By Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WBEZ and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

In the creeks and rivers of southern Illinois, a school of bigeye shiners darting along the edge of a stream is a sign of healthy water.

The freshwater fish, which is on the state’s endangered species list, has managed to survive despite habitat loss driven by decades of construction and industrial farm runoff. But an ongoing dispute between two state agencies over state species protections is testing how the tiny fish will endure.

Last summer, the state’s top wildlife regulators faced resistance from the Illinois Department of Transportation when trying to protect the shiner. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources recommended that IDOT crews mapping out construction at a site in Union County should first survey the area and find out if the shiner was present. If so, IDNR would ask them to apply for a permit to minimize impacts to the paper clip-sized fish before proceeding.

IDOT declined. The department’s reason, among others, was simple: “Fish swim away.”

The standoff between IDOT and IDNR, outlined in internal state documents obtained by WBEZ and Grist, is at the center of an ongoing clash that broke out last year after IDOT repeatedly ignored recommendations from state experts to pursue permits designed to protect imperiled species during road, bridge and other transportation work.

The widening rift between the state’s largest public landowner and its top wildlife conservation agency shows how state-funded transportation projects may have overridden Illinois’ Endangered Species Protection Act in 11 cases in the past year.

In response to IDOT’s handling of species protections, IDNR ended a decade-old agreement with the agency last fall that allowed IDOT to fast track through environmental reviews.

IDNR impact assessment manager Bradley Hayes pointed to “IDOT’s apparent automatic response to decline ITA recommendations” in his cancellation letter obtained by WBEZ and Grist.

An ITA, or incidental take authorization, is a permit that allows for the accidental harm of a protected species during the construction of an approved project, like building a road or fixing a bridge. These permits involve lengthy reviews in which applicants must outline potential impacts to listed species, require a public comment period and feedback from conservation specialists. The entire process can take at least five to six months.

Still, experts say these permits are crucial because they minimize harm to protected species and provide legal cover from criminal charges that can accompany the unintentional killing of a state-listed species.

IDOT’s Jack Elston responded to the termination letter at the end of last year disputing the initial allegations from the environmental regulators, saying that “IDOT does not make automatic responses regarding the IDNR recommendation for an ITA.”

In a joint statement from IDOT and IDNR to WBEZ and Grist, IDOT spokeswoman Maria Castaneda said, “IDOT continues to consult with IDNR and considers recommendations from IDNR along with multiple other factors, including known information about the species, other environmental surveys, engineering, costs and public safety.”

Castaneda added that the agencies are currently drafting a new agreement and that the agreement on file was outdated. “Updated language was needed,” she said.

Despite the agreement expiring at the beginning of 2019, IDOT continued to conduct environmental reviews until lDNR stepped in to stop them last fall.

Email exchanges between IDNR officials obtained by WBEZ and Grist show concern about how IDOT was conducting its environmental reviews.

Last December, IDOT’s Elston wrote that “fish swim away from construction noise” as justification for several projects that could harm fish and mollusks, like the harlequin darter and the American brook lamprey. In another instance, Elston wrote that the relocation of state-endangered mussels in White County was unnecessary and would delay a project by at least a construction season and add about $2 million in costs.

But emails obtained from IDNR officials showed increasing concerns with that rationale.

The American brook lamprey, for example, is unlikely to “swim away” from construction noise. It spends much of its life burrowed in sediment and dies not long after spawning.

“We are the experts,” wrote Todd Strole, IDNR assistant director, in an email earlier this year preparing for a meeting with IDOT. “Fish are not the same, some don’t swim away.”

In another email, Ann Holtrop, head of IDNR’s division of natural heritage, wrote: “We are open to professional dialog with IDOT but planning and engineering needs don’t negate or override the recommendations by scientists.”

The Illinois dispute reflects a broader erosion of species protections nationwide, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Rebecca Riley. Despite massive popularity, the Endangered Species Act, credited with resuscitating the bald eagle, grizzly bear and gray wolf, is once again under attack by the Trump administration.

During his first term, President Donald Trump advanced new guidance under the ESA which undercut species protection, at least until the the Biden administration undid the Trump-era rules. The Trump administration has submitted a new set of rules currently under consideration.

WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times reached out to Gov. JB Pritzker’s office for comment on how the state’s internal dispute fits into the Trump administration’s ongoing rollback of federal species protections; however, the Governor’s office offered no comments beyond what IDOT and IDNR provided.

The post Illinois state agencies at odds over endangered species protections appeared first on Great Lakes Now.

By Fatima Syed and Will Pearson, The Narwhal

The Great Lakes News Collaborative includes Bridge Michigan, Circle of Blue, Great Lakes Now, Michigan Public and The Narwhal who work together to bring audiences news and information about the impact of climate change, pollution, and aging infrastructure on the Great Lakes and drinking water. This independent journalism is supported by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

Any day now, a piping plover will make its seasonal return to Wasaga Beach, as it has done every spring for nearly 20 years. This time, its beachfront home could be a little less secure, which is why a new court case is pressuring the federal government to ensure the plover is kept safe. 

The world’s longest freshwater beach provides the perfect habitat for the tiny endangered birds, offering natural sand dunes and shrubbery for nesting and growing their population. 

For decades, both the Georgian Bay beach and the plover have been protected by the Ontario government through two main tools. First, the designation of Wasaga Beach as a provincial park, which meant  development and disruption of the sandy shore was off-limits. Second, the plover was offered extra protection under the provincial Endangered Species Act. 

Neither of those protections stand anymore.

Last fall, the Doug Ford government removed a majority of the beachfront from Wasaga Beach Provincial Park and transferred it to the local municipality in an effort to boost tourism development. And just last month, the government officially repealed the Endangered Species Act and replaced it with much weaker legislation that no longer recognizes the plover on its list of protected species.

The town has promised it will protect the plover after the transfer — and has begun working with Birds Canada on its habitat protection — but residents are not convinced. Two local officials agreed to speak to The Narwhal on the condition their names be kept confidential, for fear of retribution. They said on Apr. 13, a tractor owned by the municipality was seen raking more beachfront than was previously permitted — an action that could damage habitat and destroy plover nests. Though the raking hasn’t been repeated, many are concerned the beach is unprotected. The town did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment by the time of publication. 

