Pam Taylor: People make, can prevent environmental problems
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Said Pogo, as he held a litter pickup stick and a burlap bag and looked at the garbage left by humans in the Okefenokee Swamp, his beloved home. Political satirist Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip was a popular, often controversial, mainstay in the funny papers all over America from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. That quote is from Kelly’s Earth Day 1970 poster.
For Earth Day 1971, Kelly published a strip featuring Pogo and his friend Porky back at the same spot, overlooking another year’s worth of trash. Porky, always the philosopher, extols the beauty of the “forest primeval,” proclaiming it gets him “in the heart,” to which pragmatic Pogo replies as they try to make their way over the junk, “It gets me in the feet, Porkypine.” There’s lots of junk in the roadside dumps along floodplains and marshes next to country roads here, too. Same story, different day.
I spent Earth Day showing visitors around Lenawee County. The destination was ACRES Land Trust’s Kauffman Nature Sanctuary, just west of the Lenawee County line inside Hillsdale County. Decades ago, the donor gradually stopped farming this 78-acre property along one of southern Michigan’s few coldwater streams, a headwaters tributary to Lake Erie. Drainage tiles were broken, invasives removed, species inventoried. Now, anyone can visit the property and see five restored pre-settlement wetlands and the natural evolution over time that happens in a truly sustainable environment. This is a true restoration, similar to The Nature Conservancy’s Ives Road Fen project, with all its native micro-ecosystems, as opposed to unsustainable constructed multipurpose wetlands designed to accommodate other uses that require expensive maintenance.
I passed through some unique olfactory surroundings before the tour. My warm-up was the powdered-egg factory in Adrian. (Fortunately, the chemical odor that occasionally occurs nearby wasn’t happening.)
At Adrian’s southwestern edge, we drove through sensory haze from the weed-grow operation, which reminded me of the funk that wafted from the Riga ethanol plant (possibly the biggest taxpayer boondoggle scam ever) and hung over Riga, Blissfield or anyone downwind at the time. Distilling alcohol (which is what ethanol is) is a stinky business. I remembered the Wise Powers (investors, direct financial beneficiaries, and their elected or appointed minions) explaining during their hard-sell $$ promises to Riga residents that there might be a “baking bread” smell sometimes, but nothing more. Ha!
We were hit by dairy-air downwind of some livestock confinement barn sites, the worst. These factory farms are now disposing of their waste-pit lagoon contents on fields all over western Lenawee. Despite taxpayer-subsidized practices like conservation tillage, cover crops, subsurface injection and grass strips on field surfaces, microscopic pathogens like E. coli and the dissolved nutrients that feed harmful algal blooms in this liquid waste enter surface water, flowing off field edges or down to the buried drain tiles below, into already-impaired open drains, creeks and rivers, through towns and cities here and all the way to Lake Erie downstream.
There are some bright spots, however.
The city of Adrian has a perfect opportunity to use some of its $12 million state grant to ensure dangerously contaminated soil along the riverbank is cleaned up during the upcoming park development project. A restrictive use covenant was issued in 2016 for the property between the Citizens Gas Fuel Co. on Winter Street and the river. In addition to prohibiting certain uses, the covenant prohibits “excavation and intrusive activities” unless a site-specific health and safety plan is adhered to, and it requires that contaminated soil must be managed according to Michigan’s NREPA laws for hazardous waste.
It's also a perfect chance, as elections roll around, for voters to choose candidates with the personal character and capacity to dig in and do the right thing for the entire communities they represent over the long term, not just those things in the few Wise Powers’ $$ interests.
Pam Taylor is a retired Lenawee County teacher and an environmental activist. She can be reached at ptaylor001@msn.com.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Pam Taylor: People make, can prevent environmental problems
