters are indeed polluting our greatest source of fresh water.

And so the idea is we don't want to be highly litigious.

We don't want that to happen, but we want to hold people accountable.

And we want them to say like, "Well, I can't do that, or I'm gonna get sued."

So someone who's rich and pollutes makes money, and down the road, we pay both a health cost, and we pay an economic cost.

This stops that.

Like, we're done playing this sort of shell game of polluter pollutes, polluter gets rich, we get sick, we pay for cleanup.

It's essentially, in my view, a preventive measure.

And that's the goal of it.

- In United States federal and state law, nature is defined as property, which sets us up for a transactional relationship with nature, one based on property rights and commerce rather than the laws of nature.

The way we define nature in our laws may someday change, but there are urgent problems we need to address today.

So how do we do better with what we have now?

- I think people need to understand the importance of local elections and local politics.

Local elected officials have a huge degree of impact on natural resources locally, the environment, and our whole watershed.

They regulate land use.

The zoning regulations that we have that control the development that happens in our jurisdictions are vastly important.

I show up to public hearings as an advocate, and I see two other people in the room who are advocating.

So there's a lot more that we could be doing locally to hold elected officials accountable and educate them about these issues.

- Okay, as far as development goes, you're not gonna stop development, and nobody is saying that you should.

Municipalities can't stop it.

They can kind of direct it.

The less development there is, generally speaking, the cleaner the water's gonna be.

- For so long, Erie as a small city and kind of distant from a lot of the other regions of Pennsylvania is resource starved, in some ways, and lacks capacity.

And so part of what is needed to create an environmental ethic in Erie or to lay out a set of priorities around the environment is to have staff and volunteer infrastructure within government to make that change.

And part of having the volunteer capacity is implementing what are called environmental advisory councils, which are groups of volunteers that actually operate across the commonwealth.

- Speaking at a city council meeting this morning, advocating for the creation of an environmental advisory council, which is allowable under state law for municipalities to create via ordinance and creates a formal body that deals with environmental matters and does research on behalf of staff, elected officials, and other authorities, boards, and commissions.

So we're really excited to have the opportunity to speak on this.

- We have things associated with climate planning, with air quality monitoring, with clean water.

We have initiatives that focus on illegal dumping, which is another topic I know has been a discussion in the city of Erie.

And anything related to public involvement and engagement, particularly in environmental justice communities.

I wanted to bring that home again.

The city of Erie is home to the only environmental justice areas in our watershed.

They're all in Downtown Erie.

- Erie City Council votes to create an environmental advisory council today after a unanimous 7-0 vote.

- I mentioned environmental advisory councils being a priority of the work that we do, and that's because of all of the work that's been done by those bodies locally, acknowledging all of the different actions that local governments in particular can take to protect the environment.

- Getting bills done in the state legislature is really hard.

It takes years and years of work and commitment and partnerships, and it's no simple task.

So I am 100% about getting this bill done as soon as possible and creating the structure.

- He wrote a piece of legislation that is not encompassing, is not holistic, and it's political.

I have discussed it with a lot of my colleagues across Haudenosaunee communities, and no one's heard of this.

No one's been consulted.

There's been no conversations.

When I think about these colonial governments, the last thing they want to do is to ask the people that they have subjugated through their own laws for, "How did you live with the world for thousands of years?"

and then give them the credibility of using that wisdom to fix up what they're messing up.

- Do you think it would be possible to amend the Great Lakes Bill of Rights to require the consent of the Seneca, for instance, or other First Nations peoples when it comes to making decisions about the waters?

- If the Seneca Nation or First Nation native groups in New York can help get that done and adding this component helps get it done, then I would immediately do it.

If it doesn't help get it done, but it doesn't hurt it, I would, of course, be happy to consider that and include it.

We should, of course, do that.

They're a huge constituency and advocacy group for this movement, but I want to get this done, and I feel like I need to get this done.

And I would love to have them as a partner.

I think the more complicated we make a bill, you give them one more reason to not pass it.

- Exclusion in itself is the doomsayer of this legislation.

