From SEED to CARP
Climate activism has deep roots here in Evanston. Even before the first national Earth Day, Northwestern University students were thinking about the environment. On Jan. 23, 1970, nearly 4,000 people attended Project Survival, an all-night “teach out” organized by Northwestern Students for a Better Environment, later knows as SEED, Students for Ecological and Environmental Development.
But it wasn’t just students who came. There was Barry Commoner, one of the founders of the environment movement, along with U.S. Sen. Paul Simon, former U.S. Sen. Adlai Stevenson III and former Illinois Attorney General William Scott. On his way to the teach-out, folk singer Tom Paxton wrote the haunting dystopian song “Whose Garden Was This?”
By the spring of that year, the future of the planet was on our minds. An estimated 20 million people across the county celebrated the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970.
Through the ensuing decades, ecology, the environment and caring for our ever-more-endangered Earth has been part of life in Evanston. A group of Evanston residents built the Ecology Center and donated it to the City of Evanston in 1974. Two years later this group organized to become the Evanston Environmental Association.
Green but not blue
Residents of all ages have kept the momentum going. Through the efforts of Natural Habitat Evanston, our entire community is certified as a natural habitat. Environmental Justice Evanston is looking at, among other things, disparities in air quality, water quality, health and longevity in various areas of the city.
In 2018, City Council approved a Climate Action and Resilience Plan, or CARP. Since 2019, students at Evanston Township High School have been active in E-Town Sunrise, most recently convincing the District 202 School Board to approve a sustainability policy, the “Green New Deal for ETHS.”
We have rain gardens, pollinator gardens, solar panels and photovoltaics, apiaries and LEED-certified buildings. The synagogue of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation earned the highest LEED certification, having been designed and built on the principle Bal Tashchit, advising us not to destroy or waste.
There’s more, of course. These few paragraphs are illustrative, not exhaustive.
While the focus of many of these measures is land, our largest ecological asset may be Lake Michigan. Though our lake does not have the serious algae blooms that plague Lake Erie, and our runoff heads toward the Mississippi delta, it faces two risks – plastics and envy.
This month, the Alliance for the Great Lakes issued a report, based on 20 years of collected data from more than 14,000 Adopt-A-Beach cleanups, that 86% of the litter collected on its beaches is composed either partially or fully of plastic.
The alliance suggests several short-term solutions, such as “reducing or eliminating the most problematic plastics like single-use bags and foam, deploying new technologies such as microfilters in washing machines to remove plastic microfibers before they enter our water systems, stopping the spills of industrial plastic pellets in the Great Lakes, and increasing access to water refilling stations as well as reuse and refill packaging.”
Love’s LEBOR lost
Protecting our lakefront is one thing; sharing the water is quite another. We say we “sell” water to other communities, but in fact, we process their allotment of Lake Michigan water – because, of course, it is not ours to sell.
But is it ours to keep?
Since 2008, the Great Lakes Compact and its companion Canadian Sustainable Water Resources Agreement have limned the protection of the world’s greatest source of fresh water – the five Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River Basin. Lawmakers in Missouri are working on protectionist legislation that would keep most of its water within the state. But these could prove to be fragile protections if they are ever challenged in court.
Western states have fought over rights to Colorado River water for years. About a decade ago, Atlanta, Georgia, and the state of Florida were arguing over water. The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Florida’s claim that Georgia was using too much of the water that would flow from Atlanta suburbs into the Gulf of Mexico.
Also dismissed, by a federal district judge in Ohio, was a lawsuit by farmers against a Toledo, Ohio, ordinance. In 2019, Toledo voters passed a referendum approving a bill of rights for Lake Erie. LEBOR, the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, was designed to protect Lake Erie from pollution, particularly farm runoff. It established “irrevocable rights for the Lake Erie Ecosystem to exist, flourish and naturally evolve, a right to a healthy environment for the residents of Toledo, and which elevates the rights of the community and its natural environment over powers claimed by certain corporations.”
Challenged in federal court the next year, LEBOR was found to be unconstitutionally vague and to have exceeded the municipal authority of the city of Toledo. The “rights” granted to Lake Erie, said U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary, were “aspirational,” not practical.
More narrowly tailored legislation, he suggested, such as banning the use of certain chemicals within the city limits, might accomplish the goals.
Does water have a right to be free of pollution like plastics, phosphorus and algae blooms? Can we do something here in Evanston to protect the lake and the canal? Heavy storms and severe drought seem to make water an ever more precious resource – perhaps our second-most.
Time is running out. And that, not water, could be our most precious resource.