Home > Great Lakes       Home    How To Listen    H2O Links    BLOG    Notification List ==~==~==~==~==~==    Water      Oceans      Seas      Great Lakes      Wetlands      Rivers          Waterkeepers®          American Rivers      Misc. - But Important    Earth          Pesticides      Earth's Tree News      Tropical Rain Forest    Vegetarian/Vegan    CAFOs    Climate History    Conferences    Energy    Nuclear Energy    Other Podcasts    Transportation    Turkish    Down in the Valley RSS FEED: Copy and Paste this feed: RSS FEED into your Aggregator Software to download New podcasts Automatically.    Great Lakes Barbara Spring: "The Dynamic Great Lakes" Dave Dempsey: "On The Brink: The Great Lakes in the 21st Century" Great Lakes Discussion: Michelle Hurd Riddick and Dave Dempsey The Dynamic Great Lakes by Barbara Spring ====>Click to hear "The Dynamic Great Lakes: Part I Upper Great Lakes" ====>Click to hear "The Dynamic Great Lakes: Part II Lower Great Lakes" Barbara Spring is a teacher, and a writer of non fiction and poetry. She has worked on grassroots committees for many years for the betterment of the Great Lakes. As a concerned citizen, she continues to speak at governmental meetings that concern the Great Lakes. She also speaks at schools, museums and service clubs to educate about the Great Lakes. Barbara can be contacted via her email address: barbaraspring@yahoo.com She is the author of three books: The Dynamic Great Lakes The Wilderness Within and Sophia's Lost and Found: Poems of Above and Below Water Poetry excerpted from Barbara Spring's books : Sophia's Lost and Found: Poems of Above and Below and The Wilderness Within. ====>Click to hear Barbara's Water Poetry Barbara Spring designed and taught environmental writing courses at Grand Valley State University for many years and wrote articles for the Grand Rapids Press and other publications. The Dynamic Great Lakes website can be found by just typeing Dynamic Great Lakes into Google. The Dynamic Great Lakes and her other books are available through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble or may be ordered from any bookstore. Copyright © 2006, 2007 Barbara Spring Dave Dempsey: "On The Brink: The Great Lakes in the 21st Century" ====>Click to hear "The National and Global Significance of the Great Lakes" Dave Dempsey discusses the national and global significance of the Great Lakes, which contain 18% of the world's available surface fresh water. He describes the magnificence of the Lakes, the many human uses they support, the pollution problems that threatened them in the mid-20th Century, and how a change in consciousness, as well as public support, helped clean them up. He closes by citing the many new and growing threats to the Great Lakes and calls on citizens to call on their governments to take decisive action to protect the Lakes -- and to make changes in their daily lives that will add up to healthier Lakes. Dave is a former member of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. He has authored three books, including"On the Brink: The Great Lakes in the 21st Century, published in 2004 by Michigan State University Press. He is a graduate of the master's program in natural resources at MSU. He now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Copyright © 2006, 2007 Dave Dempsey, All Rights Reserved Great Lakes Discussion: Michelle Hurd Riddick and Dave Dempsey Michelle is a life-long resident of the Saginaw Bay Watershed, Michigan's largest. An environmental advocate for many years with Lone Tree Council, Michelle is firmly grounded in the belief that Michigan's greatest resource are her children and Great Lakes. Children and water, moral imperatives which at the end of the day always speak volumes about our priorities for life. The Lone Tree Council is the SBW longest standing environmental organization dating back to 1978. An all volunteer organization, Michelle has tackled solid waste, recycling, incineration and childhood lead poisoning and prevention for the Lone Tree Council. For the past five years her focus has been Dow Chemical's dioxin contamination of 52 miles of river in the heart of the watershed. Michelle is fond of saying she makes a living as a nurse but her real passion is Michigan's natural resources and advocating for their protection. Michelle is the 2005 recipient of the Michigan Environmental Council's Petoskey Award for grassroots leadership. You can write her at michdave@aol.com or visit the Lone Tree Council web site at www.lonetreecouncil.com To learn about Dow's contamination go to www.trwnews.net Dave Dempsey currently serves as Communications Director for Conservation Minnesota, a nonprofit organization in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He also consults for environmental and conservation organizations in Minnesota and Michigan. Dave has been active in environmental matters since 1982. He served as environmental advisor to Michigan Governor James J. Blanchard from 1983-89. From 1991 to 1994, Dave was program director at Clean Water Action. He served as Policy Director of the Michigan Environmental Council from 1994 to 1999. President Clinton appointed him to serve on the Great Lakes Fishery Commission in 1994, where he served until 2001. Dave is a resident of St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of