There’s been a lot written about last week’s midterm elections and I’m hesitant to add to it.
But I know I’m not the only person who noticed several of the states that swung from blue to red were in our region: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Why is this? High unemployment? Higher turnout of white working class voters dissatisfied with Obama?
What do you think? We’ve got a lot of collective brainpower amongst our readers, I am curious to hear people’s thoughts. Also, what policies enacted by Obama and the Democratic …

Earlier this week, Rust Wire was thrilled to chat with Great Lakes journalist Jeff Alexander, author of Pandora’s Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway. The book details how opening the Great Lakes to international shipping traffic via the Seaway allowed a number of invasive species in that have hurt the Lakes. I recommend the book for anyone who is interested in understanding more about the health of the Great Lakes ecosystem and the changes it has undergone in the last several decades. -KG

RW: “Could you start out …

Clevelanders: This sounds like a great film screening to attend- The Olmsted Legacy: a film about Frederick Law Olmsted and America’s great city parks.
Lots of people know Olmsted as the landscape architect of New York’s Central Park, but he designed nearly 100 public parks in his lifetime.
You likely have even been in a park he designed – in any one of Buffalo’s system of parks, Belle Isle Park in Detroit, as well as parks in Chicago, Milwaukee, Dayton and Scranton.
“The parks, he held, were to be vital democratic spaces in …

I think this is the most important article I have seen on the Rust Belt urban condition since this blog began.
Kain Benfield of the Natural Resources Defense Council has raised questions about the wisdom of mass demolitions in “shrinking cities.” In this article, he points out that leading urban thinker Richard Florida has joined him in this perspective.
Benfield makes the point that Detroit, Cleveland and other shrinking cities are being hollowed out, not by regional population loss, but by sprawl. Returning urban areas to quasi-rural will simply lengthen commute times …

It has been a summer of bad news for the Great Lakes:
-Asian Carp invasion.
-Increased climate change-driven warming, in Lake Superior and elsewhere.
-Sewage runoff problems.
Sorry to keep bringing you down, but here’s two more stories, both from The Toledo Blade. This one is about threats to the Lake Erie islands, and this is a detailed investigative piece about the algae blooms that have infested the Lake this summer.
-KG
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Billions of dollars of infrastructure investment are needed to stop untreated sewage from Great Lakes cities that flows into the Lakes, according to a study released earlier this month.
From January 2009 through January of this year, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee and Gary, Indiana, discharged 41 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm water into the Lakes, according to data analyzed by the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition.
“The Great Lakes are under siege from sewage overflows,” Jeff Skelding, campaign director for the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition, …

Reporter Peter Annin is an expert on all things Great Lakes-related: the environmental importance of the lakes and how they could be impacted by climate change, and the politics of water and water-sharing agreements involving the lakes and more.

He is the author of Great Lakes Water Wars, a book which details the political fighting and compromises surrounding the Great Lakes Compact – the agreement between the eight US states and two Canadian provinces that border the lakes and governs any diversion of lake water.

He is …

A troubling article from The New York Times via ClimateWire: Lake Superior, the largest, deepest and coldest of the Great Lakes is on track to have its warmest year ever.
“(T)he warming shows no sign of abatement,” the story reports. “This year, the waters in Lake Superior are on track to reach — and potentially exceed — the lake’s record-high temperatures of 68 degrees Fahrenheit, which occurred in 1998.”
The trend appears to be going on in the other lakes as well, the story states.
This is problematic because it …

In the name of protecting water quality in Lake Erie and the state’s streams, the State of Ohio has developed a voluntary, incentive-based program for sustainable development.
It’s full of really good stuff, for example:

Identify priority development and conservation areas.
Offer incentives like density bonuses, streamlined review processes, and design flexibility for development in priority areas.
Evaluate existing zoning codes, review processes, and regulations for disincentives to desirable development practices, and set policy for correcting the disincentives.
Establish regulations that prohibit construction in the wetland and riparian setback area.
Encourage compact neighborhood development, historic preservation …

There’s a group of young people living in a boarded-up mansion in Buffalo.
They don’t pay rent. In fact, they try to avoid using money altogether.
This group is part of an ideology known as Freeganism. They live lives of scavengers, convinced that society wastes too much.

What better place, then, than Buffalo, with its surfeit housing stock?
“It has a beautiful backyard with a lot of blackberry bushes!” a young resident tells the New York Times. With a handful of other misfits, Kit lives in the three-story house, which boasts 1,224 square feet …