With the public forums and webinars now behind us, it appears that our only window into the substance of the emerging new Agreement is now closed. The forums provided pieces of the puzzle, many of which are troubling, some of which are hopeful—but still only pieces. Because the public doesn’t know what the whole picture looks like, it makes assessing whether this Agreement shows progress or backsliding difficult. But, some of the information revealed points to very troubling signs.

 

 One of the most troubling revelations is the lack of stronger improvement in governance. The decision-making mechanisms for the Agreement have been a top concern of citizens’ groups ever since the 1987 Agreement Protocols shifted leadership from the IJC to the Binational Executive Committee (BEC)—a body of the governments responsible for implementing the Agreement. The new Agreement will re-name this body the Great Lakes Executive Committee (GLEC), and adds seats for municipal, tribal, and métis governments. Those additions are positive. But, there are no seats for citizen representatives at large or stakeholder groups on GLEC. So, the overall impact is that the negotiators have solidified the decision-making exclusively within the agency family. And, agencies, for all their valuable hard work and merit, are under constant pressure from their administrations and constrained budgets to not rock the boat. Agencies are invested in existing systems, and rarely get the chance or the support to break out and create new systems and push beyond existing legal and regulatory frameworks. The Great Lakes desperately need bold, imaginative and beyond-the-existing-system strategies.

Without the text it is hard to know, but I was left with the strong impression at the Chicago forum that the strategy for dealing with missed timelines and objectives in the Agreement is to remove them from the Agreement. It sounds like the grit and muscle of the agreement—determining specific toxic chemical priorities, targets for pollution reduction, benchmarks for assessing progress, and potentially even objectives themselves—will be delegated to the work of GLEC and its Annex Subcommittees. This begs the question of what specific value the new Agreement will have in driving protection and restoration strategies. When my President signs this document, I want him to know what we’re promising to do and by when, and I want to know as well. Specific committees to help implement those promises? OK. But that’s a different role.

 

The great strides under the Agreement have been catalyzed by a combination of bold leadership by forward-thinking scientists and informed constituencies. This new Agreement template doesn’t appear to create the structures that foster and empower that partnership. It was scientists’ and citizens’ demanding action on Lake Erie and other deeply troubled waters that created the political will for the first Agreement in 1972. In the years that followed, scientists empowered by the IJC’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) discovered the vectors that were contaminating the Great Lakes food web with toxic chemicals, as well as helped us understand the gravity of the damage to humans and wildlife. Citizens demanded clean-ups, chemical bans, and public information. Where is the SAB in the new structure?

 

For scientists—especially government-funded scientists—there are risks in raising tough questions and bringing attention to inconvenient issues. It was hard in the early years, and we watched committed scientists get punished in myriad ways, from seeing their grants disappear, to being isolated, and sometimes vilified. Today it is perhaps even harder, and the recent decade has seen suppression of science by both governments, and an anti-science backlash among some prominent political factions. We’ve also lost much of the capacity of journalism, which played a major role in bringing these issues to the public.

 

We still need the scientific “truthsayers” to tell us what is really happening to the chemical, physical and biological health of the lakes and their watershed, but we also need them to ask the hard questions and to help frame the investigations that can find the answers. We need this capacity, and we need active and ongoing exchange of information and face-to-face discussion with the public and our decision-makers about what it means—for our ecosystem, our health and societies. Then, we can work together—scientists, citizens, our elected officials and our public agencies and the private sector—to galvanize the public will that results in big change. The lakes need this more than ever. If the Agreement can’t foster this, then we’ll need to find a new way to rekindle our bi-national partnerships and the capacities of our peoples and our democracies to protect our beloved but beleaguered lakes.

 

 

jane@janeelderstrategies.com