As a result, environmental groups are taking the matter to federal court. 

In January, Ecojustice, on behalf of Environmental Defence and Ontario Nature, petitioned the federal government for an emergency order to offer protections for the piping plover by March, before machines are brought in to clear the beach after winter, and the birds begin migrating back. The federal government did not respond by that deadline.

In response, the groups have asked for a judicial review by the Federal Court of Canada into the delay and to compel Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin to make a recommendation to cabinet to issue the emergency protection.

The groups have also asked the court for an urgent, temporary order — or an injunction — to prohibit any raking or harmful development on the beach, which is federally recognized as a critical habitat. 

Here’s what you need to know about the tiny bird and its fate in Wasaga Beach.

What are piping plovers? And why are they endangered?

Piping plovers are sprightly shorebirds, each no bigger than a cotton ball, that can sometimes be seen bounding over Great Lakes beaches in the summertime. But seeing them isn’t easy — their sandy colour blends into their surroundings and they’ve become extremely rare in Ontario due to human encroachment.

“The main threat to the piping plover is human disturbance,” according to the Government of Ontario, “since the sandy beaches where plovers live are also popular for human recreation which can destroy nests.”

Plovers generally spend winters in the United States and Mexico, but return to more northern climates to nest for the summer.

For a long time, the Great Lakes were a prime destination for would-be plover parents. It’s been estimated that the region was once home to up to 800 breeding pairs. But the Great Lakes plover population cratered in the 1960s and ’70s, and the bird was considered extinct in Ontario by 1986.

But in recent decades, plovers have been staging a tentative comeback in the Great Lakes. A breeding pair returned to Sauble Beach (now Saugeen Beach) in 2007, sparking hope and enthusiasm among bird watchers and conservationists in the area. The birds have been spotted in the region annually since then.

But plovers’ hold is anything but secure. Some years pass with only a handful of breeding pairs observed, and other years come and go with no fledglings reaching maturity.

Why is Wasaga Beach important to plovers? And what do they like about it?

“Wasaga Beach is the most important and most productive nesting site for piping plovers in our province.”

That’s what Sydney Shepherd, the Ontario piping plover coordinator for Birds Canada, told The Narwhal last summer. The beach has been home to 59 nests and 87 fledglings since the birds returned about two decades ago, according to Birds Canada, a national conservation group. 

While plovers have been observed on other beaches in the Great Lakes region, none are anywhere near as popular with plovers as Wasaga Beach. The plovers that have been born on Wasaga Beach make up nearly 50 per cent of all fledglings in Ontario, and many of them have gone on to establish their own nests elsewhere in the region. 

Plovers tend to value Wasaga Beach for different reasons than human beachgoers. While tourists might prefer a well-groomed beach for lounging, plovers require naturalized shorelines: shrubbery and sand dunes offer cover from predators. That means of all the 14 kilometres of beachfront at Wasaga, only a small fraction near the northeastern tip of the park is suitable plover habitat.

What’s happening at Wasaga Beach?

The fortunes of the Town of Wasaga Beach have long been tied to the sandy shoreline that gives the town its name. Tourism to the area is the main economic driver, drawing more than 1.6 million visitors a year according to the municipality’s website.

But while tourism brings opportunity to the residents of Wasaga Beach, it also puts pressure on plover habitat. Until recently, that tension was managed by staff at Wasaga Beach Provincial Park, who were mandated to preserve and protect the sand dunes and other beach areas that plovers frequent.

The vast majority of the beachfront had long been within the boundaries of Wasaga Beach Provincial Park, and some in the town believed the park hindered efforts to spruce it up and develop new amenities and attractions to boost tourism revenue.

The Doug Ford government heard those concerns and acted on them. Ontario would sever more than half of the beachfront from the park and hand it over to the town to manage, Ford announced in 2025. Earlier this year, the province confirmed its intention to move forward with that plan, despite 98 per cent of formal citizen feedback on the plan being negative.

The Narwhal confirmed that transfer has now happened. 

All of the suitable plover habitat on Wasaga Beach is within the land set to be removed from the provincial park, meaning the habitat will no longer be protected by a provincial park designation.

The town, for its part, says it’s committed to protecting piping plovers. But it has yet to release its full redevelopment plans, and that leaves conservationists worried that the beach’s plover habitat is threatened.

Shepherd told The Narwhal this week that Birds Canada is in the process of formalizing their role with the Town of Wasaga Beach. The group is “seeking a committed partnership” to support the long-term protection and recovery of piping plovers that would enable them to monitor and protect the nests and the birds, and also increase education and awareness of the species. 

“So far, we have collaborated for one training session for [town] staff to begin to introduce what piping plover conservation entails,” she said in an email.

Are piping plovers otherwise protected?

The removal of provincial park designation from plover habitat on Wasaga Beach comes on the heels of other policy changes that weaken species protection in Ontario.

In 2025, Ontario repealed its Endangered Species Act and replaced it with new legislation called the Species Conservation Act, a weaker set of rules that drops some key protections.

One difference between the two acts is the newer one adopts a more narrow definition of “habitat” than the former act. When it comes to legal protections for the habitats of endangered species, the new legislation’s scope is limited to the specific area an animal nests or dens in, rather than the larger area it uses to travel or find food.

But even that limited protection doesn’t stand for piping plovers, which have been removed from Ontario’s list of protected species. With the loss of provincial park status, the plover habitat has been stripped of another protection that could have restricted the beach grooming activities that render Wasaga Beach unsuitable for plovers — and appear to have already begun.

That’s why environmental groups are now turning to the federal government to fill the gap. Nationally, there is a species-at-risk law that can be invoked for the protection of an endangered species and the broader habitat it needs to survive. The question is whether the federal government will use it to save the piping plover’s favourite Ontario beach.

Updated on April 22, 2026, at 2:55 p.m. ET: this story has been corrected to note that piping plovers have been removed from the Government of Ontario’s list of protected species, meaning even the individual and its nest are not provincially protected.

The post Will Canada protect the piping plover before it returns to Wasaga Beach? appeared first on Great Lakes Now.

IN THIS EPISODE:

On Kelleys Island, Tom and Paula Bartlett are on a mission to band 100,000 birds. When winter hits, it’s up to icebreakers and tugboats to keep the lakes moving. Can your yard become a national park?