By excluding any voice from the discussion is a failure of it.

I know there's a lot of pessimism with my attitude towards this piece of legislation, but it's not the finale, it's not the death knell to this.

- What is that sense of urgency?

Where does that come from for you?

- I think we're running out of time.

You know, when you look at Toledo, you have a city that was built on a great lake that you can see from space.

You can see this great lake.

Fresh water in the city was shut down 'cause they didn't have access to fresh water.

Like, if that's not urgent, like, I don't know what is.

And again, if the climate is getting more and more volatile, there's so much that needs to be done.

We just don't have time to jerk around.

I don't understand how people aren't urgent about this matter and the broader matter of just climate, but we can do what we can do right here within our power.

I have to do it in New York.

It's just one step.

Then it has to go to PA, it has to go to Ohio, it has to go all these other states surrounding the Great Lakes.

So now, not tomorrow, not five years, years from now.

Like, right now.

- My ancestors saw the Great Lakes as the commons to be shared by our One Dish, One Spoon.

So our communities haven't changed the narrative at all.

It's the same narrative.

And they're patiently waiting still.

Gotta get to the table and begin talking about it.

And it's never too late to start.

- If there's enough will, there's a way.

And you have to create that will to make that way.

- The policies that we put into place, are they helping?

Are they not helping?

Does something else need to be done to assure that all Pennsylvanians have access to clean air and water and land?

- It's the ego of big government of failing to realize that what they've been doing is misaligned of sorts.

We've gotta stop looking at technological fixes.

The language of science is quite strong and is kind of driving the whole discussion.

And that's the problem that everyone has with this, because they think if we're going to save something, we have to overdo it with technology, or we have to overlegislate.

It's based on computations and rational thinking that doesn't take into account that there might be other things in play with nature and human engagement.

And so there's no way to measure those things, so there's a reluctance to talk about it, especially in the realm of spirituality.

- Yeah, if you can't qualify and quantify it, then it doesn't become part of the formula.

- That's right.

- What if national, state, and provincial laws were modernized to include the original law of the land, the laws that helped those who've been here the longest live in harmony with the lakes for thousands of years?

- And this is an exchange.

And we do it from nature all the way way up through people.

And so within this great law, it's instructions of how to engage everything.

And so the same ways that we engage people, we engage these natural resources.

So that tells me that we're seeing everything with a living energy.

There's lots of ways that we can carry forth here.

And there has to be a concerted effort to go back to those original instructions and at least begin there.

- Perhaps the principles of the Great Law of Peace could be the building blocks for a future law for the Great Lakes, one rooted in healthy relationships, with rules that align with the laws of nature.

- Everything that we do is a relationship.

It is not one of a dominant one and a submissive one.

And the Earth is not a submissive one.

The Earth is a living being of its own rights, and we have no right to try to control it.

We share everything, and not with just people, but we also share it with the birds and all the mammals and all the amphibians and the wind and the things that you can't even see or even understand.

And so we have to take everything into account.

How do you measure love?

- How do you measure love?

- Usually a big hug.

(laughs) - Do they hug back?

How does this feel?

- I don't know.

I can go for a walk in the woods, and I feel like I've been hugged when I leave.

(soft music) It's peace that my ancestors were trying to teach.

Because if we're brothers and sisters, we're going to try to solve our problems together without trying to hurt each other.

In order for us to have peace, we have to come to the table, we have to have discussions, and we have to talk.

We have to talk about needs, wants, and outcomes.

We also have to talk about the problems involved.

And so as a result, everyone needs to come to the table.

It's not a matter of converting everyone to your political view, it's a matter of convincing people that we have to make choices that are healthy, that involve all of us.

Make space for everyone to share it all.

It's really just a simple thing.

- Maybe one day we can all see Lake Erie as much more than a resource.

Maybe we will see it as a living part of our community, perhaps even as our kin.

(soft music) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) - "Chronicles" was made possible thanks to a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, Springhill Senior Living, support by the Department of Education, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

(bright music) - We question and learn.