An Update on Our Third Coast

By Brian Barth

With 20 percent of the freshwater on the planet, 10 percent of the U.S. population, and an economic engine worth over $5 trillion annually, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River megaregion is a planning project with global implications.

The pollution of the Great Lakes helped ignite the environmental movement in the late 1960s, and although much has improved, new issues continue to emerge: Asian carp, record low lake levels in 2013, and the politics involved in allocating all that freshwater. Gary Doer, Canada's ambassador to the U.S., predicted in 2014 that cross-border water disputes will become a top diplomatic priority in the next five years.

Planning efforts abound, though most are driven by local agendas or single issues rather than reflecting a vision for growth in the region as a whole. The toxic algae bloom that shut down Toledo's water supply for three days last July alarmed those who thought the worst of the Great Lakes' environmental woes were over.

"The Toledo water crisis made everyone driven to get something done and to figure it out quickly," says Adam Rissien, the director for agriculture and water policy at the Ohio Environmental Council.

For those working to curb the phosphorus runoff that has repeatedly caused toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie, the event was no surprise. Less than six months before the Toledo incident, the International Joint Commission (the binational organization charged with preventing and resolving disputes related to Great Lakes water use and quality) issued a report stating that phosphorus loads needed to be reduced by about 40 percent to prevent continued outbreaks of toxic algae and identified the Maumee River Basin — the watershed that feeds into Lake Erie at the Port of Toledo — as the primary contributor. (A 78 percent reduction would be needed, the report said, to reduce the frequency of hypoxic fish kills in Lake Erie below a threshold of 10 days per year.)

Rissien says that the current reliance on voluntary, incentive-based measures to encourage farmers to reduce phosphorus runoff represents "a part of the solution, but in and of itself, it's not enough. What we need is an action plan that the governors and premiers can commit to that has specific timelines for reductions and how we're going to meet them."

The "teeth" that OEC and countless others seek for enforcing better environmental standards will likely be aided by two other impending developments. Two months after the Toledo incident, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced the renewal (through 2019) of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, an Obama administration program established in 2010 to speed up the process of environmental remediation in the lakes.

The initiative includes measures to streamline interjurisdictional efforts and allocates federal funds, especially toward the remaining 29 "areas of concern" in U.S. waters. Second, the International Joint Commission's Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement may be updated in 2015 with new targets for nutrient load reductions, providing a mandate for the six states and two provinces of the Great Lakes basin to create action plans to meet them. "We can only hope that 400,000 people without drinking water creates the political will to commit to those reductions," says Rissien.

Josh Ellis, program director at the Metropolitan Planning Council in Chicago, estimates that 80 percent of nutrient loading in Illinois originates from agriculture, with the balance from wastewater treatment plants and stormwater runoff.

"In northeast Illinois, we're being extremely proactive about removing phosphorus, nitrogen, and any other harvestable resource [from wastewater] with the idea that we're going to sell it. We're flipping the script and moving toward resource recovery, as opposed to waste removal," he says of emerging wastewater treatment technologies, suggesting that a similar market-based mechanism could provide leverage with pollutants of agricultural origin. But he acknowledges that it's a painfully steep uphill battle.

"There are so many different land managers, so many different actors, and substantial costs involved. We're working on it," he says, "but it's hard."

Ellis heads up the MPC's Calumet Stormwater Collaborative, an interjurisdictional committee formed to address problems in Chicago's Cal-Sag sewershed "that no one is really responsible for," he says. Playing the role of convenor, the collaborative includes every entity with a stake in the outcomes, from the EPA down through local jurisdictions, in an effort "to get all those actors to agree on a common set of problems to solve, that are not currently being solved, and won't be solved [without] collaboration," says Ellis.

Big concept

Although the Cal-Sag system has been engineered to drain into the Mississippi River basin, the collaborative effort to manage it is emblematic of the regional planning approach needed to address ongoing water-related concerns across the Great Lakes.

One of the challenges encumbering work in the Maumee River basin, for example, is the fact that it drains not just northwest Ohio, but parts of Indiana and Michigan as well. Loopholes in nutrient management regulations in one jurisdiction can easily undermine effective strategies carried out a few miles away in another jurisdiction within the same watershed, a phenomenon that continues to play out at the larger scale of the Great Lakes basin.

While many planning efforts in the Great Lakes are born of these and other pressing concerns, others are focused on the view from 10,000 feet, seeking a regional vision with broad stakeholder appeal. Architect and urban designer Philip Enquist, a Chicago-based partner in the global design firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, has developed the bones of a planning document for the region that wraps agriculture, urban development, transportation infrastructure, the regional economy, and environmental concerns into a big vision of what the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence region could be 100 years from now.

A pro bono public service initiative by SOM, the Great Lakes Century Vision Plan originated in 2009 as part of the city of Chicago's 100-year celebration of the Burnham Plan and has now been endorsed by the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, a regional coalition of mayors, along with 30-plus other agencies and institutions (see http://thegreatlakescenturyblog
.som.com/recognizing-a-global-resource).

"The one drawing [in the Burnham Plan] that was really compelling to me was this tiny drawing that showed all the shipping routes in Lake Michigan and Chicago," says Enquist. "I thought if we moved forward another 100 years, wouldn't the issue be the health of the whole Great Lakes watershed?"

Enquist's plan envisions high-speed rail connections between the largest cities in the region (see map on next page), local food systems, a renewable energy grid powered by lake winds, and municipalities that use the best technology available to manage their water resources. One of its most compelling and original components is framing the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence water bodies as a vast international park, a notion based loosely on the precedence of the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park that straddles the Montana-Alberta border, but with a significant emphasis on urban environments.

Enquist has already presented the idea to the National Park Conservation Association, which indicated that it fit nicely into its own planning document, released in preparation for the National Park Service centennial coming in 2016, which indicates a strategic direction toward a future collection of parks that are more urban and focused on restoration, as much as conservation. He says the notion of the Great Lakes as a park doesn't have to be taken in a literal sense, but is "a way to communicate the value of this watershed and how to treat it in a special way."

To date, SOM's Great Lakes Century Vision Plan largely amounts to a data collection and mapping project intended to elicit conversation. The maps intentionally deemphasize the international border unlike "so many maps that only show the U.S. side," says Enquist. "It seems like we've just chopped the whole thing up and no one is really looking at this thing holistically. It [the Great Lakes] is not too big to have a vision — we can have a collective vision."

Brian Barth is a writer, environmental planner, and land-use consultant living in Ottawa, Ontario.