For years, scientists believed that many migrating birds would avoid crossing the Great Lakes. But thanks to bird banders like Tom and Paula Bartlett, we know know that many birds do cross the lakes, stopping on small islands. On Kelley’s Island in Ohio, Tom and Paula are on a mission to band 100,000 birds.

When winter descends, traveling the lakes becomes a dangerous proposition for freighters. Ice can trap even the largest ships in place, and it’s up to a small fleet of U.S. and Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers and tugboats working in tandem to keep vital shipping routes moving.

What if your yard were part of a national park? That’s the idea behind the Homegrown National Park Movement, an effort to get property owners to see their land as part of a larger ecosystem. GLN’s Lisa John Rogers spoke with the movement’s co-founder Doug Tallamy to find out more.

The post Banding Birds and Breaking Ice appeared first on Great Lakes Now.

Check out @SciNC’s video about the Crush Truck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpDRtKC92DU

And the full Earth Month playlist from PBS: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnNZYWyBGJ1F8ofFm4H9UTrHxqU8zngK4

For years, scientists believed that many migrating birds would avoid crossing the Great Lakes. But thanks to bird banders like Tom and Paula Bartlett, we know know that many birds do cross the lakes, stopping on small islands. On Kelley’s Island in Ohio, Tom and Paula are on a mission to band 100,000 birds.

#Birds #Nature #Wildlife #EarthMonth #GreatLakes #Ohio #Birding #ornithology #citizenscience
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“A Bird in the Hand” was produced by Christy Frank Photography LLC and @RunningWildTVSeries in partnership with Great Lakes Now/Detroit PBS

Produced, Shot, Written, and Edited by
Christy Frank and Alex Goetz

Narrated by
Rob Green

Featuring original music by
Steve Madewell and Bill Lestock

The post Tracking the Birds of the Great Lakes appeared first on Great Lakes Now.

By James Bruggers, Inside Climate News

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Belching smoke from a new plastic waste processing plant in central Ohio has stirred opposition to an even larger “chemical recycling” factory planned for Arizona by the same company.

The Freepoint Eco-Systems plant near Hebron, Ohio, fired up its processing kilns for the first time in 2024. Since then, it’s faced multiple citizen complaints about sooty emissions, from black clouds of smoke to flames. Dozens of times, plant operators have bypassed normal pollution controls to vent gases through a flare after upsets in their manufacturing processes, including emergency shutdowns, according to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

The state regulator has issued four notices of violation to the company, according to an agency database, and launched an enforcement case after the latest one in December.  

The Ohio plant’s troubled track record should be a red flag to officials who oversee permitting for the company’s plans for Eloy, Arizona, about 60 miles south of Phoenix on Interstate 10, said Kevin Greene, a pollution-prevention expert who lives in nearby Tucson and retired from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.

Another warning should be the industry’s “troubling” underperformance when attempting to use chemical processes to turn mixed plastic waste into fuels or new plastic feedstocks, said Greene. 

“How about a six-month pause on this project while they investigate what’s going on in Hebron and take another look at the industry in general?” Greene suggested in an interview with Inside Climate News.

At least one Eloy city councilmember, Josephine “JoAnne” Galindo, said she’s concerned enough to want to be part of a potential Eloy delegation to visit Ohio, tour the Freepoint plant there and meet with local government and company officials.

“I would want to know more,” Galindo said. “I’m always concerned about the safety of my community.”

Freepoint officials declined a request for an interview on either their Ohio plant’s environmental performance or their proposed Arizona facility. 

In a written statement, the company said it has “invited officials from Arizona to tour our Ohio facility to see the sophistication of our operations and the scale of the plastic waste we are working to process. We’re currently scheduling this visit.”

In Ohio, the company is working with environmental and occupational safety and health officials and the local fire department “to ensure compliance with health, safety and environmental requirements,” the statement said. Freepoint officials, the statement added, “have implemented a number of operational improvements.”

In February, at public meetings in Arizona, a Freepoint representative put a positive spin on the situation.

“You get the benefit of being the second mover,” Geof Storey, the company’s chief development officer, told the Pinal County Board of Supervisors. “We are only going to build this one if the first one works. You are going to get all [the] learnings and all the benefits of that [Ohio] project.”

To the Eloy City Council the same week, he added, “We are still working out some of the kinks.”

The Ohio plant, located about 30 miles east of Columbus near Interstate 70, is designed to process up to 175 million pounds of plastic waste annually. The waste is sourced from plastic packaging companies and community recycling programs throughout the region, including as far away as Louisville, Kentucky. 

Freepoint Eco-Systems, a subsidiary of global trading and finance firm Freepoint Commodities, envisions at least a half-dozen facilities in the United States, Storey told Arizona officials. The Eloy facility would collect waste plastic from as far away as California and Colorado, as well as from Phoenix and Tucson, he added. A company PowerPoint presentation said its capacity would be more than twice the Ohio plant’s.

That would make the Eloy plant one of the largest in the world, said Rita O’Connell, a national organizer with the environmental group Beyond Plastics. But O’Connell also noted that the company’s PowerPoint contains a disclaimer that “there can be no assurances that information relied upon in preparing this presentation will prove accurate or any of the projections will be realized.”

Deregulatory Agenda Boosts Chemical Recycling

Industry officials have advocated for chemical recycling of plastics for years—often under the umbrella term of “advanced recycling”—as a solution to the global plastic waste crisis. 

Typically, that’s done with a technology called pyrolysis, the process of decomposing materials at very high temperatures in an oxygen-free environment. Traditional uses range from making tar from timber for wooden ships to transforming coal into coke for steelmaking.

More recently, major oil companies and small startups alike have sought to develop the technology as an alternative for recycling a wide variety of plastic waste. So far, they’ve been met with limited success and serious pushback from environmental groups viewing it as akin to incineration.

But one of the biggest criticisms is the paucity of plastic waste that pyrolysis actually turns into new plastic. 

For example, a 2024 lawsuit by California Attorney General Rob Bonta—against ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis-based chemical recycling operation at its Baytown complex near Houston—claimed decades of recycling deception contributed to a plastics crisis in California and around the world. In the lawsuit, which is still pending, Bonta asserted that no more than 8 percent of the incoming plastic waste to ExxonMobil’s plant is converted to feedstocks for new plastic. 

