These are turbulent times, and anyone who is paying attention has to be concerned about the health of our democracy, not to mention the state of our economy and our environment. There’s a lot of heat and noise on multiple fronts, while the core issues and substantive discussions are sometimes harder to find. Somewhere in the cacophony is the renegotiation of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, and I’m hoping it won’t get lost in the noise because the Agreement is at the foundation of how Americans and Canadians value and protect the Great Lakes. We can’t assume those underpinnings are safe—especially when policy makers are slashing environmental protections left and right.

 

First forged in 1972, this agreement between the United States and Canada has provided an essential framework for the rest of the Great Lakes protection platform. Two sovereign nations set aside their national egos and put their heads together to solve the crisis in Lake Erie, which at the time was choked and gagging on pea-green algae. And by and large, the Agreement they hammered out worked. Subsequent versions of the Agreement expanded on this binational teamwork approach. They identified and developed strategies for tackling toxic pollution, cleaning up contaminated muck, and along the way kept driving groundbreaking global research to help stake out new threats before they got too big to solve. We made great strides in some areas, got stuck in others, but it has been a remarkable human endeavor—two nations working peacefully together to safeguard one-fifth of the fresh surface water on our little planet. It kind of makes you proud to be a North American, doesn’t it? And yet, in recent years the Agreement and its vision have fallen by the wayside.

 

Much of the progress we have made in establishing the principles and policies that guide today’s Great Lakes environmental protection and restoration work stands on the shoulders of the first three generations of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. Yet, some see it as an antiquated relic, no longer relevant to today’s challenges, and unenforceable in our courts. But its principles of binational cooperation and shared leadership are still essential, as are its ethical guidance to protect the chemical, physical and biological integrity of this irreplaceable ecosystem, and its aspiration to hold to a standard of “zero” when it comes to how much persistent toxic pollution should be intentionally flushed into our treasured lakes.

 

Now, our nations are forging an agreement for the 21^st Century, with little fanfare and inadequate public involvement. This process needs our attention. We must be vigilant to defend the heart and spirit of the Agreement, so we can build on its strengths for the challenges we now face. If we take it for granted, like so many other foundational gains of the last century, we risk losing not only the gains it gave us, but the underpinnings of so many other laws and programs we also take for granted. As David Brower once so sagely observed about the environment: “All of our victories are temporary; all our defeats are permanent.” We have to keep affirming and reclaiming our temporary victories and shaping them into new ones, or risk losing them, and along with them, the principles and power we need to continue to forge progress.