Of the White House, Asian carp, and leadership

It’s been two weeks since what I think of as “the White House meetings,” when Great Lakes advocates sat down with senior White House officials for two discussions as part of Great Lakes Days in Washington D.C. , Now that the dust has settled, I wanted to share a few thoughts.

First, the White House is COOL! It’s not amazingly ornate or solemn or beautiful; it’s a working space, a little on the small side. But when you walk in you’re hit with this sense of import and energy and focus. Huge decisions get made there by serious people, and whether you agree with them or not, it’s a pretty intoxicating place to be.

It was hard not to be intimidated sitting in the Roosevelt Room across from Administration officials during the White House meeting Monday. I’m proud to say that our merry band of activists was focused, thoughtful, and completely professional — until after the meeting ended. Then everybody started talking at once and tried to get pictures of everybody else in front of the portrait of Teddy on this horse, or FDR, or the Nobel Peace Prize (yeah, that’s hanging on the wall).

If you want a good summary of that meeting and the larger one on Wednesday in the auditorium of the Old Executive Office Building, a good place to go is Joel Brammeier’s blog.  He walks through the issues — funding, nutrients, Asian carp, invasive species, etc. — one at a time and reports on the main discussion points.

First Impression: Obama Admin. Committed to the Great Lakes

I wanted to write about two impressions I took away. First, the Obama Administration truly is committed to the Great Lakes. That commitment, of course, is reflected in the Great Lakes funding budget numbers this and previous years, and we got a pretty good idea of the political capital the Administration had to spend to keep that funding intact.

But it really came through on a personal level in those meetings. Top officials from throughout the Administration, like Commerce Secretary John Bryson not only showed up and made a few comments — they really knew the Great Lakes. I’ll never forget Pete Rouse, President Obama’s special advisor, dropping in to address 120 Great Lakes leaders Wednesday afternoon. Without notes or pause, he spoke for 15 minutes about Great Lakes problems and initiatives, including Lake Erie, Asian carp, funding…. This guy has maybe a thousand issues to keep up with every day, and he knew the Great Lakes stuff cold. That says a lot about this Administration’s priorities at the highest level.

Second Impression: Asian Carp Blind Spot

My second impression is not as positive. When it comes to Asian carp, the Administration still has a blind spot. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, it’s not exerting the kind of leadership from the top that the Lakes need. And when I say from the top, I mean someone at a level who can change the parameters of the debate and move the Army Corps of Engineers.

I don’t know if it’s an overabundance of caution, or an urge to get everybody on the same page before moving forward, but the bold leadership we need here is lacking in critical ways.

To be fair, the Administration has moved quickly and forcefully when it comes to short-term measures to keep the invasive carp out of Lake Michigan, and to the extent that there is not yet a breeding population of Asian carp in the Chicago canals or the lake, those measures have been successful, as Cam Davis pointed out at the briefing. But we know those short-term measures aren’t perfect — witness the discovery of Asian carp eDNA in the canals and at the edge of the lake and the capture of a live silver carp in Lake Calumet. We also know the risk grows every day. That’s why a permanent solution is so important.

Bold Vision Needed on Asian Carp

What’s needed is a vision for that permanent solution and a plan to get there. The conservation community has been pushing for over two years for permanent physical barriers to separate Lake Michigan from the carp-infested rivers in the Mississippi River basin, and the Great Lakes Commission and Great Lakes/St. Lawrence Cities Initiative have just finished a study showing how and where such barriers could be built. The reaction from the Administration? No commitments, they say; let’s wait until 2015 for the results of a study by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The White House meetings changed little of that. Pete Rouse said that the Corps would speed up its study but provided no specifics – echoing a letter from Jo Ellen Darcy to concerned U.S. Senators promising to try to accelerate the study. That’s something, but not a lot; there’s no specific date of completion or commitment to study hydrologic separation and not half-measures that won’t protect the lakes from Asian carp. (And I’d like to recognize that the staff of the Corps has been much more transparent in their study timelines and tasks, something we appreciate even if it doesn’t resolve our central concerns.) Certainly there was no bold vision for how to address the crisis.