The lawsuit claimed the remaining waste becomes fuel, which is subsequently burned. 

After the lawsuit was filed, ExxonMobil responded that “advanced recycling works. To date, we’ve processed more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste into usable raw materials, keeping it out of landfills.”

The United Nations estimates that the world produces roughly 882 billion pounds of plastic waste each year.

Freepoint, which also uses pyrolysis, declined to say how much of the waste plastic it takes in becomes new plastic.

Storey told Arizona officials its plants divert waste from landfills and offset in-the-ground oil demand. 

Company officials said 70 percent of incoming plastic waste is converted into something called pyrolysis oil, or pyoil, which is used as a feedstock to create new products. About 25 percent is converted into gas used to heat the kilns. The rest becomes something called char, what Storey described as “black carbon.”

Storey said the pyoil gets sent to petrochemical customers on the Gulf Coast. There, company officials said, it serves as a “substitute for crude oil to create new plastics and other products.”

“What products our customers manufacture and where they distribute them,” the company said, “is up to our customers.”

The chemical industry has already worked to ease regulations on advanced recycling in dozens of states, including Arizona and Ohio. And in March, after groups of chemical and plastics industry lobbyists visited the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters, the EPA took an initial step to exempt pyrolysis from federal Clean Air Act regulations.

Beyond Plastics’ O’Connell, who is based in New Mexico, said the chemical industry seems to have accelerated its push for chemical recycling as the Trump administration rolls back a wide range of environmental rules. At least three recycling and chemical regulation bills pending in Congress aim to boost chemical recycling of plastic waste, she said.

Fewer than 10 chemical recycling plants are operating in the United States, often in a limited capacity, said O’Connell, whose group follows the industry’s performance.

But Oil and Gas Watch, a petrochemical tracker created by the Environmental Integrity Project, identifies about 40 potential new chemical recycling facilities in the works. Some are proposed, some are in the permitting process and some are approved for construction.

“Given the national atmosphere, it’s possible we’re about to see the lights go on on a bunch of these proposals that haven’t moved in a while, because there seems to be a lot of energy in this direction,” O’Connell said. “It all points to a huge industry push to leverage this Congress and EPA to get chemical recycling rolling nationally.”

Ohio EPA Opens an Enforcement Case

It was a little more than a year ago when Amanda Rowoldt, an Ohio organizer with the environmental group Moms Clean Air Force, was driving by the Freepoint facility near Hebron and saw black smoke billowing out of the stacks. She took a video and filed a complaint with the Ohio EPA.

“Long story short, they were found in violation of exceeding their particulate limits,” Rowoldt.

Numerous pollution incidents followed. A local nonprofit newsroom covering Licking County, The Reporting Project, affiliated with Denison University’s journalism program, took notice.

Denison is a small private liberal arts college located about 10 miles away in Granville. Doug Swift, who teaches at Denison and is an advisor of The Reporting Project, said a plastics recycling theme in an investigative reporting track resulted in a series of articles. 

One of the stories, published Feb. 26, revealed the citizen complaints, the state’s violation notices and a 911 call last May from a resident a quarter-mile away reporting “a factory on fire.”

“It was a great series to push out into the community, and it did alert some of our most engaged and knowledgeable citizens to the plant and to a technology most didn’t know anything about,” Swift said. He described the Hebron area as something of a local news desert, often ignored by commercial news outlets in the region.

Hebron Mayor Valerie Mockus said her municipality has no jurisdiction over the plant because it’s located just outside city limits, in an industrial park in Union Township. Still, she said she’s been concerned about environmental incidents there, though she is working to keep an open mind.

“I am very interested in finding ways to address problems with novel solutions,” Mockus said. “We have a problem with too much plastic. Is this a way to address that? But I was disappointed to hear about the negative side effects.”

She described her community as working class, its residents familiar with plumes of evaporated vapor coming from industrial stacks. “When it comes out black,” she added, “everybody pauses.”

According to the company’s air-quality permit from the Ohio EPA, the plant is allowed to emit certain levels of toxic fine particles, volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides, hydrochloric acid, and dioxins—pollutants that collectively can damage lungs, cause cancer and create havoc with other bodily systems.

Ohio EPA’s most recent notice in mid-December alleges air-permit violations including excess emissions of particulates, a toxic mix that can include soot, smoke and a variety of chemicals. Since then, the agency has opened an enforcement case against the company, said Max Moore, a spokesman for the Ohio EPA.

The state agency required the company to conduct emissions testing to get a clearer picture of what’s being released into the air, Moore said. Visible particulate emissions exceeded an opacity limit 18 times from Feb. 1 through March 31, he said. Nitrogen oxides from a test in February also exceeded a permit limit, he added.

On April 3, an Ohio EPA official chastised Freepoint for repeatedly failing to quickly notify the agency of plant malfunctions, according to an email that Inside Climate News obtained through a public-records request.

“This issue has been beaten to death at this point, but we still are not receiving immediate notifications of malfunctions,” the state official wrote, citing an example of a late afternoon March 30 notice to regulators of an early morning March 27 malfunction. 

“If it helps, think of it like calling the fire department when there’s a fire,” the official told the company representatives. “That’s immediate. You wouldn’t wait eight hours or until the next day.”

A company representative said that afterward, “we promptly changed our reporting process to ensure it’s in line with their requirements.”

The Ohio EPA’s Moore said the goal “is to get the facility back into compliance.”

Pollution and Fire Videos

Cat Adams, a Columbus-based organizer with the Buckeye Environmental Network, said several workers have sought her out to describe unsafe working conditions, including dust, chemical spills and fire hazards. She hears from area residents about the plant, too.

“There’s a group of people in the community who are worried about it, and they want something done,” Adams said.

Shawn Jones is one of them. He was an eyewitness to the May 27 fire and took a video of it. In subsequent months, he’s kept a close eye, documenting other incidents of billowing smoke. “I’ve probably seen that 15 times,” Jones said, adding that he’s concerned about the health and safety of both people in the community and workers inside the plant.

