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Stelco Inc. paid a $25,000 fine for polluting Hamilton Harbor on five occasions in 1999-2000.  But the Ontario Ministry of the Environment has withdrawn three other charges and agreed not to investigate or prosecute dozens more waste-water violations reported by the company’s sprawling Hilton Works steel-making complex in recent years.

The deal was negotiated at a pre-trial conference just minutes before Justice of the Peace Don Stevely accepted a guilty plea from Stelco lawyer Doug Hamilton in provincial offences court yesterday.

The plea bargain is significant because Stelco could have faced a maximum fine of $1.6 million on the eight charges laid last July, and because it was the company’s 10th conviction. Stelco was fined $200,000 for the most recent prior offence, an oil spill that spread sheen across the harbor in 1999. Read the rest of this entry »

The newly created Jennie-O Foods Turkey Store subsidiary will be headquartered in Willmar, Minn. Together; the Jennie-O Foods Turkey Store plants have the capacity to process over one billion pounds of turkey annually. Overall, agriculture and its related industries provided 17 percent of Minnesota’s gross state product. The total net farm income for 1999 was $1.29 billion.

Agriculture is also the second-largest employer in Minnesota, providing more than 468,000 jobs (20 percent of the state total). Two-thirds of those jobs are off the farms, in processing, distribution, supply and service sectors. As the figures show, agriculture is an important and viable part of the economy of both Minnesota and Wisconsin. However, local farmers and growers, especially small producers, have had to continually demonstrate their ingenuity and ability to weather the ups and downs of the economy without much attention being paid to them. Today, people in the United States have come to take the national glut of foods for granted. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may know, over the past year, MRR’s Environmental Review Team and collaborating groups has petitioned the DNR to complete initial “Environmental Assessment Worksheets” on DNR off-highway vehicle proposals impacting 40 counties in Central and Northern Minnesota.

To date the DNR has refused these EAW requests for all but the following two projects:

- Moosewalk/Mooserun All-Terrain Vehicle Trail along the North Shore State Trail near Finland in Southern Lake County

- White Earth ATV Trail in Southwestern Clearwater County surrounding Long Lost Lake and five miles from Itasca State Park
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IT’S A RARE person who can tell the difference between a bottle of chilled tap water and a bottle with a label on it.

This is not a message welcomed by the legions who have switched from tap water to spring water, distilled water, purified water and - surprise - bottled tap water.

Bottle it and put a label on it and consumers by the thousands will pay good money for a guzzle while rejecting the same product flowing free of cost out of the tap.

A decade ago, only the pretentious walked around with a bottle of Evian. Now, you see almost as many brands of bottled water as beverage on Toronto streets.Learn more about the Global Water Experiment and how supporter, Andrew Liveris of Dow Chemical, has helped.
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Dams were once considered magnificent feats of engineering. But the perspective on dams has changed, and by the end of this year, nearly 40 of them will be removed from rivers all over the United States.

Todd Ambs is the Executive Director of the River Alliance of Wisconsin. His organization has been working to remove three dams in the southern part of the state on the Baraboo River. Two of the dams are gone already, and the third is scheduled to be removed this fall.

Ambs says dams slow down river currents, block the migration of fish, and flood valuable wildlife habitat.
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Botulism, a rare and deadly form of food poisoning in humans, is believed to have killed at least some of the fish and birds whose bodies have littered the eastern end of Lake Erie on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border in recent weeks.

The source of the poison is unclear, but suspicion has fallen on two invader species: zebra mussels and round gobies, a bottom-dwelling fish. Both are thought to have arrived in the bilges of ocean-going freighters in the past 20 years. Read the rest of this entry »

You never know what might be hiding behind Lake Ontario’s “Canadian Veil” unless you go out and take a peek.

It might even be harboring a 40-inch, 31-pound king salmon - a fish of trophy proportions that quickens the heartbeat of many trollers.

One day recently, just such a fish was cruising along a thermal “cliff” about 90 feet below surface in 600-foot-deep waters well offshore. Its predatory instincts forced it to slam a Silver Streak spoon casually known as a UGT - Ugly Green Thing - which was trolled by within striking distance.

When a fisherman lets out an “ugh!” of air in setting the hook and the rod stays bent double, and the line strips off the reel as if it had no drag, you know you have a big fish on the line - which is what happened in this case. Read the rest of this entry »

As demand for water begins to outpace supply in this growing suburban community of 38,000, the city’s Utility Committee on Tuesday got its first glimpse at a study that outlines ways to keep the faucets running, plans that could include spending more than $52 million to tap into Lake Michigan.

“We don’t want to sound alarmist. You’re not going to run out of water tomorrow,” said Steven H. Schultz, who led the water supply department at the Waukesha consulting firm Ruekert & Mielke Inc.

However, Schultz warned that the city needs to immediately start working on ways to supply more water to the city - whether by drilling more municipal wells to draw more groundwater or entering negotiations to buy Lake Michigan water. Read the rest of this entry »

During the demonstration project, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will try out three alternatives for moving the algae, which can harbor harmful bacteria.

Algae are responsible for closing the Charlotte beach to swimmers for about half of every season. And the beach has been closed 19 of 44 days.

Two of the alternatives involve pumping algae-laden water from the lake side across the Charlotte pier into the Genesee River. A third involves simulating a culvert that would use gravity to feed algae from the lake into the river. Read the rest of this entry »

Wetlands can store huge amounts of a greenhouse gas, but only as long as they stay wet.

Wetlands around the world provide homes to all kinds of fish and waterfowl, and they’re also important because of what they lock up within their boggy borders. It’s a whole load of carbon - so much that it’s measured in billions of tons. Researchers have now found that only one chemical reaction keeps all that carbon from entering the atmosphere and adding to global warming.

All plants absorb the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, and they usually release that carbon once they die and decompose. But dead waterlogged plants in wetlands don’t decompose much. As a result, wetlands are storing a huge amount of carbon - as much as what is already in the atmosphere. Read the rest of this entry »