President & Candidates Must Reframe the Debate on Asian Carp

What we need is to change the framing of the debate. With one sentence, the President could change the conversation from whether there should be permanent physical barriers built in the canals to where, when and how such barriers should be built. More than anything else, that would create the momentum we need to get to an effective permanent barrier quickly, before the carp invade the lakes.

The Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition has called on the President and all the candidates for the presidency in 2012 to make the commitment to hydrologically separate the Mississippi and Great Lakes basins.

The President and the Administration have exercised bold leadership on so many Great Lakes issues. It’s time they did so on this one, too.

Next post: toxic algal blooms and what we should be doing about them.

The Chicago Canal Problem Goes National

This week may turn out to be a watershed moment (that’s a very intentional pun) for stopping the movement of invasive species through the Chicago canals.

On Monday, the attorneys general of seventeen states — from West Virginia to Arizona, from Louisiana to Wyoming — called on Congress to order the Army Corps of Engineers to take rapid action and install a barrier in the Chicago canal system that will permanently and hydrologically separate Lake Michigan from the Mississippi River basin (read the attorney generals’ letter to the chairs of key congressional committees (pdf).

This is the first time that top officials from states outside the Great Lakes region have weighed in on this issue, and it could be a game changer.

So why are they engaging? For them, it’s not about Asian carp. It’s about the Great Lakes sending invasive species through the Chicago canals out into the vast Mississippi/Missouri/Ohio River system. The Chicago canals threaten the health of their states – economic and ecological – and they’re beginning to fight back.

The best example is the spread of zebra mussels from the Great Lakes through the Chicago canals to the rest of the country. As I’ve posted before, you can see their spread, year by year, in this animated map published by NWF and the U.S. Geological Survey.

That damage has already been done; the zebra mussels have spread through the canals and into the Mississippi River system. What these eleven non-Great Lakes states are worrying about is the next invader to come through. Will it be quagga mussels? Eurasian ruffe? Round gobies? Spiny water fleas? Or something that has yet to invade the Great Lakes?

Kudos to Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette for leading this effort. As bad as Asian carp are for the Great Lakes, he’s made other regions see that Great Lakes invaders could be equally damaging for them.

The Chicago canals are not a one-way street; they’re a highway that carries invasives in both directions. The electric fence currently in the canals will have little effect in stopping many of them.

We need a permanent  physical barrier. The safety of our nation’s waters demands it.

March 1 Dispatch from Washington

Like everybody else, I thought that any big news coming out of Washington’s Great Lakes Days this week would be about the Great Lakes restoration budget. And certainly that’s what most of the briefings and conversations are about.

But lost in the budget news are important new developments about (you guessed it) Asian carp. From a brief, low-key presentation to the Great Lakes Commission, we learned that Asian carp are much more likely to reproduce and have much more food to eat in the Great Lakes than scientists previously thought.

That means that if the invasive carp make it to the Great Lakes, they’re likely to spread fast and far and do even more damage than we’d feared.

Here’s what we heard. Dr. Leon Carl, director of the scientists at the Great Lakes/Midwest division of the USGS (that’s the US Geological Service, the science agency charged with doing much of the fisheries research on Asian carp), on Monday told the Commission that scientists had discovered two new problems:

1. Asian carp larvae learn to swim vertically at younger ages than scientists had previously assumed. What that means is that the larvae don’t need to be suspended as long in turbulent water to survive and thrive…. which means that shorter river segments or even the coastal areas of the Great Lakes themselves can support Asian carp reproduction. That’s very disturbing news. Until now, scientists thought that Asian carp could only breed in a handful of long tributaries to the lakes, which would limit their ability to spread if they did get into the lakes. Now their capacity to breed and spread looks much greater.
2. Asian carp eat Cladophora, a common algae that grows along much of the Great Lakes shoreline. That’s another stunner. Scientists had believed that there wasn’t enough food in much of the Great Lakes to support the voracious carp. Now it turns out that there’s plenty of food along much of the coastline to support the spread of the invasive fish.

