Mary McKSchmidt Blog

If It’s Not Okay, Then What?

9/2/2019

Thank you for your support as I try to live my creative life following the wisdom of the late Toni Morrison:

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

In my fourteen years living near Lake Michigan’s shoreline, I have yet to meet anyone who isn’t concerned about the deteriorating health of the lake. The question I am always asked is, “what can I do?” The upcoming presentations are designed to answer that question—with examples from across the region that I hope will spark creative thinking and fuel a desire to get engaged. Please join us.

On September 17th at 6:30 p.m. in the Herrick District Library in Holland, I am honored to be participating in a panel discussion on “Glocal Water.” Part of the Living Sustainably Along the Lakeshore Series, the forum will focus on water quality, quantity, distribution, and conservation locally and globally— i.e. “glocal.”

Joining me will be Dr. David VanWylen, Dean for Natural and Applied Science at Hope College. He will outline the challenges of global water scarcity as people, communities, and nations struggle to find safe, accessible, and affordable water.

Discussing local challenges with groundwater depletion created by our unique bedrock Marshall Sandstone formation will be Paul Sachs, Director of the Department of Planning and Performance Improvement for Ottawa County.

As for me, my presentation is titled “If It’s Not Okay, Then What?”

It is not okay that the health of Lake Michigan is at risk. Nor that the number and magnitude of the issues are increasing. There are things we can do, as individuals, to make a difference. But if we want to drive needed changes faster, more efficiently, we need to link arms and form teams. Following the example of forty-two fourth graders at Quincy Elementary School, we’ll explore how organizations can get involved in tackling the everyday issues that threaten--access to and the quality of—our water.

I also am thrilled to be speaking at the Hope Academy of Senior Professionals (HASP) on October 10th at 1:00 p.m. in the HASP classroom. The talk is titled "A Lake Michigan Love Song."

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What Might We Learn from the Irish?

8/14/2019

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I subscribe to The New York Times, my friends to The Wall Street Journal. Both newspapers are targeted to the intellectual reader. So, why is it so difficult to discuss matters of importance?

The daughter of an Irish Catholic mother and a father of Irish Protestant descent, I stood in the opening of a peace wall in Belfast, Ireland, pondering the lessons of history. On this misty spring day in 2019, decades after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 settled the “Troubles” of Northern Ireland, the gate still closes at 7:00 p.m., reopens at 7:00 a.m. Both sides feel safer knowing violence cannot be hurled in darkness over a wall 40’ high, 4’ thick, and extending 6’ below the ground.

“They would have you believe this was a war about religion. It was not.”

He, the first of our two tour guides, stood outside Divis Tower, not far from City Hall, the place where the Troubles began.

“It started as a civil rights march from Belfast to Derry,” one of the thought-leaders behind the October 1968 march, explained. “We fashioned the protest after the Civil Right movement in the United States. We wanted equal opportunities for all, including the right to own property, to earn a decent wage, to have one person get one vote—regardless of whether one was Catholic or Protestant. After hundreds of years of conflict, we believed we could bring change to Northern Ireland and end discrimination through peaceful protest. We were wrong.”

On the fourth day, as they neared Derry, the protesters were ambushed. Over 300 loyalists (supporters of the union between the Protestant British monarchy and Northern Ireland) appeared in the fields above a narrow country lane bordered by hedges. The loyalists pelted the marchers with stones and beat them with crowbars and lead pipes when they tried to flee.

“The police—known as the Royal Ulster Constabulary—did nothing to intervene. There were even members of the police auxiliary, called the B-Specials, involved in the beatings. As riots broke out across Northern Ireland, the loyalists burned our homes and gunned down unarmed family members and friends fleeing the fires. This radicalized our youth and the movement took a violent turn.”

It also revitalized the Irish Republican Army (IRA), an organization known for its use of guerilla tactics in Ireland’s War for Independence from Great Britain in 1920. For violence begets violence. By the time the Good Friday Agreement was reached and the Troubles declared over, 3,600 people would die.

More than 2,000 were civilians.

I see the bullet holes in the walls of Divis Tower and the many gardens of remembrance for the lives lost before I am ushered through the gate to the other side.