He said he’s not sure what, if anything, Ohio EPA officials will do to force the company to comply with environmental regulations.

“I’d like them to shut the whole place down,” Jones said. “It’s such a new process. They clearly don’t have it figured out yet.”

He said it feels like Freepoint is “doing sandbox experiments in the backyards of thousands of people. They can, because of the lack of zoning here.”

In Arizona, Greene, the former Illinois environmental official, said he and an Eloy resident, Ralph Atchue, are asking Pinal County air quality officials to strengthen a permit they issued the company three years ago. The reason they’re citing: the company’s pollution record in Ohio. 

Greene also suggests that the city of Eloy should ask for fenceline air-quality monitoring to give the community real-time data on any leaks and equipment failures.

Noting that the company has essentially described its Ohio plant as a test case, Greene added: “I’d like to know what’s going to be redesigned [for Eloy], or what’s going to be improved. But I also want to make sure there will be the appropriate safeguards in place to ensure that it doesn’t happen in Eloy—and that it doesn’t recur in Hebron.”

The post Ohio Plastic Waste Plant to Expand Nationally appeared first on Great Lakes Now.

By Kelly House, Bridge Michigan

The Great Lakes News Collaborative includes Bridge Michigan; Circle of Blue; Great Lakes Now at Detroit PBS; Michigan Public, Michigan’s NPR News Leader; and The Narwhal who work together to bring audiences news and information about the impact of climate change, pollution, and aging infrastructure on the Great Lakes and drinking water. This independent journalism is supported by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Find all the work HERE.

The US Supreme Court has unanimously sided with Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel in a dispute over which court — state or federal — should oversee Nessel’s lawsuit to shut down the Line 5 pipeline.

The court’s nine justices ruled that Enbridge cannot move the state court case Nessel filed seven years ago to federal court, because the company missed a 30-day deadline to do so.

Jurisdiction matters because federal courts are considered more likely to sympathize with Enbridge’s argument that the pipeline should stay open, while state courts are more likely to sympathize with Nessel’s argument that it should close.

The ruling is the latest development in a yearslong dispute over the fate of the 72-year-old oil pipeline owned by Canadian oil giant Enbridge Energy, which crosses through the open water of the Straits of Mackinac as it transports petroleum products from Wisconsin to Ontario.

The aging pipeline has sustained damage multiple times in recent years, sparking fears that it could rupture and cause an oil spill in the Great Lakes.

Citing those fears, Nessel in 2019 filed a lawsuit in the 30th Circuit Court in Ingham County seeking to shut down the pipeline’s lakebottom segment. But two years into deliberations, Enbridge attempted to move the case into federal court — missing a 30-day statutory deadline to do so.

In a dispute that made its way to the nation’s highest court, the company argued it qualified for an exception to the deadline, while state lawyers accused the company of seeking “an atextual escape hatch.” 

In an opinion authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the justices concluded that Congress authorized limited exceptions to the 30-day deadline, none of which apply to the circumstances of this case.

“Enbridge’s counterarguments are not persuasive,” Sotomayor wrote.

The procedural ruling doesn’t settle the question of the pipeline’s fate. But it remands the case back to Ingham County, where deliberations are paused pending the outcome of a separate case.

In a statement, Nessel said the ruling “makes emphatically clear” that the case belongs in state court.

“For far too long, following years of Enbridge’s delay tactics, the fear of a catastrophic spill from Line 5 has haunted our state, threatening to turn our most vital natural resource into a man-made disaster,” Nessel said.

Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy expressed confidence that the company will prevail in arguing that the line should remain open. 

“The fact remains that the safety of Line 5 is regulated exclusively by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration,” Duffy wrote. That agency is part of the US Department of Transportation.

In a ruling tied to a separate shutdown dispute between Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Enbridge, US District Court Judge Robert Jonker ruled in December that federal pipeline safety laws preempt state laws, leaving Michigan with no “power to interfere” in Line 5 operations. The state is appealing the decision and Nessel’s state court case is paused pending the outcome of that appeal.

Prolonged battle

For years, fans and foes of the pipeline have been battling in Michigan and Wisconsin over fears that the pipeline could cause a catastrophic oil spill. Enbridge also owns the line 6B pipeline, which spilled into the Kalamazoo River causing among the worst inland oil spills in US history. Line 5 has been repeatedly struck by ships’ anchors, further heightening pipeline safety concerns.

In 2018, Enbridge pitched a plan to move the Straits section of the pipeline into a concrete-lined tunnel deep beneath the lakebed to alleviate spill concerns. But that plan, too, has been controversial, with some contending the best solution is to remove the pipeline entirely.

It’s a debate that revolves not only around spill risks, but concerns about land disturbances from tunnel construction, infringement on Native American treaty rights in the Straits and the climate implications of building infrastructure that would lock in decades of additional fossil fuel use.

The US Army Corps of Engineers and the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy are both preparing to issue key permitting decisions tied to the tunnel plan. 

Meanwhile, the Michigan Supreme Court is deliberating over a lawsuit challenging a separate tunnel permit the state already granted.

The post Supreme Court sides with Nessel in Line 5 jurisdiction dispute appeared first on Great Lakes Now.

Richard B. (Ricky) Rood, University of Michigan

Michigan and parts of Wisconsin are in the midst of a historic flooding event in spring 2026. Days of heavy rainfall on top of snow have sent lakes and rivers over their banks and threatened several dams in both states, forcing people to evacuate homes downstream. By April 20, 2026, nearly half of Michigan’s counties were under a state of emergency. In Cheboygan, Michigan, large pumps were brought in to lower pressure on a century-old dam in the city.

The region’s aging water infrastructure was never designed for the volume of water it is facing. That’s a troubling sign for the future, with flooding becoming more common as global temperatures rise.

In many areas, the damage has been exacerbated by a culture of building homes and cabins on the shores of inland lakes and along riverine lakes behind small, often privately owned dams. Many of these dams were built over 100 years ago, with some long forgotten.

I am a professor emeritus of meteorology at the University of Michigan whose work focuses on helping communities adapt to climate change. The warming climate is worsening the flood risk, and disasters like the one Michigan is experiencing are setting higher benchmarks for safety as communities plan future infrastructure.

Where is all the water coming from?