After the briefing, Leon told me that these new findings make him deeply concerned. He’s right.

The likely damage from an Asian carp invasion has just skyrocketed, as has the urgency for taking action. So far, we’re lucky that the monster carp haven’t established breeding populations in the canals or Lake Michigan. But we can’t count on being lucky for much longer.

We need the Corps to construct a permanent barrier, and fast.

Public in Traverse City asks Corps to declare war on Asian carp

The Traverse City public meeting on Asian carp I talked about in yesterday’s post was quite an event.  NWF’s Jeff Alexander and Marc Smith were both at the hearing. Check out Jeff Alexander’s blog post and the AP story on the Traverse City hearing.

The crowd was large and frustrated with the delays by the Army Corps of Engineers. As NWF’s Marc Smith said at the meeting, “We just don’t see why it should take five years from start to finish. There’s just a lack of urgency on the part of the Corps.”

One resident said the Corps should battle the carp with same urgency that we’d fight a war.

The Corps may be getting the message; they told the audience at the meeting that they’d be taking some actions right away. But the Corps didn’t promise to speed the completion of the study needed to build a permanent barrier.

Slow Progress on Asian Carp

Asian carp news didn’t take a break over the holidays.

The last month has seen an important marshaling of forces against the march of Asian carp toward the Great Lakes. Consider:

• The leading experts in eDNA testing published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal that should finally put to rest any doubt that Asian carp are (or have been) where the eDNA says they are. The paper should add a little starch to the backbone of the Army Corps of Engineers when it comes to them taking action quickly to stop any further invasions by the carp. It should also enable all the federal and state agencies to stand up to the carp-deniers in the Chicago shipping industry.

• Michigan’s new Attorney General Bill Schuette is pursuing an appeal in federal court to force the Army Corps of Engineers to take rapid action on a permanent barrier in the Chicago canals to stop the carp.  Stay tuned as the Seventh Circuit hears the case.

• Frustrated by the slow pace of the Army Corps of Engineers, two independent bodies are doing their own in-depth feasibility study of how and where to erect a permanent barrier to separate Lake Michigan from Asian-carp infested rivers in the Mississippi River Basin. The Great Lakes Commission and the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Cities Initiative will complete the $2 million study by January, 2012. One of the primary purposes of the report is to jumpstart the Corps’ own feasibility study, which the Corps claims will take over five years. That time frame is simply unacceptable. By that time the Great Lakes may be the Great Carp Ponds. The Corps needs to use the completed GLC/GLSLC study to finish its work much faster.

• In October, a group of prestigious scientists from the U.S. and Canada began a rigorous risk assessment to describe the likely impacts that Asian carp will have on the Great Lakes. The risk assessment will hopefully explode the other myths being propagated by some among the Chicago shippers that (a) Asian carp will not travel through the Chicago canals in numbers great enough to achieve breeding populations; and (b) even if they did, the carp would not thrive in the Great Lakes or their tributaries. Although both of these claims are demonstrably false, some continue to make them. I expect that the risk assessment, once completed, will bury them once and for all.

• Leaving the Chicago canals for a moment, citizens all over the region are attending public meetings and calling for the Corps to close the other pathways that Asian carp might take to the lakes. The Corps last month released a preliminary draft of its Great Lakes and Mississippi River Interbasin Study (GLMRIS). The draft (called “Other Pathways Preliminary Risk Characterization”) identified 18 potential pathways (outside the Chicago area) where the risk of the carp reaching the lakes is “acute,” “high,” or “medium.”

The draft study identified another 13 potential pathways where the risk is described as low. The report identified three particularly worrisome areas:

“One location was singled out as the greatest concern, the Eagle Marsh site in Fort Wayne, IN. Interim and long-term risk reduction measures were deemed necessary to mitigate potentially imminent risk of Asian carp reaching Lake Erie through the aquatic pathway that develops at this location during a significant storm event.

“The Long Lake connection to the Ohio and Erie Canal in Summit County, OH south of Akron, OH, and the Libby Branch of the Swan River large wetlands complex in Itasca and Aitkin County, MN are also identified as High Risk locations for ANS interbasin transfer.”

