BP decides it won’t increase pollution in Lake Michigan
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Posted on August 24, 2007
Filed Under Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
What a stupid headline, but it’s the story on the front page of Milwaukee’s newspaper. It’s hard to believe we still live in a world where we have to fight to keep a corporation from pouring more toxic pollution directly into one of the Great Lakes.
As you know, we posted about this recently — that BP wants to increase capacity at an Indiana refinery by 15% and therefore sought permission to increase the amount of chemical pollutants it pours directly into the lake. My niece was pretty upset about it, as you may remember, living as she does right along the lake in Chicago.
The outcry was huge, and so they have backed down.
But I wanted to link to this article for a reason. What it is about is how minor this amount of pollution would be compared to the other sources that are destroying the entire lake ecosystem — 
mostly agricultural runoff and all those suburbanites out their who insist on pouring chemical fertilizers on their lawns.
It is so much easier to get angry at an oil company than agribusiness farmers, suburban homeowners, and developers.
This is not to say that BP’s proposal was okay. On the contrary, it would have been a real setback right now to set this kind of precedent — gets harder to turn down the next one, and the next.
But reporter Dan Egan’s point is well taken. Symbolic expressions of outrage in Congress do no good at all and are even getting tiresome. Targeting the tree and neglecting the forest, to torture an old metaphor, won’t do much good either. BP’s backing off saves our precious Lake Michigan almost nothing at all in terms of its deterioration, only helps fight future big oil polluters.
But, BUT!! unless we act to stop the big polluters, the lake will continue to deteriorate.
And here’s another tidbit from today’s paper. Demand for water in southeastern Wisconsin is expected to increase by 30% over the next 25 years as a result of exurban sprawl. Developers keep putting developments out there and affluent folks keep fleeing the city. But this development is not self-sustaining in terms of something as vital as water. Aquifers are being depleted and groundwater tables are dropping. Some people ‘out there’ who rely on wells are already down to the levels where dangerous radium rises to their taps and are now forced to drink bottled water.
We have little sympathy. If the groundwater could not support these developments, they should not have been built.
Meanwhile, these communities are demanding access to Lake Michigan water, which right now is not allowed for municipal water needs outside the lake basin. Those rules leave out much of the sprawl and the debate about what to do next is at fever pitch. Of course, local governments anxious for economic growth and a bigger tax base, along with greedy developers, want more water, lots more water, to keep the growth happening, no matter the damage to future generations of this precious Lake Michigan ecosystem — not to mention the formerly beautiful woodlands and wetlands where these developments now sit.
This must become one of the new frameworks now for everything we build, ‘develop,’ create — any project must be locally self-sustaining, taking nothing more than can be put back or replenished. This is radical. It will upset everything about how business is conducted in capitalist societies.
But it is the only way we can keep on living on the planet in the long term. Because what we are doing now is destroying ecosystems and depleting the Earth of what we need to live.
Technorati Tags: BP indiana refinery, BP backs off pollution proposal in Lake Michigan, Lake Michigan pollution, suburban sprawl, self-sustainable living
Photo credit/link: EPA
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