“Make no mistake, they are terrorists.” the second guide tells us, nodding to the community we have just toured. Formerly a member of the British military, he wore the crossed rifles of a marksman during the Troubles. “My job was to train the loyalists to shoot to kill.”

He points to the little girl with bright red curls playing in a vacant lot overgrown with weeds.

“That used to be someone’s home before a bomb was tossed from the other side.”

He leads us to Frizzel’s fish shop on Shankill Road, the site where a bomb took the lives of nine people in October, 1993, two of them children. Another fifty-seven were injured. He mentions the car bomb that exploded in Omagh and the twenty-nine civilians killed after the peace agreement was signed.

“Despite what you hear about the Good Friday Agreement, I believe there are guns, ammunition, and bombs still hidden in bunkers. I believe the IRA is still out there, waiting to attack.”

Will the walls ever come down?

“Hearts and minds have been shattered. Maybe in the next generation things will change and we can find understanding. But our kids do not play together, do not go to the same school or church, shop at the same stores. They will not see the faces of the children on the other side of the wall until University. They do not have the opportunity for friendship.”

According to historian John Gibney, the Good Friday agreement did not address many of the root causes of the conflict, but rather was a brokered peace in a deeply divided society. It was an opening in a wall, an opportunity to end the bloodshed.

We, in this country, can learn from the Irish. Before we become so deeply divided our walls become impenetrable, we can engage in dialogue, seek to understand differing points of view. We can join the mourners in Dayton who demanded that government “do something” to address gun violence. We can insist our leaders find an opening in the wall of rhetoric and end these senseless killings. If they cannot, we must find leaders who can.

Resources:

Belfast Political Tour. https://www.belfastpoliticaltour.com
Gibney, John. A Short History of Ireland 1500-2000. 2017. New Haven and London. Yale University Press
Keefe, Patrick Radden. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. 2018. London. William Collins

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Welcome Her with Yellow Roses

7/24/2019

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I do not want to “send her back”, but welcome her, instead, with yellow roses.

On August 18, 1920, thousands of yellow rose petals floated wildly through the air above Tennessee’s legislative chamber as a 24-year-old first-term Republican cast his “Aye” vote in favor of ratifying the 19th Amendment.

Yellow roses symbolized the dawning of a new day for women, a day no one thought would happen. That it happened in Nashville, capitol of a southern state with an “all-male, all-white, mostly good-old-boy” legislature is nothing short of miraculous. But it did.

In the pocket of Harry Burn, the youngest state representative, was a letter from his mother—a widowed, land-owning, non-voting taxpayer. She urged him to do the right thing, to vote for ratification. He listened, changing his earlier “Nay” vote to “Aye” and broke the gridlock. Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify women’s right to vote, sealing the three-quarter majority required to make the Amendment federal law.

Prior to the ratification, women and men had battled emotional, religious, financially-motivated, and political beliefs that women should be governed under the common law tradition of femme covert. A holdover from British rule, it meant all power and authority resided with men. A woman had no rights. Her role was to be silent and subservient. It was a fight that took seventy-two years and spanned four generations.

The campaign to change common law practice began in 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott convened a convention of 300 people in Seneca Falls, NY. Advancing the rights of women under a Declaration of Sentiments fashioned after the Declaration of Independence, they emphasized one key difference. The signers held “these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.” Resolutions demanded equal rights for women in marriage, education, religion, employment and “the sacred right to the elective franchise.” They wrote:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her . . . He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God. He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

It is a message with an increasingly familiar ring.

Susan B. Anthony joined the cause in 1851. The three women, considered founders of the woman suffrage movement, were not alive when the final battle was waged in Nashville. In the engrossing nonfiction, The Perfect 36, the authors describe a thorny path to victory that included bribes, threats, tapped telephones, lawsuits, “parliamentary shenanigans”, and lobbying efforts conducted in the Hospitality Suite of Nashville’s Hermitage Hotel where Tennessee-brewed Jack Daniel’s whiskey was available twenty-four hours a day. Yet despite the drama, the authors concluded that the summer of 1920 “must be counted as one of democracy’s finer triumphs.”

It is a triumph at risk.

When crowds, whipped into emotional fury, chant “send her back” or “lock her up” to women who have the courage to speak their truth and the confidence to try and make this country a safer, healthier, more just place to live, work and raise children, they are echoing the sentiments of those who believed women deserved no voice outside the home. They are sending all women “back” in action, if not law.