The report recommends additional study prior to taking action for all the sites except Eagle Marsh. That’s the site where the headwaters of the Maumee River, the largest tributary to Lake Erie, pass within a mile of tributaries to the Wabash River, which already is carp-infested. Concern about flooding that could connect the two streams via Eagle Marsh prompted the Indiana DNR to erect an emergency fence through the marsh.

The Corps is now in the midst of gathering public testimony as part of the NEPA review of the GLMRIS “Other Pathways” study at meetings in 12 cities (today in Traverse City, next week in Cincinnati, and March 8th for meeting in Ann Arbor that was rescheduled due to weather). And wherever the Corps is, so is NWF. Our very own Jeff Alexander has been blogging from the hearings; check out Jeff’s posts.

This is good stuff, but we have lots more marshaling to do. We need to keep the pressure on the Corps to get the study done faster and then to start work on the ground toward a permanent barrier. To speed the Corps’ study we should demand that it use the Great Lakes Commission/Cities Initiative report that will be published in 12 months. Reinventing the wheel is rarely a good idea, and here it would be particularly harmful.

The public meetings are a great way to make our voices heard. Let’s get out there and tell the Corps to get moving.

Army Corps: Cracking open the door for Asian carp

Last week I attended the “Michigan Asian Carp Prevention Workshop” put on by the state’s Office of the Great Lakes. It was a really solid event with excellent presentations and new information.

The workshop highlighted the significant recent progress on Asian carp, including the:

• Hydrological separation feasibility study by the Great Lakes Commission/Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Cities initiative
• New Asian carp director, John Goss
• Upcoming Asian carp risk assessment facilitated by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission
• New structures to stop carp-carrying floods in the Chicago area and in Indiana.

Unfortunately, even as some progress is being made, the Army Corps of Engineers are opening the door for Asian carp.The Corps seems determined to resist serious consideration of hydrological separation in the Chicago waterway system.

The latest obstacle to shutting the door on Asian carp is the way the Corps is setting up its feasibility study for preventing the movement of Asian carp and other invasive species between the Mississippi River basin and the Great Lakes. Congress passed a law ordering the Corps to conduct that study (called GLMRIS – the Great Lakes Mississippi River – Study). The law (the Water Resources Development Act of 2007, Pub. L. 110-114, §3061(d))  says,

(d) FEASIBILITY STUDY.-The Secretary, in consultation with appropriate Federal, State, local, and nongovernmental entities, shall conduct, at Federal expense, a feasibility study of the range of options and technologies available to prevent the spread of aquatic nuisance species between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River Basins through the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and other aquatic pathways.(emphasis added)

But the study that Congress ordered is not the study the Corps wants to conduct. In the Great Lakes Mississippi River study plan and in public presentations, the Corps says it will assess the feasibility of measures “that could be applied to prevent or reduce the risk of ANS transfer between Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins.” But “reducing the risk” can be pretty minimal – like doing more electrofishing. It certainly isn’t prevention, and it certainly isn’t what Congress ordered.

When I asked the Corps staff at the workshop why they were not following Congress’s explicit orders (and the law) on the study, the staff said that no mechanism can be 100 percent effective in preventing introductions, so they wanted to “lower expectations.” That’s why they added “or reduce the risk” to the purpose of the study.

That’s a pretty significant lowering of expectations – almost to zero. I asked why they didn’t at least say the study purpose was “prevent to the maximum extent possible.” The Corps said they hadn’t thought of that!

Here’s what’s at stake:

Congress has ordered the Corps to evaluate the feasibility of measures that will actually prevent the introduction of Asian carp into the Great Lakes. That assessment would include economic and social factors as well as ecological ones, and it could be that the Corps concludes that some prevention measures are not feasible, or that some measures are more feasible than others.

But the Corps isn’t even willing to live by those rules. Instead, the Corps wants to assess the feasibility of measures that do NOT prevent the introduction of Asian carp… but only reduce the risk of introduction. Virtually any measure can be said to reduce the risk in some way. So the Corps might be assessing the economic and social costs of doing more electrofishing, or more commercial fishing, or improving the operations of the electric fences – all well and good, but none designed to prevent the introduction of Asian carp into the lakes.

