Tagged: environment

Everything’s back to normal at the Fermi 2 nuclear power plant in southeast Michigan after a spill last week.

A drain valve for a filtering system failed and 100,000 gallons of slightly radioactive cooling water overflowed a holding tank. The water contaminated the shoes and outer clothing of some plant workers, but no one was harmed.

Michigan's soon-to-be Director of the Department of Natural Resources, Rodney Stokes, says he wants more people to hunt and fish in the state.

Stokes was named director of the department by Governor-elect Rick Snyder earlier this month.  Snyder announced he would be dividing the Department of Natural Resources and Environment into two agencies: The Department of Natural Resources and The Department of Environmental Quality.

Stokes told The Detroit News that he wants to expand the focus of the department's recruitment efforts and that he has no plans to increase license fees.

The Associated Press reports:

Revenues from the sale of hunting and fishing licenses were $45.3 million in the most recent budget, said Sharon Schafer, the department's assistant division chief for administration and finance. That's down from 2005 when adjusted for inflation.

Artists can apply to spend part of their summer in a cabin in the middle of the woods. 

The Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park is accepting applications for its artist-in-residence program. The state park is in the western part of the upper-peninsula and borders Lake Superior. The park has 60,000 acres of varied forest, along with plenty of trails.

Sherrie McCabe directs the artist-in-residence program.  She says the artists get to live in a secluded cabin with no running water or electricity:

It’s far enough away from any roads that you really don’t get the traffic noise.  Sometimes it’s dead silent and at other times it’s so loud it’s practically deafening with the sounds of nature. The wind can howl, the owls are noisy, the birds are noisy, but as far as humans go it’s very, very quiet.

Residencies are open to any kind of artist. Applications are available at The Friends of the Porkies.

A few years back, we at the Environment Report did a comprehensive series called, "The Ten Threats to the Great Lakes." Doing our best to make it comprehensive, we broke each of the Ten Threats into several stories.

We joked that the "Ten Threats" series turned into a 33-part series as we dug deeper into the issues.

For the series, I traveled to northwest Ohio and met with Lynn Davis. His grandfather had started a farm drainage business in 1910 using a steam powered trenching machine. Davis later took over the business from his father and uncle.

Governor-elect Rick Snyder is already shuffling things in Lansing. He’s planning to split up the Department of Natural Resources and Environment... back into two separate agencies.

Officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency briefed people at a meeting last night in Battle Creek about the continuing clean-up of the Kalamazoo River oil spill.  EPA officials say they've finished cleaning up 50 sites in the river.