three books: Ruin and Recovery: Michigan's Rise as a Conservation Leader, an environmental history of Michigan since its statehood in 1837, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2001; On the Brink: The Great Lakes in the 21st Century, a history and look forward on the state of the world's largest freshwater ecosystem, published by Michigan State University Press in 2004; and a biography of Michigan's longest-serving governor, William G. Milliken: Michigan's Passionate Moderate, published by University of Michigan Press in 2006. Dave has a bachelor of arts degree from Western Michigan University and a master's degree in resource development from Michigan State University, and served from 1999-2004 as an adjunct instructor at MSU in environmental policy through the Department of Resource Development (now Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies). He serves on the board of directors of the Alliance for the Great Lakes. ============== ============== ============== ====>Click to hear "Fish Advisory Dow Dioxin" Dow Chemical's dioxin contamination from its world headquarters in Midland, MI. For decades Dow Chemical has used the Tittabawassee River for a sewer. In geographic proportions this site is enormous. 52 miles of river , the Tittabawassee and Saginaw leading out to Lake Huron, thousands of acres of floodplain and properties through several communities. A study done by the Michigan Department of Community Health highlights the environmental justice issue of this contamination. The less educated people are, people of color, migrant workers and indigent residents are more likely to eat the fish from these waters as well as eating the fish most contaminated. In the summer of 2006 Lone Tree Council and a number of state wide groups and citizens petitioned the federal government ( CDC) for a Health Consultation. We are awaiting a determination. The MDCH Fish Consumption Study can be viewed at http://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdch/FCS_Final_rpt_061407_199288_7.pdf Copyright © 2007 Riddick/Dempsey, All Rights Reserved ============== ============== ============== ====>Click to hear "General Discuss Dow's Dioxin" Michelle's advocacy and the difficulty posed when the polluter, Dow Chemical, also happens to be a powerful Fortune 50 company. State of Michigan sets a standard of 90 ppt and we have in excess of 100,000 ppt in the rivers. Because of the very high levels of dioxins/furans every study to date has shown dioxin being taken up by every living creature on the flood plain. Taking a page out of the tobacco industry hand book, Dow's PR machine continues to manufacture debate and create uncertainty about the toxicity of dioxin to neutralize public opinion. And under the guise of "uncertainty" public officials are given a place to retreat and not take a position. Copyright © 2007 Riddick/Dempsey, All Rights Reserved ============== ============== ============== ====>Click to hear "State of the Great Lakes" Are the Great Lakes getting cleaner or dirtier? The answer is mixed. Pollutants that were top priorities in the 1970s like phosphorus and PCBs have been on the decline while new contaminants have worsened. The loss of wetlands, which filter pollutants and provide habitat, and increases in pollution from poorly planned development are causing new problems. As the successes of the 1970s showed, the key to further progress is citizen activism. Government only follows where citizens lead. Copyright © 2007 Riddick/Dempsey, All Rights Reserved ============== ============== ============== ====>Click to hear "Water Diversion" It's a modern cliché: Water is the oil of the 21st Century. It also happens to be true. About one-fifth of the world's fresh water is harbored in the Great Lakes. Raging wildfires in the West and a sudden water scarcity in the Southeastern U.S. have raised public awareness of the significance of fresh water. The Great Lakes states and Canadian provinces are seeking to prevent water exports through a new regional compact and agreement. Unfortunately, a giant loophole in the agreement allows unlimited exports in containers under 5.7 gallons in size: bottles, for example. Citizens need to support compact ratification and demand that the states go beyond it by shutting the loophole down. Copyright © 2007 Riddick/Dempsey, All Rights Reserved ============== ============== ============== ====>Click to hear "Citizen Activism" Lack of political leadership from on Dow Chemical's dioxin contamination of Michigan's largest watershed and the overall lack of leadership in the State of Michigan on the Great Lakes. The preservation and protection of the Great Lakes need to be taken to the people to drive the issue then elected officials will follow and do what's right. Elected officials do not lead as a rule. Michigan needs a handful of legislators who will rise up out of these waters, so to speak, and focus their efforts on protecting what is Michigan's greatest economic resource and our greatest legacy. Copyright © 2007 Riddick/Dempsey, All Rights Reserved ============== ============== ==============   For further information contact: Joseph Puentes email: Clean@h2opodcast.com RSS FEED: http://h2opodcast.com/rss.xml WWW H2Opodcast.com Copyright © Joseph L. 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