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100 Years of Shared Water

This year Canada and the United States celebrate the 100 anniversary of the signing of the Boundary Waters Treaty. From June 5 to June 15 communities along the Niagara River will be celebrating a century of shared water protection with concerts, art exhibits, educational events, special guests, and more.

While this is truly an occassion for celebration, it is also one for introspection and dialogue. That is why Great Lakes United and University at Buffalo Great Lakes Program are holding workshops exploring issues of binational governance and cooperative pollution cleanup. While the workshops are being staged independently, a shared luncheon is an chance to exchange ideas. You can register for either event right here.

These events run concurrently, with some overlap. Do not register for both.

Great Lakes Toxic Hotspots: Organizing the Cleanup
Presented by Great Lakes United

Citizen action has been a cornerstone of the successes in cleaning-up and protecting the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River over the past century of the Boundary Waters Treaty’s existence. As governments celebrate their successes under that Treaty and under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, we want to make sure that the central role of citizen activists is also recognized.

Great Lakes United’s workshop “Great Lakes Toxic Hotspots: Organizing the Cleanup” focuses on the role that citizens have played and must continue to play. The workshop also looks at the challenges that we still confront and points us forward to the approaches that are necessary for future success. In this workshop we will learn from some of the organizing strategies that have been successfully used in the Great Lakes and St Lawrence River basin. We will also spend time strategizing for our work together in the future.

 Agenda | Presentations 

Great Lakes Connecting Channels: Governance, Ecosystem Science and Management
Presented by University at Buffalo Great Lakes Program in collaboration with other units of UB from the College of Arts and Sciences, Schools of Architecture and Planning, Law, and Engineering and the Applied Sciences.

The Great Lakes connecting channels—the rivers and straits that link up the five Great Lakes and make them a single hydrological and ecological system—create some of the most difficult challenges for environmental science and for management institutions. Like choke points on a highway system, the connecting channels are the places where things come together: nations, people, pollutants and problems. As a result, many of them are among the most degraded areas in the region.

To a greater degree than other Great Lakes Areas of Concern, the connecting channels require strong binational cooperation and a basinwide ecosystem perspective for their restoration and protection. In practice, however, those conditions have only rarely been achieved, and proposed changes in the Water Quality Agreement may impede rather than improve management of connecting channels. This conference will use the connecting channels as a focal point for considering the institutions, laws, and strategies used to manage the boundary waters.

Agenda

 

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