I say to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, “You are welcome here! And thank you.”

Come November 2020, I will vote with a yellow rose in mind and heart to keep the voices of women—all women regardless of national origin, color, race, religion, or sexual preference—in the public sphere. I urge others to do the same.

Resource:
Patrick Dugan, Janann Sherman, Carol Lynn Yellin. The Perfect 36. 1998. Oakridge, TN. The Iris Publication Group.

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Floods, Crop Shortages, Ticks

6/24/2019

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Our climate is changing
now. Extremely rapidly.
Expect wetter winters and springs
with heavy rain, snow events.
Intensity and frequency of tornadoes,
large hail, damaging thunderstorm winds.

Rain events exceeding 6 inches
now occur regularly. Flooding.
Sewage overflows. E. coli alerts.
Beach closures. Water-borne pathogens.
Nutrient runoff. Algal blooms.
Great stress on water infrastructure.

I have just returned from Washington, D.C.
The White House says “We don’t believe you” but

changes in precipitation affecting farmers.
Planting delays caused by spring flooding,
excessively wet soil conditions. Delayed planting
puts crops at risk during hot, drier conditions.
Will likely reduce crop yields for soybean
and maize by 10-30% mid-century.

More events. More rain. Exceeding
capacity of culverts and storm sewers.
Lake level variability high, affecting
marinas, docks, shoreline homes.
Vulnerability of beaches, shorelines
and bluffs to erosion. Wave damage.

Both parties get it but don’t want to do anything
until the political climate is such they don’t feel
they are committing political suicide.

Shifts in length of season. Increasing concerns
about invasive species. Ranges shifting
for sport and baitfish. Parasites, especially ticks,
surviving in greater number. White-footed mice,
carrier of known pathogen for Lyme, to colonize
new areas, including southern Michigan and Quebec.

I volunteer my time because our children
and grandchildren will bear the burden
of our decisions.

They already are.

My note to Congressmen Fred Upton and Bill Huizenga: “Addressing climate change must be a priority. I am not a scientist but I see what is happening to our lakeside communities, dependent in part on tourism, in part on farming. We are under water.”

A Found Photo Poem

A poem found in the words of Dr. Donald J. Wuebbies, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Illinois, as spoken (in italics) at the June 2019 meeting of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative and published in the report, “An Assessment of the Impacts of Climate Change on the Great Lakes,” Accompanying photos found in Park, Laketown, and Saugatuck Townships.

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Hope

6/17/2019

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Check out this story in today's Detroit Free Press to see why Laura O'Brien and so many others give me hope someday the only colors we will see in the skies above our Great Lakes will be those gloriously painted by God!

"18,000 pieces of balloon waste were found in Great Lakes: Why it's a danger"

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U of M Student Launches Study to Eliminate Balloon Litter

6/14/2019

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Lara O'Brien

My name is Lara O'Brien and I am a master's student at the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability. I am currently researching the environmental impact of balloon releases in the Great Lakes, Here's a link to a recent article:

In order to collect more data on balloon debris sightings, I have created a Survey123 form that can be used to record the date, time, location, and photo of the debris sighting. This data can

then be used to quantify, analyze, and create visual maps of balloon debris. (Link to survey)

I am originally from Kansas City and have always been interested in the environment and how people view and interact with the natural world. I received a B.A. in Anthropology and a minor in Geography from the University of Missouri. I also have an M.A. degree in Geography from the University of Kansas. Using qualitative research and in-depth interviews, I focused on the effects of climate change and sea level rise on low-lying island nations in the Pacific and how indigenous communities are adapting to current and future environmental changes. When I traveled to some of these small, remote islands, I was able to talk with members of the local villages and see the direct impacts of climate change. I was also astonished at the amount of plastic littering the beaches and the lagoons and saw that plastic pollution was another huge environmental challenge for the islands.

After I graduated, I became increasingly involved in wildlife conservation and volunteered at a wildlife rehab in Kansas. There I learned more about native birds and wildlife and how they are also impacted by climate change and increasing pollution. I decided to enroll at the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) to continue my studies and learn more about the science and data behind climate change and conservation as well as the latest developments in GIS and remote sensing technologies. My hope is to combine qualitative, quantitative, and geospatial methods to help raise awareness about climate change and plastic pollution and help communities protect and conserve their environment.

