Every day, more than 12 million people wake up in the Lake Erie Watershed. For some, the lake is nothing more than a backdrop to their everyday life in the form of a 9,940 mile desktop wallpaper. For others, it’s the backbone of their day, whether it’s the fisherman who uses the lake’s bounty to make a living, the MetroParks employee who keeps the area around the lake clean or the mom of five from Avon who takes her daily walk around Rocky River Park.
That lake — the smallest of the five Great Lakes — might be the thing that determines the future of the country.
With the world fluctuating daily due to climate change, area leaders are working to make Lake Erie the cleanest and safest it can be while also working to help the lake reach its full infrastructure potential. “We have an unparalleled water economy in front of us,” says Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne. “We just need to make sure we utilize the water as a pillar of our economic future.”
When Ronayne got his introduction in politics by joining former Cleveland mayor Jane Campbell’s administration as the city’s planning director in 2002, one of his main focuses was on how to develop Cleveland’s lakefront. That focus led to Ronayne helping spearhead the creation of the Lakefront Nature Preserve in the Glenville neighborhood. Now, as the newly elected Cuyahoga County Executive, Ronayne’s working to help preserve Lake Erie for the future of Cleveland and the world.
He got a firsthand look at the Lake’s international pedigree last November when he was part of Cleveland’s delegation that attended the United Nations Convention on Climate Change in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. Despite being a world away from Cleveland, Ronayne spent the trip inundated with questions and comments about the Great Lakes region and how it can impact humanity’s future. “They may not know Cleveland in Sharm el Sheikh, but most everyone in the world understands the value proposition of the Great Lakes basin,” Ronayne says.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Great Lakes provide water to more than 30 million people. For Ronayne, the Great Lakes basin’s ascent to being a global freshwater beacon is even more impressive when you consider Cleveland’s checkered past with water. “The river once burned here, and now we have a legitimate stake in being the freshwater capitol of the world,” Ronayne says. Now, more than 50 years after the Cuyahoga River infamously caught on fire, Ronayne is part of a new guard of political figures working to regulate Lake Erie.
Currently, the lake is primarily regulated through the Great Lakes Compact, a binational treaty that mandates that any company that uses Great Lakes water for manufacturing has to return the same amount of water to the lake when it’s done to prevent the body of water from drying up.
That compact will become even more important with the opening of Intel’s $20 billion semiconductor processing plant outside Columbus. While the plant is located in New Albany, 140 miles away from Lake Erie, and it isn’t slated to open until 2025, the amount of water needed to run the plant could serve as a sort of litmus test for how the waterfront infrastructure could handle a potential boom in growth in the coming decades. “We can’t let anything negative happen to our water system,” says Cleveland Water Alliance director Bryan Stubbs. “We want that economic activity and we want job creation. It’s going to be really good for Ohio in the long run, but it won’t be good if we don’t handle our water resources correctly. We’ll only grow as a region if we’re willing to make clean water a main driver of our economy.”
But we’ve also seen what happens when clean water isn’t a focus. While the aforementioned burning of the Cuyahoga is perhaps the biggest example of what happens when Clevelanders have an apathetic view toward the health of the lake, there have been plenty of smaller instances of misuse that are just as important.
In August 2014, more than half a million Toledo-area residents were urged not to use their tap water due to a harmful algal bloom caused by agricultural runoff. While there hasn’t been an algal bloom of that severity since, each summer brings its own algal concerns: a stark reminder of what can happen when the proper care isn’t put into the Great Lakes region.
“We have an extraordinary situation of being 600 feet above sea level with 20% of the world’s fresh water,” says Kirsten Ellenbogen, president of the Great Lakes Science Center. “We have an advantage for the future; we just need to plan for it.”
Ellenbogen and the science center have been thinking about that future in 25-year increments, meaning that the curriculum in their classrooms is focused around building water turbines to plan for a future where water could end up being an energy resource. “We really want the youth to think about the role that water is going to play in the country’s future,” Ellenbogen says. “We want kids to come home talking about how what goes in the sewer grate impacts the lake.”
For years, Ellenbogen and the science center have taught classes and held exhibits around the importance of Lake Erie. Now, with an impending climate crisis increasing that importance, she’s hoping more and more people will begin to listen. “We need to start understanding that water is a luxury and not something that’s given,” she says.
