Michigan environmentalists in April linked the faltering recovery of the Great Lakes to flagging public participation and a failure of government leaders. In a groundbreaking report on the health of the lakes, MEC called for reforms to rehabilitate the public role in Great Lakes policy and management.

"In the 1960s and 1970s, public demand for Great Lakes cleanup spurred enormous progress, but now more threats are cropping up even as old ones linger. The failure of Great Lakes governments to invite and capitalize on public interest in the Great Lakes is a source of this disturbing trend," MEC President Lana Pollack said. "The time for reform is now-before the U.S. Congress is asked to provide $4-6 billion in Great Lakes restoration funding, as proposed by bills now pending in the House and Senate," she added.

The report analyzes the capacity of the network of governmental institutions charged with overseeing the Great Lakes' health and concludes that despite millions of dollars in public funds, problems have begun to worsen in the last decade.

The number, complexity and diffuse responsibilities of the institutions, as well as their failure to include the public in their decisionmaking, have stalemated cleanup efforts. Institutions charged with protecting the lakes include the International Joint Commission (IJC), a U.S.-Canada body, the Great Lakes Commission, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, the Council of Great Lakes Governors, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and state and provincial governments.

"Talk about restoring the natural ecosystem is premature and doomed to fail unless we take steps to restore the governance ecosystem, too," said Dave Dempsey, MEC's senior policy analyst and the report's author. He added that most Great Lakes state governments and the International Joint Commission consciously shut out the public from decisionmaking processes during the 1990s.