For years, I have been horrified when groups gather and release balloons. I hope by engaging and participating in this citizen science research, more people will become aware of the impact balloons and balloon releases have on the environment and wildlife. Hopefully, it will lead to changes in behavior and changes in policy.

Meeting this woman gives me great hope for our planet. Please support her efforts to eliminate balloons from the skies above the Great Lakes by providing her information on balloon litter sightings at https://arcg.is/1OfbKT. And PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!

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860 pieces of plastic, 528 straws, and too many steps to count!

4/22/2019

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Forty-two volunteers picked up 43 balloon remnants and ribbons along the shores of Saugatuck Dunes State Park on Saturday, April 20th. They also collected 860 pieces of plastic, 528 straws, 393 plastic bottle caps, and 326 cigarette butts and cigar tips.

Our litter tells a story and it’s not a good one. And while the amount of trash collected was most likely reduced by high lake levels and waves that battered the beach and made the normal 2.5- mile continuous walk in the sand impossible, the group picked up almost 80 pounds of trash!

What an incentive to use less plastic, more reusable products and dispose of trash appropriately!

Thank you to all involved in Saturday’s Alliance for the Great Lakes Spring Kickoff and to the “Don’t Let it Fly or the Great Lakes Will Cry” team committed to eliminating balloons from the skies above our lakes. Working together, we can make a difference.

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Inside the Copper Pail, a Sacred Gift

4/16/2019

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Josephine Mandamin

The message of Josephine Mandamin of the Anishinabek Nation of Ontario, Canada, was always the same.

Water, the source of all life, is a sacred gift. We, the people of this earth, need to adopt it, honor it, care for it, pray for it, fight for it.

Quoting Grand Chief E. Benton-Banaise-Bawdwayadun, a tribal elder she heard in 2002, Josephine Mandamin warned that “the abuses of water will result in severe shortages. And if we don’t do anything about it, thirty years from now our water will cost the same as gold”.

The key word, she said, was “if.” It didn’t have to happen. And when the chief finished his talk by asking, “What are you going to do about it?”  she decided to start walking. Beginning with Lake Superior in 2003, this grandmother in her sixties—and then seventies—would inspire and participate in water walks that spanned over 15,500 miles alongside all five Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River and other major waterways in the region.

Unbeknownst to me, during that same chilly month of April 2008 as I hiked north up the eastern coast of Lake Michigan, she and a group of Water Walkers were traveling south, carrying the symbolic copper pail filled with Lake Michigan water, praying for its health.

Josephine Manadamin, passed in February at the age of seventy-seven. What might I have learned from this remarkable woman had our paths crossed?

She admits in journal entries and video interviews* that these walks were tough physically and, in the beginning, emotionally.  Passing motorists who did not understand taunted her, and the small group accompanying her, with war whoops and shouts like “crazy Indians” or “get a job.” But she and the others kept walking. And by 2008, the year they completed the last leg of the Great Lakes journey, there were native and nonnative people, men and women, young and old walking alongside.

“She had an aura about her that made her special,” Royce Ragland, founder of the Green Elk Rapids organization and an inductee into the Michigan Environmental Hall of Fame, told me. “Something emanated from her, a quiet peacefulness that grabbed your attention, made you want to be near her.”

Ragland asked Mandamin to speak to the Elk Rapids organization in 2010, and to return in 2018.

“She had such a powerful message it gave us goose pimples. She was so modest, humble, and focused on her mission. One of the warmest and most brilliant things about Josephine was that she accommodated all of us, especially those of us who did not know indigenous cultures and traditions. She walked the talk that this mission must include everyone.”

In researching Mandamin’s journey, I learned that women, as life givers, must understand the meaning of water, and how it gives life, just as women give life. The copper pail is a reminder that it is women’s responsibility to care for the earth and her water. And copper, one of the universal elements, is a reminder of Mother Earth in her tender beginnings, before chemicals, pollution, and climate change put her health at risk.

