For over 25 years, Great Lakes United has been a unifying voice for ensuring a healthy and vibrant future for the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River ecosystem.

We find consensus during controversy and agreement within division; we build bridges between disparate interests, organizations, and individuals. We tackle emerging concerns with vigour, setting a framework for a progressive protective action.

Our members span a diverse spectrum of interests, organizations and individuals. We are citizens, environmentalists, conservationists, labour unions, First Nations, tribes, hunters, anglers, academics, and progressive business and industry. Together, we work to protecting the world’s largest freshwater ecosystem.

A Voice for the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes are the energy that fuel the region’s economy, culture, human and wildlife health, and wildspaces.

These crisp, biologically rich waters have fostered industrial growth, contributed to some of the highest quality of life in the world, and incubated innovation that has spread across the world. In 2000, the economy of the region totaled nearly $2 trillion – more than any nation in the world, except Japan and the United States.

Unfortunately, this progress has come at the expense of the health of this fragile ecosystem. What once seemed a fortress of environmental resilience is now recognized as very susceptible to the pressures we place upon it.

While the lakes have partly recovered from the most harmful poisoning of the 1960s and 70s, there are new signs of serious – and without action, possibly irreversible – damage. This includes lower water levels, an ominous Lake Erie dead zone, invasive non-native species, and rising rates of human illness and disease in many communities around the basin.

Residents enjoy one of the highest standards of living on the planet. It is now time to focus our prosperity on restoring the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River. This responsibility falls on all of us.

Our Work

Great Lakes United strives to maintain a balance between the needs of humanity and the well-being of the ecosystem we call home. We strive to ensure sustainability in its truest sense: meeting the needs of today without harming the vigor of the future.

Thousands of voices are calling for a healthier Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River; Great Lakes United continues to be the coalition through which these voices are heard.

These are some of the issues we work on:

• Sediments contaminated by toxic chemical pollution fouls harbours and watersheds. Just as our legacy is one of innovators, it is also one of ecological strain. Great Lakes United continues to fight to clean up old pollution and ensure emerging chemicals of concern stay out of water before our toxic history repeats.
   
• We are leading experts on how water quality issues are addressed across an international border, and have championed the joint effort between Canada and the United States in instituting the programs to ensure a clean and healthy Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River ecosystem.
   
• While the Great Lakes contain are an enormous amount of water, they are essentially a closed system that renews itself at a rate of 1% per year. It is this sliver of renewable water from which we must make our living. Great Lakes United has helped to close the door to long-distance diversions, but now this region's wasteful water practices put this ecosystem under threat. Through a commitment to water conservation, the Great Lakes states and provinces can become world leaders in water use reduction practices and technologies
   
• As gaping regulatory holes facilitate an onslaught of invasive aquatic plants and animals, we have been a vocal advocate of national programs to treat and inspect ballast water discharges from ocean going ships, presently the number one way new invaders arrive in the Great Lakes. The ubiquitous zebra mussel has cost the region billions of dollars in lost economic production, billions more in control efforts, while critically harming creatures native to the Great Lakes. But, most frustrating is that we invite a similar invasion as we still lack the protections that would have stopped the zebra mussel.

Add Your Voice

Our coalition is united in one belief: every individual and organization in this region has a role in ensuring a safe, healthy, and sustainable Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River region.

Great Lakes United is driven by its members. From shaping our policy and focusing the issues we tackle, to lending their support to our campaigns, our membership are active participants in improving the region.

You can support our work by becoming a member or by making a donation today. Together, we make a difference.