With the help of a grant from The Joyce Foundation, MEC recently completed a six-month exploration of collaborative advocacy with key groups in the Lake Erie basin. The idea was to test the waters to see whether cross-border coordination on policies and actions affecting Lake Erie ecosystem health could be effective, and if so, whether some sort of structure for continued collaborative action should be pursued.

Lake Erie is the only Great Lake without a lake-wide advocacy organization, and yet it is, of all the lakes, the most at-risk due to its shallowness, surrounding high population density and its legacy of industrial contaminants. The return of the "dead zone" in 2001 recalled the dead Lake Erie of the early 1970s, a lake choked with rotting algae, dying fish and oxygen levels too low to support most aquatic life.

Since much of Lake Erie's pollution, especially sewage pollution, comes from the Detroit River, it made sense for MEC to pilot this work, in effect saying to advocates in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Ontario, "Michigan is the 500-pound gorilla on this lake. We want to make our state do a better job of protecting it, and at the same time figure out an effective way to coordinate protective efforts in all the surrounding jurisdictions."

Project director Margaret Wooster identified about 50 key organizations interested in working together on Lake Erie issues. These included environmental councils working in each state or province; Lake Erie coastal, river and watershed groups; and researchers like the Lake Erie Millennium Initiative and the state Sea Grants who could act as advisors. The network took on three issues that were timely, Lake Erie-wide in their importance and had strong local organizers:

o A draft permit for a proposed new coking plant on Maumee Bay (Ohio) would allow eight million pounds of hazardous air pollutants, including 680 pounds of mercury, to be discharged annually.

o A provincial zoning order prohibiting development of a rare 300-acre dune, wetland and Carolinian forest ecosystem on the north shore of Lake Erie was about to expire with no further protection plans in place.

o A proposed rule in Michigan would limit phosphates in dishwashing detergent to the same levels that were established for laundry detergents over 20 years ago.

In each case, the network worked with local leaders to generate letters to the appropriate local, state and provincial decision-makers, placing the proposed action in the context of international, national, state and regional policies for Lake Erie. The Lake Erie import of these decisions earned press for the issues in local and regional newspapers and helped affect initial outcomes. The coke plant mercury discharge limits were greatly reduced, for example, and the protective zoning order was extended for Marcy's Woods. But all of these issues are ongoing.

Conclusion? The project's final recommendations to The Joyce Foundation were: (1) that a Lake Erie advocacy network is needed, and (2) that the structure for continued collaboration should be lean and mean, not a new 501(c)(3) organization, but something simpler. MEC hopes to follow up on this as a way of helping restore Lake Erie.