For much of Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as northern Illinois, 2026 has been the wettest March and April on record.

In March, much of that precipitation fell as snow, including in an enormous blizzard that brought 3 feet of snow to parts of Michigan. In mid-April, persistent rains began. The rain, on top of all that snow, sent floodwaters running into rivers, streets and homes. The water carries large amounts of ice that damages shores, infrastructure and homes.

The moisture for much of these storms has been funneled northward from the warm Gulf of Mexico, thanks in part to a high pressure system sitting over the southeastern U.S.

The problem of warming winters

The kind of flooding Michigan and Wisconsin are experiencing in 2026 is what forecasters expect to see more of as global temperatures rise.

Winters have been warming faster than other seasons across the U.S. In Michigan and Wisconsin, winter months used to be reliably below freezing, but that’s changing. In the Cheboygan area, near the tip of Lower Michigan, March temperatures used to be below freezing on all but a few days. By the 1991-2020 period, the region averaged 10 days above or close to the freezing point – about twice as many as the 1951-1980 period.

The air coming in from the south is also warmer than in the past. Nationally, 2026 was the warmest March on record in 132 years of record-keeping in the contiguous U.S., with an average temperature more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) higher than the 30-year average. So, in addition to snowmelt starting earlier, melting is happening faster.

Michigan’s average wintertime temperature rose by more than 4 F (2.3 C) from 1951 to 2023. Though winter 2026 in Michigan was colder than the 1991-2020 average, the Gulf of Mexico, where the moisture originated, was warmer than average, accelerating the snowmelt.

How warming leads to downpours and flooding

A few aspects of a warming climate can lead to flooding.

First, temperatures are increasing. In higher temperatures, moisture evaporates faster from the ground, plants and surface water. That moisture, once in the atmosphere, eventually falls again as precipitation. However, for each degree Celsius that temperatures increase, the atmosphere can hold about 7% more moisture, resulting in more heavy downpours.

A warmer winter also means more melting snow and more rain-on-snow events that can quickly increase the amount of runoff into rivers.

The Great Lakes region and much of the Northeast already experience more precipitation than in the past. Winters with more persistent wetness – not just snow but also rain – prime the region for floods. With continued warming in the coming decades, 2026 might be among the least disruptive in the future.

Data shows that a scenario of persistent wetness, changes in winter and seasonal runoff is part of the future for Michigan and the other states and Canadian provinces along the Great Lakes Basin, as well as New England.

Fixing dams for the future

All of this means communities across the region will have to pay closer attention to the growing risks facing their vital infrastructure – particularly dams.

Even prior to the 2026 floods, Michigan had a well-documented problem with its aging inventory of 2,600 dams. In May 2020, an intense storm system that stalled over the region brought so much rain that the Edenville and Sanford dams both failed near Midland, Michigan, forcing 10,000 people to evacuate and causing an estimated US$200 million in damage.

After that disaster, a state task force issued recommendations for fixing the state’s water control infrastructure to meet the growing risks. But a member of the task force told The Detroit News in April 2026 that little had been done to address those recommendations.

Michigan and parts of Wisconsin are in the midst of a historic flooding event in spring 2026. Days of heavy rainfall on top of snow have sent lakes and rivers over their banks and threatened several dams in both states, forcing people to evacuate homes downstream. By April 20, 2026, nearly half of Michigan’s counties were under a state of emergency. In Cheboygan, Michigan, large pumps were brought in to lower pressure on a century-old dam in the city.

The region’s aging water infrastructure was never designed for the volume of water it is facing. That’s a troubling sign for the future, with flooding becoming more common as global temperatures rise.

In many areas, the damage has been exacerbated by a culture of building homes and cabins on the shores of inland lakes and along riverine lakes behind small, often privately owned dams. Many of these dams were built over 100 years ago, with some long forgotten.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ik4S2Kgn9ak?wmode=transparent&start=0 Michigan State Police captured scenes of stressed dams and flooding across Cheboygan County, near the tip of the Lower Peninsula, including the century-old dam in the city of Cheboygan that was nearly overwhelmed by flood water.

I am a professor emeritus of meteorology at the University of Michigan whose work focuses on helping communities adapt to climate change. The warming climate is worsening the flood risk, and disasters like the one Michigan is experiencing are setting higher benchmarks for safety as communities plan future infrastructure.

Where is all the water coming from?

For much of Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as northern Illinois, 2026 has been the wettest March and April on record.

In March, much of that precipitation fell as snow, including in an enormous blizzard that brought 3 feet of snow to parts of Michigan. In mid-April, persistent rains began. The rain, on top of all that snow, sent floodwaters running into rivers, streets and homes. The water carries large amounts of ice that damages shores, infrastructure and homes.

The moisture for much of these storms has been funneled northward from the warm Gulf of Mexico, thanks in part to a high pressure system sitting over the southeastern U.S.

The problem of warming winters

The kind of flooding Michigan and Wisconsin are experiencing in 2026 is what forecasters expect to see more of as global temperatures rise.

Winters have been warming faster than other seasons across the U.S. In Michigan and Wisconsin, winter months used to be reliably below freezing, but that’s changing. In the Cheboygan area, near the tip of Lower Michigan, March temperatures used to be below freezing on all but a few days. By the 1991-2020 period, the region averaged 10 days above or close to the freezing point – about twice as many as the 1951-1980 period.

The air coming in from the south is also warmer than in the past. Nationally, 2026 was the warmest March on record in 132 years of record-keeping in the contiguous U.S., with an average temperature more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) higher than the 30-year average. So, in addition to snowmelt starting earlier, melting is happening faster.

Michigan’s average wintertime temperature rose by more than 4 F (2.3 C) from 1951 to 2023. Though winter 2026 in Michigan was colder than the 1991-2020 average, the Gulf of Mexico, where the moisture originated, was warmer than average, accelerating the snowmelt.

How warming leads to downpours and flooding

A few aspects of a warming climate can lead to flooding.

First, temperatures are increasing. In higher temperatures, moisture evaporates faster from the ground, plants and surface water. That moisture, once in the atmosphere, eventually falls again as precipitation. However, for each degree Celsius that temperatures increase, the atmosphere can hold about 7% more moisture, resulting in more heavy downpours.