And the Corps plans to unfairly compare “risk reducing” measures and their costs to the costs of measures that really prevent the introduction of carp – like hydrological separation. Which ones do you think the Corps will conclude are more feasible? I can answer that question now; we don’t have to spend millions of dollars and wait 5 years for that bad news.

The Corps should obey the law. And we all should hold them to it. Let’s ask the new Asian carp director, John Goss to do just that. Email him at John_R_Goss@ceq.eop.gov.

Bad News, Doubled, on Asian Carp

I don’t know which is worse: the discovery of a live Asian carp beyond the electric fence that is supposed to stop them, or the dismissive and obstructionist reaction to that discovery from the Army Corps of Engineers. That’s the negative impression I got after listening to an emergency briefing held yesterday afternoon by the agencies responsible for protecting the Great Lakes from the monster carp: the Corps, the Coast Guard, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. EPA, and the Illinois DNR.

Of course it’s bad news that a 20-pound, 34-inch bighead carp was captured in Lake Calumet, 6 miles from Lake Michigan and beyond the electric fence and the O’Brien Lock. There is no remaining physical barrier between where the fish was found and the Great Lakes. And because the fish was found in larger body of water (Lake Calumet) so close to Lake Michigan, chemical treatment may be unwise or impossible. That leaves increased electrofishing and netting to try to find more invasive carp and suppress whatever populations are present.

The good news is that most of the agencies on the call said that they plan to implement the electrofishing and netting measures and expressed a new urgency in making sure they were doing all in their power to stop the Asian carp from advancing. The US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US EPA, the Illinois DNR…. they all announced new measures to combat the carp, and each of them pledged to ramp up their efforts.  But not the Corps.

The Corps spokesperson, Mike White, made it sound as if the Corps would just like to wash its hands of the whole problem. On the call and in the press release, he said the Corps’ primary responsibility was:

“to continue to operate the locks and dams in the Chicago Area Waterway System for Congressionally authorized purposes of navigation, water diversion, and flood control. We will continue to support fish suppression activities by modifying existing structures such as locks as requested by other agencies to support this common goal…”

Protect the Great Lakes? Forget about it. Apparently the Corps does not think that protecting the Great Lakes is part of its mission.

When asked if the Corps would post on its website the results, including the date and location, of the additional DNA sampling we assumed the Corps would be conducting, Mr. White said the Corps is in discussions with the institutions who have done sampling in the past (Notre Dame) about whether Corps will continue doing DNA sampling at all. So, will the DNA sampling resume? The Corps doesn’t know, but it certainly hopes those discussions come to resolution sometime soon. Well, that’s a relief, right?

Later, in a call with the press, Mr. White was asked if the discovery of a live carp beyond the electric fence, 6 miles from Lake Michigan, made a response to the problem more urgent. His response was that the Corps would consider its statutory authorities and determine a course of action. In other words, the Corps is going to think about it and get back to us.

Will the Corps act forcefully and with urgency? Forget about it – not to protect the Great Lakes.

What’s terrifying is that the Corps is the agency that is supposed to decide on whether a permanent separation of the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River is feasible. Given the performance we saw yesterday, why bother? Their answer is predetermined (since Great Lakes protection apparently isn’t part of the Corps’s mission), and given the low urgency that agency is assigning to this issue, it could be decades before it finishes the study, anyway.

We’re supporting a bill to force the Corps to do a real feasibility study on hydrological separation, and to do it rapidly. Thanks to the leadership of the Great Lakes senators, particularly Senators Durbin, Stabenow, Levin and Voinovich, this bill might move, and move quickly. It will be a big help with the Corps’ mission.

But what about the Corps’ culture? I think we need to change the agency’s incentives. How about this: if Asian carp colonize the Great Lakes, then the costs to the ecosystem and the economies that depend on it get deducted from the Corps’ annual budget. Or even better: deduct those costs from the paychecks of their staff.

That might light the fire under them the Great Lakes need.

