The Environment Report

If you’re out on a lake this summer and you stumble on a blob that looks like an alien life form, it could actually be a good thing. Jo Latimore got an email recently about a weird-looking greenish-gray gelatinous blob that a boater found in Juno Lake in Cass County. Latimore is an aquatic ecologist at Michigan State University. She says she got an email from the boater saying, “We found something that’s pretty gross attached to the bottom of one of our pontoon boats and we’re afraid of what it

Asbestos is known to cause cancer. It’s banned for some uses in the U.S., but it’s not entirely banned . The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing a new rule, and new ways to evaluate the safety of asbestos.

There's a scene in the 1967 film The Graduate where a well-meaning friend of the family pulls Dustin Hoffman's character aside at his graduation party, and gives him this advice: "There's a great future in plastics - think about it, will you think about it? ... That's a deal." But back then, the downside of plastic wasn't apparent.

More than 16,000 ticks have arrived in Nate Nieto’s mailbox. He’s an associate professor of microbiology at Northern Arizona University, and he launched a citizen science project to learn more about the diseases ticks can transmit. People from 49 states sent him (and his collaborators at Colorado State University) the ticks they found on themselves or other people or dogs. “We started thinking that the majority of tick awareness is really in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest, and so really

Wind energy became popular because it can reduce the need for polluting coal and gas generated electricity. But, things are shifting now. “The primary driver is economics,” said Stanley “Skip” Pruss with Five Lakes Energy , a consulting firm on sustainable energy. “Obviously, there are other benefits associated with wind and solar energy. It is environmentally benign. It doesn’t produce any carbon dioxide, no particulates, no acid gases, no heavy metals that contaminate the Great Lakes. So, even

New tariffs are putting some Michigan newspapers and printers at risk of going out of business. There’s more than a little irony in the fact that a state which built paper mills all over, no longer makes the kind of paper that newspapers use.

How can cities reduce flooding caused by increasingly intense rain storms? More often, it's flooding in areas not known for a lot of flooding in the past. That happened in Detroit in 2014. It caught everyone by surprise as interstates and neighborhoods were suddenly under water.

What happens if your dog likes to swim in the lake, but there might be toxins in the water? It can happen in a local lake or somewhere like the western basin of Lake Erie. Toxin-producing cyanobacteria appear. Some people still call it blue-green algae. “Starting like late July, early August it starts to look like liquid guacamole,” said Bill Braunlich, who lives right on Lake Erie near LaSalle, Michigan. He and his husband Michael Meyer own a Bahamian Potcake dog named Ruby. “It means we have a

Beaches along Lake Michigan are closed when E. coli bacteria gets too high. But a nasty critter found on the bottom of the lake might help keep the beaches open. E. coli gets into the water and on beaches through stormwater runoff and sewer overflows. But those are a relatively small part of the problem. Most of the fecal bacteria comes directly from visitors. “It can be deposited directly from skin shedding from people on the beach. It can also be deposited by wildlife defecation, and diapers,

New laws signed by Governor Rick Snyder last Friday set up commissions to oversee the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. Environmentalists say those commissions will be stacked with business and industry people and give them more influence in the environmental rulemaking process.