A warmer winter also means more melting snow and more rain-on-snow events that can quickly increase the amount of runoff into rivers.

The Great Lakes region and much of the Northeast already experience more precipitation than in the past. Winters with more persistent wetness – not just snow but also rain – prime the region for floods. With continued warming in the coming decades, 2026 might be among the least disruptive in the future.

Data shows that a scenario of persistent wetness, changes in winter and seasonal runoff is part of the future for Michigan and the other states and Canadian provinces along the Great Lakes Basin, as well as New England.

Fixing dams for the future

All of this means communities across the region will have to pay closer attention to the growing risks facing their vital infrastructure – particularly dams.

Even prior to the 2026 floods, Michigan had a well-documented problem with its aging inventory of 2,600 dams. In May 2020, an intense storm system that stalled over the region brought so much rain that the Edenville and Sanford dams both failed near Midland, Michigan, forcing 10,000 people to evacuate and causing an estimated US$200 million in damage.

After that disaster, a state task force issued recommendations for fixing the state’s water control infrastructure to meet the growing risks. But a member of the task force told The Detroit News in April 2026 that little had been done to address those recommendations.

Because warming will continue for the coming decades, the 2026 flooding should be considered at the lower end of capacity for stormwater infrastructure and dams. Rather than relying on the statistics that described floods in the past, planners will have to anticipate the floods of the future.

Michigan is often touted as a climate haven because it is relatively cool and has plenty of water. The state is not, however, immune to the amped-up weather of a warming climate. Environmental security in the future requires improved and more adaptive infrastructure.

The post Extreme rain on snow is testing aging dams across Michigan and Wisconsin — this is the future in a warming world appeared first on Great Lakes Now.

Explore the Fish City living near the waters of a nuclear power plant and get your questions answered LIVE!

Using cutting-edge underwater robotic camera technology, discover the hidden world beneath the surface of the world’s largest freshwater ecosystem. Explore the aquatic metropolis living near the fish-filled outflow of a nuclear power plant on Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula, where the warm water creates a unique gathering space for a diverse range of species.

Hosts:
Zach Melnick, Inspired Planet Productions
Yvonne Drebert, Inspired Planet Productions

Guests:
Dr. Nicholas Mandrak, Professor, Department of Biology, University of Toronto
Dr. Cherie-Lee Fietsch, Environment Regulatory & Research Manager, Bruce Power

Hidden Below: Live is series of live, underwater explorations of the Great Lakes. Presented by Inspired Planet Productions and Great Lakes Now with support from the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

The post Fish City | Hidden Below: Live appeared first on Great Lakes Now.

This Earth Day, Detroit PBS programming is focusing on turning land back into something wild. Better known as “rewilding,” a large-scale conservation effort that usually involves reintroducing keystone plant or animal species to reestablish the health of a local ecosystem. 

In the Great Lakes region, Illinois recently made history by being the first state in the nation to make rewilding part of its official strategy. As of January 1, 2026, the “Illinois Rewilding Law” is now in effect. According to the Chicago Tribune, the law empowers the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to go after projects that restore land to its natural state.

“The law could encompass the reintroduction of keystone species that improve ecosystems, like beavers and bison. But officials and environmentalists say closing the federal gaps in wetland protection is their focus right now,” wrote Christiana Freitag at the Chicago Tribune. 

After the Supreme Court case Sackett v. EPA rolled back federal wetland protections, Illinois became especially vulnerable considering it already lost 90% of its swamps. Chicago was built on wetlands, which are important when considering water quality and flood prevention — this is especially significant, as Chicago has dealt with severe flooding. 

An international effort

British author and conservationist Isabella Tree joins our Detroit PBS colleagues to discuss her non-fiction book “Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm.” On April 29, be sure to check out their live event with PBS Books Readers Club, from 8 to 9 p.m. ET. 

Tree’s book details her process of rewilding her 3,500 acre estate in Sussex, England. After visiting an arborculturist to save their oak trees, Tree and her husband were inspired to change everything they were doing with their land. After it was depleted by centuries of farming, they transformed it into a healthy haven for the littlest bugs and grazing animals, all by planting native flora and fauna. 

“I think the only answer to eco anxiety is to get your hands dirty and do something,” said Tree. “And the joy that can come from even transforming a window box… so that you’re now attracting night flying moths and hoverflies and all the forgotten pollinators, you’re making a difference. And that feels just so fantastic.”

Be sure to also check out the upcoming documentary, Wilding (inspired by the book) that premieres on PBS, on April 22. 

What you can do

For those who would like to feel more involved in helping our ecosystem, Doug Tallamy wants private property owners to know they have a role in the conservation movement. Tallamy calls this the Homegrown National Park movement. 

“Most people have too much lawn,” said Tallamy. 

According to the author, entomologist, biologist and conservationist we have 44 million acres of lawn in this country. When there’s a storm event, most of those pesticides, fertilizers and herbicides run off into the watershed. He said, if we’re going to put plants in our yards, why not use ones that do everything we need to conserve and protect our environment? Native plant alternatives to grass help guard our watershed, help the food web, support pollinators and are often better at sequestering carbon.

 “The point is, what you’re doing is creating connectivity,” said Tallamy. “If you and a bunch of other people do it, then outside of the parks and preserves it’s not no man’s land, there is some habitat.”

For more information, watch Great Lakes Now’s latest interview: 

The post Rewilding, a new way to heal the land this Earth Day appeared first on Great Lakes Now.

Yolanda Kondonassis is a musician working in the Great Lakes region, formerly at the Cleveland Institute of Music,she will begin teaching at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance in the fall. Now, the Grammy-nominated harp soloist performs on the harp and drums, on an album commissioned by the Interlochen Arts Academy, called “Terra Infirma.” 

“Terra Infirma” had its digital premiere on April 17, ahead of Earth Day, and was composed by Reena Esmail for a collaboration with Kondonassis. Esmail started writing the concerto in January 2025, while living in Altadena, CA as the catastrophic wildfires began to enclose her neighborhood. The concerto also references Esmail’s extensive studies of Hindustani music — specifically the raags (or ragas) of Deepak, which are fabled to evoke uncontrollable fire. The piece also required another song or raag of Megh, which brings the rain as it is typically sung during monsoon seasons. 