Real progress on carp!

It’s nice to be able to report good news on this topic, and this news is big.

Remember how many times I’ve emphasized that we must implement a permanent solution to stopping the Asian carp invasion?  Well, the only way to guarantee that carp would not move through the canals into Lake Michigan is to create a physical barrier between the Mississippi River system and the Great Lakes – hydrological separation. And in order to create that physical barrier the Army Corps of Engineers must first complete a feasibility study. But the law directing them to do the study was vague, and by all reports the Corps is not intending to take a hard look at hydrological separation.

Today the Great Lakes Congressional delegation took a big step toward hydrological separation. Led by senators from Michigan, Ohio and Illinois — yes, Illinois, too — the Great Lakes Congressional Task Force sent a letter to their Senate colleagues calling for legislation to direct the Corps to do a study of hydrological separation. Now, this is a study, not an order for action, but it’s an essential step and it’s the right step. Illinois Senator Durbin has really stepped up here, joining Michigan’s Senators Levin and Stabenow and Ohio’s Senator Voinovich in leading this Great Lakes protection effort. You can read the environmental community’s positive reaction to the letter.

Senators Durbin, Levin, Stabenow, and Voinoich, and the other 9 Senators who also signed the letter, recognize that hyrdological separation is not only essential for saving the Great Lakes ecosystem, but if done right can be of great benefit to improving Chicago’s transportation system, lowering transportation costs for businesses in Chicago and throughout the region, better cleaning Chicago’s wastewater, and bringing federal investment and jobs into the city. In other words, hydrological separation can be a win for the Great Lakes, the city of Chicago, and the entire region.

Congress should act quickly on the recommendations in the letter. Of course, the Corps doesn’t have to wait for Congress to authorize a new study. It should take the hint from these Senators and get started on a hydro sep study right away.

I hope this regional unity on this study is the beginning of a trend. The Great Lakes community is an incredible political force when we’re unified; just look at our successes the past two years on Great Lakes restoration funding and the Great Lakes Water Resources Compact. Now facing one of the most serious threats to the lakes in decades, we need that unity more than ever. Our Great Lakes senators are moving us in that direction, and just in time.

Supreme Court decision on Asian carp: the ball is in our court now

Pardon the length of this post, but I haven’t blogged in awhile, and this one is a bit complicated. Prominent in the news last week was the Supreme Court’s dismissal of Michigan’s petition to end the Chicago diversion and restore the natural divide between the Mississippi River system and Lake Michigan. After earlier refusing to hear two emergency motions to order short-term actions to stop the carp, the Court refused to reopen its consent decree that governs the Chicago diversion — which means the Court has declined to participate in any way on the Asian carp issue. That’s certainly disappointing, but at least in my mind, it does not have to be devastating.

Here’s why.

The only way to make sure Asian carp don’t enter Lake Michigan is to create a permanent barrier in the Chicago waterway system that stops live organisms from traveling through the canals (otherwise known as “ecological separation”). And the only entity that can build that barrier is the Army Corps of Engineers. To build such a barrier, the Corps would need to do studies on where and how the barrier could be built so as to maximize ecological protection while simultaneously creating economic growth (or at least minimizing economic harm). And then Congress would need to authorize the Corps to do the work and provide significant funding for construction.

Now, all this can happen without intervention by the Supreme Court. The Corps can do its study in a timely way (say, in 12-18 months), Congress can adopt the recommendations and fund them, and the Corps can then undertake construction. The problem is that the Corps is dragging its feet on the study and our Congressional delegation is divided as to what it would like the Corps to do. We heard last week that the Corps thinks it cannot finish its study by the end of 2012. And Congress isn’t likely to provide clear direction because there have been divisions between the Illinois delegation and most of the other Great Lakes states over the issue of ecological separation; without a unified front from the Great Lakes, Congress is unlikely to provide billions of dollars to fix a problem primarily associated with the Great Lakes.

Until the Supreme Court decision last week there were two strategies to getting the Corps to act quickly to complete the right kind of study and then for Congress to fund it.

