EDITORIAL: Put Great Lakes ahead of Greenland, Gulf, Canal

The president-to-be is making it clear he has deep concerns about issues involving water. Donald Trump is saying the U.S. should seize the Panama Canal, change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and take ownership of the world’s largest island, Denmark’s Greenland.

Should this agenda prove to be more than colorful rhetoric, some interesting adventures can be expected, but the new president has more important work concerning water resources to do first. Restoring federal funding for protecting the Great Lakes from pollution, invasive species and other threats has to be a priority. President Trump needs to strongly support and prepare to sign a bill that reauthorizes the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

Since 2010, the GLRI has worked to change the course of the Great Lakes from a natural wonder in decline to a rebounding resource of incalculable importance to the North American continent. Funding for the initiative will end after this year if a reauthorization bill is not passed by Congress and signed by the president.

Prospects for the latter action are cloudy. Three years in a row during his first presidency Trump tried to cut GLRI funding. In 2020, he proposed slashing funds for the initiative by 90%. Resistance by outraged senators and representatives from Great Lake states, both Republicans and Democrats, saved the program.

One of the senators who defended the GLRI, who was co-chair of the Senate Great Lakes Task Force and co-sponsor of a bill to reauthorize funding through 2031 (which never came to a vote), was JD Vance of the Great Lakes state of Ohio, the same JD Vance who will be inaugurated as vice president next week. If Vance doesn’t wilt in the suffocating aura of his boss, the Lakes could have an ally in the White House.

As president the first time around, Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental protection regulations and he has signaled he plans to do more of that, so it would be too much to ask that he embrace or even understand the environmental value of the Great Lakes.

But the economic worth of the Lakes should get his attention. According to data gathered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Great Lakes region accounted for $3.1 trillion in gross domestic product last year, employing 25.8 million people who earned $1.3 trillion in wages.

A glacial phenomenon, the Great Lakes are the planet’s largest freshwater system, holding  22% of surface freshwater on Earth and providing drinking water for more than 30 million people. Though the economic power generated by that water is a force for American prosperity, the Lakes’ most valuable gift to mankind is not as a monetary treasure, but as a natural treasure replete with the wildlife it sustains—aquatic, avian and terrestrial—and the beauty it bestows on humans. The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative exists and needs to be renewed because humans have not taken good care of this treasure.

The GLRI’s biggest impact has been in cleaning up so-called legacy pollution, the residue left by rust belt industries that abused the Lakes as convenient repositories for their toxic chemical waste. Thanks to the program’s work in the cities that bracket Ozaukee County, water flowing into Lake Michigan from rivers in Milwaukee and Sheboygan is cleaner than it has been in a long time, surely more than a century.

There is much more to be done to restore the quality of the lake water and its connected wetlands and habitat near those cities and others in the eight states that border the Great Lakes. What’s more, though states are working on it, the ongoing threat of other forms of pollution—PFAS, plastics and agricultural waste and fertilizers—will not be abated without the federal action and the spending made possible by the GLRI.

That is particularly true in the case of the agricultural degradation of lake water, which is the largest cause of nonpoint Great Lakes pollution but less subject to control measures than other sources.

The damage done by manure and chemical fertilizer runoff is evident in the algae blooms that kill fish, foul beaches—disgusting mounds of rotting algae appear on Port Washington’s north and south beaches several times each summer—and cause extreme carbon dioxide concentrations that can endanger human health. A massive bloom threatened to choke the life out of the southern portion of Green Bay several years ago.

Just last week, a bipartisan group of House of Representative members introduced a bill to reauthorize the GLRI for five years at $500 million per year. Pushing Congress to pass it and then signing it deserves to be moved to the the top of the president’s adventuresome waterborne agenda.