For Earth Day, Christa Grix from Detroit’s Jazz and Classical station WRCJ 90.9 FM (also owned and operated by Detroit PBS), discusses this groundbreaking new work in conversation with Kondonassis. They also touch on Kondonassis’s nonprofit, Earth at Heart, which encourages conservation awareness and action through music and the arts. 

For the full interview, you can listen here:

The interview below was recorded, transcribed and edited for length and clarity.

Christa Grix: It gives me great pleasure to welcome my guest, Yolanda Kondonassis, a globally renowned harpist, composer, harp pedagogue, author, recording artist and environmental activist.

Yolanda Kondonassis: Thank you so much for having me. 

CG: I have admired you for most of my professional career, and I’m also aware of Reena Esmail. I do the programming at WRCJ, and I heard her music about a year ago, and I said, that is a composer to pay attention to. So, I can’t imagine anything better than the two of you collaborating on this project, “Terra Infirma.” And I’d like you to tell us all about it. 

YK: You know, the best things in life, I think, happen kind of organically, and because of that, they tend to evolve for all the right reasons. Reena and I probably first met virtually about five years ago. And we met through our husbands, who are both very active musicians. 

My first experience with Reena was through my “Five Minutes for Earth” project, which was my most recent album, where I commissioned a whole bunch of folks to write a roughly five minute piece that was inspired by Earth.

She’s just such an intelligent, curious person, and we have very much the same sensibility when it comes to creating art. Our environmental concerns and everything we do to make sure the planet will be around for many, many years to come — art should be approached the same way, that term “sustainability” should apply to both.

And I think her music has sustainability. So much art right now is created extremely quickly; premiered, quickly; consumed, quickly and then almost discarded. We don’t really hear much about it again, and this is not musical fast food.

CG: No, it is absolutely not.

YK: It had about a four year gestation period. We talked about all sorts of different iterations this might take. And finally, we had one kind of seminal conversation where it was like, what sound, what sonic element would really bring the harp to life in a way it hadn’t been before?

I’ve kind of always been sort of a closet percussionist. And I thought, well, you know, the harp is a percussion instrument. What if you actually wrote a concerto for harp and percussion, and I do both, and how would that look?

It just was such an amazing experience to learn about all these different percussion equipments. I play 18 different percussion pieces, and I’m shoving my harp across the stage, in a sort of a metaphorical journey.

CG: Could you tell me a little bit more about those logistical challenges? Principally, being a harpist, I know it’s no small feat to move a harp. And for our listeners, let me mention that the harp is about six feet tall and weighs about 80 pounds, so when you’re talking about moving — and as I understand— the harp is a main character in a musical drama. Is that correct? 

YK: You said it. I just get excited every time I think about the genesis of this piece. Because initially we thought, okay, we’ll put you on stage. We’ll surround you with a ton of percussion, you may have to get up at some point. And then as we really started talking about the subject matter…

What if the harp actually, and to some degree, me as a performer were like a protagonist in this story of what we face environmentally? And what if the harp almost symbolized Earth as a “not” inanimate protagonist. And as anybody who plays the harp knows, that is not an inanimate object. You’ve got to be a harp whisperer, to play that thing. 

It evolved from the idea of me sitting in one place on stage in my usual concerto position, surrounded by percussion to “what if you walked on stage just without a harp and started doing something percussive?” And from that, it evolved into this idea that my harp starts on one side of the stage. And throughout the journey of this piece, it is a journey, I literally shove it from one percussion battery to another.

CG: So, not on a dolly or anything like that. You shove it?

YK: Yes, and so that shoving was literally built into the choreography. Then, of course, we said, well, this is getting very theatrical. What if one of the movements was incorporated at a theatrical element where you’re literally walking around the stage? Maybe you’re rimming a singing bowl. Maybe you’re exploring while the orchestra does something else. So, it really kind of stretched me to my limit. 

CG: We all know that you’re a passionate advocate for the environment. What inspired you to do so much for the environment and for Mother Earth?

TK: I think that when something evolves over time you begin to invest in it, emotionally and otherwise. And really, when I started truly thinking about the environment is when I had my daughter in 2002. As we know, when you have a child, you start thinking farther ahead than we do when we don’t. 

I did an album called “Music of Hovhaness,” a piece on there was called, “Spirit Of Trees.” This was 20 years ago, and I thought, this music is so inspiring to me. This sounds like I’m walking through the woods and this is incredible, just being struck with the way music can conjure both a visual image and inspiration. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we set it up so that my royalties from this album went to the Rainforest Alliance? And that was kind of the first little foray into all of this. 

That eventually led to establishing my nonprofit called Earth at Heart, and writing a kids book called “My Earth, My Home.” You know, one thing kind of leads to another. I wanted to kind of wrap my artistic life around this unifying mission. At a certain point, I think during covid, is when I started thinking, okay, great, I’ve been doing this for decades. I played in every part of the world I could have ever dreamed of. I’ve played the traditional repertoire. I’ve commissioned some great pieces. What’s my mission, what’s my unifying idea. 

And so it was a great kind of incubator during the pandemic to develop some ideas and to really have the time to follow through on them, because for busy musicians, that’s the tough part. It’s like we’re always full of ideas, but it’s the time to develop them and let them sit a minute and germinate and marinate before you take the next step. 

It’s been a wonderful way to combine passions. I don’t pretend to be a climate scientist, but what I can do is work on inspiring action, inspiring awareness of things. And what better way to do that than music? I think if anybody hears this piece, “Terra infirma,” they might even be inspired to learn more about it, and in learning more about it, who knows, they might become really inspired to think about environmental concerns in a way they hadn’t before. When they’d been thrown stats and statistics and, quite honestly, very scary stuff. What a better way to reach people than through music?

Both Reena and I talked about how we didn’t want “Terra Infirma” to be some sort of musical Armageddon, even though the reality is very scary. But, I think the only way we address any problem is with hope, hope that we can do something, hope that our actions will have an effect. 

“Terra Infirma” premiered live on October 30, 2025 at Interlochen Arts Academy. As of April 17, listeners will find the album digitally on all streaming platforms.  

The post When Music Meets Climate Crisis: A New Concerto Echoes the Planet’s Fragility appeared first on Great Lakes Now.