JoAnne Cook and Josephine Mandamin

But women cannot walk alone. In addition to the copper pail, the Water Walkers carried a staff inscribed with an eagle, the symbol for caretaking and protection. “Just as men’s responsibility does not end when the seed is planted in the womb of a woman, men must accompany women on this critical work of caring for the water,” she reminded a gathering of chiefs encountered while walking Lake Huron. Men must help carry the load.

“In the culture of the indigenous people, everything is connected,” explained JoAnne Cook, a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa/Chippewa Indians, a consultant, and former tribal court judge. “Peacemaking allows everyone a voice. Healing happens. The same thing for the water. When we pray, talk positively, and conduct water ceremonies, we are helping the water to heal.”

Cook participated for several days in three of the walks.

“Josephine was so inspiring. When she heard the words of the chief, she received her own personal message and followed it. It’s so easy to say ‘I’m just one person, what can I do?’ But look what she did!”

According to Ragland, she gave the term “grandmother” new meaning. “She saw something that needed to be done and she just did it. She didn’t let her age or her health get in the way.”

How do you measure the success of the Water Walk? Josephine Mandamin wrote in her journal after that first year hiking the circumference of Lake Superior. Is it the numbers of miles walked? Is it what we experienced? Is it the people we met?

I suspect it was all those things. For me, it is knowing her spirit walks alongside me as I carry a pail of copper in my heart. The pail is filled with Lake Michigan water.

*Found at the website of the organization she created, www.MotherEarthWaterWalk.com.

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What Better Way to Kick Off Spring?

4/6/2019

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Members of an Aldea cleanup team: Elly and Daniel Bollweg, Josh Manzer, Brittany Goode

“Sometimes, I feel like the lake is the only entity who truly gets me,” Brittany Goode told me.

One of the leaders for the two Grand Haven beach cleanups scheduled in April, she was “born and raised” along Lake Michigan and feels a responsibility to it.

“Those of us who spent our childhood with Lake Michigan have an innate connection to it,” the employee of Grand Haven’s Aldea Coffee

continued. “Plus, I work for a company that is committed to preserving the earth through our business practices. We compost, recycle and purchase items with intention. I see the beach cleanup as a way to get our customers engaged and to raise awareness that products used downtown and not disposed of correctly, ultimately affect the cleanliness of our beaches.”

For Drew Paloucek, the other leader of the April 20th and 27th Grand Haven “Adopt-a-Beach” cleanups scheduled for 9:00 and 10:00 a.m. respectively, her connection also stems from childhood.

“I grew up taking nine-hour car rides from Chicago to my grandparents’ home on the Les Cheneaux Islands. After I graduated from college and moved to West Michigan, I reestablished my connection to the Great Lakes. When I saw that careless lifestyles were contributing to the trash along the shoreline, I knew I had to do my part to educate and inspire others to care for our lakes.”

A mortgage lender who has led over fifteen beach cleanups from Chicago to Grand Haven, Paloucek noticed that her passion, connection and drive to protect the lakes has grown stronger with age.

“Since my first cleanup—when we pulled twenty pounds and six bags of trash off the Grand Haven beach—I have been hooked,” she admitted. “It’s a great way to give back.”

Others, she's discovered, feel the same.

Drew Paloucek

“People look forward to these cleanups. It’s something tangible almost everyone can do. And when you pick up enough straws, you think twice before using one.”

The same is true for releasing balloons.

“In addition to single use plastics like eating utensils, stirrers, straws, and cigarette filters, we have pulled dozens of balloons out of the side of the sand dunes, the ribbons wrapped and woven into dune grass,” Paloucek said.

According to Tyrone Dobson, Volunteer Manager for the Alliance for the Great Lakes, the “Adopt-a-Beach” program has been in existence since 1991, increasing in popularity each year. In 2018, there were over 900 Great Lakes beach cleanups, 15,000 volunteers, and roughly eighteen tons of trash removed—including 4,415 balloons..

“We ask leaders to have the volunteers record every piece of trash picked up,” Dobson said. “We use that information to influence change—at the local and national level.”

More than 85% of the debris is plastic. Despite the cleanups, 22 million pounds of plastic pollution end up in the Great Lakes every year. Over time, the plastic breaks into smaller pieces known as microplastics. Because they are difficult to filter, microplastics eventually find their way into our drinking water, affecting our health.