The first strategy was (and is) to build consensus: to work with members of Congress, the states, the cities, the business community, scientists, and environmental organizations to find a method to do ecological separation that closes this canal system to invasive species while improving transportation and the Chicago and regional economies. This strategy brings people together to find a win-win outcome; it builds a consensus that the Corps would have every reason to adopt. We are already seeing signs that such a consensus is possible: the adoption of resolutions endorsing ecological separation by the Great Lakes Commission and its chair, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, was an excellent development. But that strategy takes time, and the Corps so far has been resistant to changing the slow, ineffective path on which it currently treads.

The second strategy was the opposite of consensus – the litigation option. Over the opposition of Illinois and some Chicago stakeholders, the Court could just order the Corps to do a study to determine the best ecological separation option and then implement it. Such an order would have been helpful in the following respects: it could have made sure the Corps did the right study (on how, and not whether, to do ecological separation); it could have forced the Corps to do the study quickly; and it could have established a special master to push the Corps to implement the study. But even under the best case scenario, the Court’s order could not have forced the government to stop the carp. The Court could not order Congress to provide funding, and without funding, there’s no construction for ecological separation. So even if we had the best decision from the Court, we’d need major action from Congress to protect the Great Lakes.

And that’s where the lawsuit created a bit of a paradox. A successful lawsuit could move the Corps along much more quickly…. but it also made action by Congress more unlikely. The lawsuit deepened and exacerbated the conflict between Illinois and other states, particularly Michigan, and their Congressional delegations. That conflict has made it extremely difficult for Congress as a whole to act. So while the lawsuit would have been really helpful in getting the Corps to do a good study quickly, it could have made doing the construction needed for ecological separation more difficult.

The dismissal of the lawsuit is a mixed bag. On the one hand, no lawsuit means a chance for the first strategy to work: to find widespread agreement around a win-win scenario for ecological separation. That agreement can be a force for funding and construction of ecological separation in ways that a Court order could not. On the other hand, it means that there’s no clear way to hold the Corps accountable – to conduct the right kind of study, and to conduct it quickly. It means that the first strategy becomes the only strategy. If we can’t build consensus and build it quickly, then the Corps will continue plodding along, often in the wrong direction, and the Great Lakes will be in real trouble.

That means the ball’s in our court now: we in the region, and not the Supreme Court, will decide the fate of the lakes. We’ve got some work to do.

Too quiet on the Asian carp front

The cameras have stopped rolling. The national newspapers have stopped calling. The editorials have stopped opining.

But the Asian carp haven’t gone away.

In any long-term environmental crisis, this is the most dangerous time — after the initial rush of concern passes and the media begin looking at other stories. The profile of the issue declines, and so does the political will to address it.

We can’t let that happen here, but that trend certainly is a risk for the Great Lakes. The last major story on Asian carp is that they were NOT found beyond the electric barrier after 6 weeks of fishing and sampling by the Illinois DNR and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. That’s not exactly a surprise, as most experts predicted that the odds of finding a live or dead fish in that stretch of the canals were quite low. But that story has the potential to take the pressure off the Corps and the other agencies who are supposed to be taking action quickly but haven’t:

• The Corps had a deadline of “early March 2010” to develop a “modified lock operations” plan to reduce the chances of carp movement through the canals. That plan will determine the short-term actions needed to stop the carp right away, while a permanent solution is found. But the deadline for the plan has come and gone. When will we see the plan, and when will it go into effect?
• The permanent solutions will be guided by a feasibility study on ecological separation of the Mississippi River system and the Great Lakes that the Corps is supposed to be undertaking right now. There’s broad agreement that study needs to be completed within a year; the Corps says it needs two years, in part to get sufficient guidance from outside experts and the public. But so far, there’s been no effort by the Corps to line up that guidance or begin the study. When will the Corps get moving?

So far, the Asian carp have moved much faster than the government’s response to them…and that was when there was enormous media pressure for action.  As the media pressure lessens, the public needs to step in. The millions of members of our organizations, the cities, the tribes, the states, we all have to push for fast action. The Corps should understand: the carp aren’t going away, and neither are we.