April 2023

This coming weekend, April 21-23 is Adopt-a-Beach spring kickoff for 2023. Adopt-a-Beach is a program of the Alliance for the Great Lakes. If you live in the Great Lakes region, the Alliance can help you find a beach clean-up – or organize one! 

At a beach clean-up organized in coordination with the Alliance, there is a leader who helps distribute materials (e.g. gloves, buckets) and gives an overview of the data collection aspect of the clean-up. Adopt-a-Beach volunteers have been collecting data during beach clean-ups since 2003. To do this, someone is tasked with keeping track of what trash is being pick-up, and at the end of the event, the weight of it. 

The data has shown a number of things: Volunteers are removing close to 15 tons of trash from beaches each year. About 85% of this trash is made entirely or partially of plastic. 25% of litter picked up is food-related – like plastic cups, utensils and takeout containers. Much of the plastic collected are small pieces that have already broken down or off of a larger piece. These tiny pieces matter! During a cleanup it’s easy to realize that they are actually the most likely trash to be eaten by animals in and around the lakes when they mistake the microplastics for pieces of food.

Things that I love about beach clean-ups: on-boarding is quick, they are hands-on, physical activities outdoors, and they can be a great group or solo activity. 

I’ve participated in three different beach clean-ups thus far and each one was rewarding and satisfying in its own way. In July 2022 I was at Euclid Beach on Lake Erie at 7 AM on a Saturday morning on my own for a beach clean-up organized by the Cleveland Metroparks. Everything about the outing was a joy: the water was beautiful, the beach was quiet and there were few people out when I got started. By 8:30 when the clean-up ended, there were people walking and biking, a number of whom stopped to thank me for my efforts. I drove home with the windows open listening to a good podcast and was home in time for breakfast with my family.

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The issue: Plastic pollution is a problem in the Great Lakes. Research from the Rochester Institute of Technology estimates that over 22 million pounds of plastic enter the Great Lakes each year. 

Why this matters: Over time plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces and particles that can end up in drinking water and living organisms in the lakes. These microplastics may eventually be ingested by humans when we eat or drink something with lake origin. Plastic particles have even been found in beers brewed in the Great Lakes region. While the full impact on the animal and human body is not known, there are concerning aspects of humans ingesting about a credit card sized amount of plastic each week (an official estimate according to the Alliance for the Great Lakes).    

close up photo of plastic bottle

What actions can you take? 

Reduce your own plastic use. Think more expansively than just eliminating single-use plastic drink containers and grocery bags – although do these for sure! Could you eliminate ziploc and single-use snack bags? Could you replace hand soap and dish soap containers with a permanent container and purchase larger refill containers? Could you replace a takeout order with eating in a restaurant or cooking at home? Could you forgo one to-go coffee a week? The Alliance for the Great Lake has a plastic-free toolkit for download if you want to explore more possibilities.

Learn more about the concept of extended producer responsibility. Creating new laws around this concept would require plastic producers to be responsible for their products through the product’s full lifecycle. Over time these laws would force producers to eliminate the most harmful plastics, pay for disposal, or produce less plastic. You can visit the Alliance for the Great Lakes action center to send congressional delegates a message requesting they support extended producer responsibility legislation. 

Lead or participate in beach clean-ups if you live near a Great Lake. More about this in my next post. Stay tuned! 

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If you have read earlier posts, you know that my interest, advocacy and activism related to the Great Lakes is relatively new. It’s not my professional work, and not my sole interest, but the Great Lakes have become a significant actor in my life. I’m sharing today how I shifted my energy in this direction, which is by listening to a whisper.

In her fantastic book The Lightmaker’s Manifesto: How to Work for Change Without Losing Your Joy, Karen Walrond shapes this activist origin story and I immediately connected with it. She interviews a consultant and activist in the arena of women’s and girls’ rights who shares about “the call”:

… for some people there isn’t a single awakening experience. Instead, it’s just a whisper. And I’ve talked to young people who hear the whisper, and they want to get involved more, but they don’t know how.  When they ask for my advice, I always tell them to keep listening to the whisper. Don’t ignore it. Keep listening, and let it guide you to do the very first thing, even if it’s just getting curious.

Getting curious is exactly what I did after my January 2021 retreat on Lake Erie. That year, I read two books about the Great Lakes that anchored my knowledge base – The Living Great Lakes by Jerry Dennis and The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan.  

In 2022, I started to volunteer for two organizations. I became an Ambassador with the Alliance for the Great Lakes, a nonpartisan nonprofit working across the region and in Washington, DC at the federal level, to protect the lakes. As an Ambassador, I join monthly virtual meet-ups with others from around the region for learning sessions on Great Lakes issues. I represent the Alliance at local events in Northeast Ohio. Last year I tabled at Cleveland State University’s EarthFest and at an environmental justice event. I even had the opportunity to be on a panel after a local documentary film festival showed a series of short films on water resources.   

I also joined the Cleveland Metroparks Watershed Volunteer Program (WVP). My volunteer efforts with the WVP focus more on the watershed systems in Northeast Ohio that feed into Lake Erie rather than the lake directly. I have participated in water monitoring activities, planted trees, and cleaned and sorted seeds for rain gardens. These efforts and learnings have impressed upon me the incredible interconnectedness of land and water.

As a result of my advocacy and activism, I’m living in an atmosphere of growth – and a space of creativity I didn’t know I inhabited. As Elizabeth Gilbert writes in her book Big Magic, “I believe that curiosity is the secret. Curiosity is the truth and the way of creative living.” I’m so thankful that you are curious enough about the Great Lakes to join this blog community. But I wonder what other whispers you might hear as well. I encourage you to listen to them.

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