Great Lakes threats and solutions

Newcomers to the Great Lakes restoration movement may need a little primer on what we're talking about here. The Lakes are still big and beautiful - they are crucial to the region's culture and economy, from fishing to shipping to tourism and drinking water.

But this treasure we share is threatened by a host of foreign creatures, chemicals, and other problems that sound like they're from a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie:

• Aquatic invasive species like the sea lamprey, zebra mussel, and spiny water flea have hitchhiked in the ballast water of seagoing ships and are decimating fisheries and from Duluth to Niagra and deep inland into the watershed. Hundred-pound Asian carp are making their way up the Mississippi, leaping around, eating half their weight daily, only kept at bay by one electric barrier. One of the most ghoulish of invasives, VHS, is a virus that infects fish like the bubonic plague, causing schools of them to bleed to death and wash up on the shore.

• Sewage run-off, also known as poop, is dumped into the Lakes by cities all over the lakes by the billions of gallons every year. Outdated sewer systems can't handle big rain storms, which drain into the Lakes instead of water treatment plants when overwhelmed.

• Toxins, generated by large farms and factories, make their way into the lakes constantly. Fertilizers and pesticides make their way through the watershed from farms, and sometimes factories like the BP plant in Whiting, Indiana, just go ahead and dump their chemical trash right in the lake.

So there's good news and bad news about fixing this.

The good news is, there's a Federal commitment and a plan for restoration. In 2004 President Bush issued an Executive Order recognizing the Great Lakes as a "national treasure" and created a federal Great Lakes Interagency Task Force to improve federal coordination on the Great Lakes. The Order also directed the U.S. EPA Administrator to convene a "regional collaboration of national significance for the Great Lakes." This collaboration process was needed to develop, by consensus, the national restoration and protection action plan for the Great Lakes. That collaboration, the Great Lakes Regional Collaboration (GLRC), created that action plan, the Strategy to Restore and Protect the Great Lakes, which was released on December 12, 2005. The bad news is, it's been awhile, and the Lakes are still threatened by monster invaders and nasty chemicals. The funding for this commitment has been cut from budgets consistently since it was proposed, and the problem gets more costly with every delay. State and local governments are doing what they can to mitigate damage, but the only hope for a healthy body of water is with implementing with the comprehensive restoration plan outlined by the GLRC.

Which is why people who love the Great Lakes are in DC this week making it clear to leaders in Washington that the Lakes are important, in trouble, and voters in the region are going to be asking about it and voting on it. No one, not Republican, Conservative, rich, poor - Packer, Viking, or Bear fan, likes swimming in and drinking water full of human poop and bleeding schools of dead fish. This cause is something everyone in the region can get behind.

What about you? Why are the Lakes important to your area and to your life?