Do you have a personal connection to the Great Lakes? A couple hours to spare over the next three months? Currently, there are 114 “Adopt-a-Beach” public cleanups scheduled for the Great Lakes April through June. Over half are alongside Lake Michigan—including the one sponsored by the “Don’t Let It Fly or the Great Lakes Will Cry” campaign to eliminate balloons from the skies above the Great Lakes. It is scheduled for Saugatuck Dune State Park on Saturday, April 20th, at 1:00 p.m.

Please join us. And consider refusing single-use plastic items like water bottles, straws, eating utensils. Instead, opt for reusable alternatives like cloth grocery bags and personal water containers. For what if someday, instead of trash, the only colors in the sand were wildflowers—like the blush of the Pitcher’s Thistle, the exuberant gold of the Puccoon, the pink kiss of the Bearberry?

To find an event near you, visit: https://greatlakes.org/get-involved/adopt-a-beach/

And because I am partial to the “the Great Lakes State,” Michigan’s events are listed below.

Belle Isle Beach 4/7, 4/27
Oceana County 4/20
Elberta Village 4/22
Grand Haven 4/20, 4/27
Norton Shores 5/4
Manistee 4/20
Ferrysburg 6/10
Muskegon 4/20
Benton Harbor 4/24
Saugatuck Dunes 4/20
South Haven 5/5
Monroe County 4/19, 6/15
Berrien County 4/28
Whitehall 4/13

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My Take . . . As Seen In The 3/29/19 Holland Sentinel

3/30/2019

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I bought a bag of balloons recently for my 92-year-old mother who is leading an exercise class in her Holland retirement community. She wanted the balloons for an activity that involves batting about balloons with swim noodles. She tells me it is the most fun and the most strenuous of all the exercises.

I am not anti-balloons. I am against releasing them into our skies. There is a difference.

In 2018, volunteers participating in the Alliance for the Great Lakes beach cleanups picked up 4,415 balloons. Those of us who walk the beaches on a regular basis pick up thousands more. In addition to littering, balloons released into the skies cause enough damage that five states and numerous cities have banned the mass release of balloons. None are in the Great Lakes region.

The good news is we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program and the Clean Virginia Waterways of Longwood University—through grants from NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management—have created a website documenting five years of research on the damage caused by floating balloons and they provide alternative ways to celebrate. (http://preventballoonlitter.org)

The photos tell the story. Wildlife starved because they mistakenly ingested balloon remnants as food. Birds entangled in ribbons, hampering their ability to fly. Livestock spooked and injured because floating balloons caused confusion. Mylar balloons tangled in power lines, their metallic coating melting and causing power outages, even sparking fires. And while latex balloons are considered “biodegradable,” the studies show they can take as long as six years to decompose when exposed to periods of time in water.

In 2007, the fourth grades classes of Quincy Elementary School in Zeeland, under the leadership of teachers Kathy Nemeth and Donna Atman, launched a “Don’t Let it Fly or the Great Lakes Will Cry” campaign to eliminate balloons from the skies above the Great Lakes. They collected enough balloon evidence while cleaning up Saugatuck Dunes State Park to convince the two high school principals and the school district of Zeeland to ban the mass release of balloons at all school functions. They graduated eight years later in balloon-free ceremonies.

What if we, in Michigan, relaunched their campaign?

#dontletitflygl. On March 23, I discovered nine ribbons within 1/3 mile of Big Red. Within 1/3 mile! I could dispose of only seven. The other two will dangle in the wind until they decompose--or worse--a bird becomes ensnared and tries to fly away.

What if every event organizer, wedding planner, funeral home director, school principal, and family in Michigan found other ways to announce, celebrate, honor, and grieve than littering our skies with balloons? What if every store selling balloons participated in the Balloon Council’s “Responsible Balloon Retailer” program promoting the correct disposal of balloons? What if communities throughout Michigan banned the mass release of balloons?

On Saturday, April 20th, at 1:00 p.m. a team of volunteers (to include myself and several from that legendary Quincy team) are returning to the Saugatuck Dunes State Park to clean up the beach and relaunch the “Don’t Let it Fly” campaign. Please consider joining us. For what if someday, the only colors we saw in the skies above the Great Lakes were those gloriously painted by God?

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We can live without a lot of things, access to clean, fresh water ​is not one of them.

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is not one of them.