Great Lakes Article:

The mosquitoes were getting to Christine Sevilla last week at a nature preserve in Penfield. But the bites she got were all for a good cause. The fine arts photographer is documenting regional wetlands, like the one at Hipp Brook Preserve.

Sevilla, an instructional designer from Pittsford, is planning a photo show. It will use art to illuminate the ecology of the swampy areas that filter water, slow down runoff and protect the water quality of streams that feed into lakes.

Wetlands, she said, “are a good thing to have.”

Sevilla’s photo project illustrates one of three events converging in New York this month. All of them are facets of an accelerating debate over the fate of the Great Lakes.

With today’s expected end of the state Legislature’s session, lawmakers in Albany are debating a bill that would radically expand protection for New York wetlands. Some experts say it will pass — the only environmental law this year likely to emerge from the budget-debate tangle.

The other Great Lakes events are about protecting fish, along with the vast and vulnerable waters they live in.

The Great Lakes Fisheries Commission, a binational advisory group, held its annual meeting in Rochester earlier this month. Members passed resolutions about concerns ranging from hatcheries to invasive species.

That same week, the governors of the eight Great Lakes states, along with their counterparts in Ontario and Quebec, received a draft of Annex 2001. The amendment to the 1985 Great Lakes Charter, if signed by all 10 state and provincial leaders, would ban large-scale water diversion without unanimous regional approval.

The three events this month mirror a deepening national interest in the Great Lakes, which contain 20 percent of the world’s fresh surface water. (Only the polar ice caps contain more.)

President Bush called for a Great Lakes task force in May; two restoration bills worth billions to lake communities are being debated in Congress; and at least four Great Lakes states, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, are hotly contested swing states in this year’s presidential campaign.

A fragile ecosystem

During the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission meeting, Xerox Corp. retiree Edmund Sander of Irondequoit was elected chairman of the group’s U.S. advisers.

Heated talk, and a few resolutions, dealt with invasive species — the same issue that prompted the commission’s founding in 1955.

More than 160 species of exotic fish, insects and water plants have invaded the Great Lakes in the past five decades.

It’s a personal issue for Sander, who blames the invaders for the shrinking size of the Chinook salmon he catches in Lake Ontario. “Invasive species are like extinctions,” he said, noting how invaders tip ecosystems out of balance. “They’re forever.”

But Sander said the commission meeting on June 8 and 9 was wide-ranging.

Included were presentations by experts on a federal plan to deepen navigation channels and on the American eel, an endangered species native to Lake Ontario.

There also were resolutions on:

Protection for perch and trout hatcheries.

The need to toughen laws on ballast water from international ships, the source of most exotic species.

A permanent electronic barrier in Chicago that would block Asian carp in the Mississippi River from getting into the Great Lakes.

The need to increase funding for U.S. Geological Survey research vessels that ply the lakes, assessing bait fish and doing depth studies.

Informally, water diversion and wetlands were also discussed, said Sander.

Public input

Annex 2001, as its name suggests, is not new. A brief version was signed in principle three years ago, but a full version is now in the hands of the governors and their Canadian counterparts for a 30-day review.

Three months of public review will follow, starting in July, though no hearings have been scheduled yet.

”The goal for the (government) review is to have it completed in 30 days, but it will take as much time as is needed,” said David Naftzger, executive director of the Council of Great Lakes Governors in Chicago, which is assembling the document.

Tender subject

Water diversion has been a tender subject regionally since a 1998 attempt by a Canadian corporation to withdraw and sell lakes water to Asia. Though it was quickly shouted down, the idea still raises hackles.

”We shouldn’t allow any water out of the Great Lakes basin,” said Sander, who foresees a world in which water becomes as much a source of conflict as oil.

”Keeping authority (over lakes water) within the states and provinces,” and not within federal governments, is vital, said Donald Zelazny, Great Lakes program coordinator for the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

He was in Rochester last month for a lakes restoration hearing.

Annex 2001 will likely take effect in 2005, said Zelazny. It will call for a “collective, open process to make decisions” about where water goes, when and in what quantities, he said.

One advantage of Annex 2001 is that it will cost New York very little to implement, said David Higby, who tracks lakes issues for Environmental Advocates of New York, an Albany lobbying group.

But current water management laws would have to be reviewed and adjusted, “which is good,” he said.

The wetlands question

The wetlands act would protect more of the marshy areas along hundreds of miles of New York’s Great Lakes shoreline.

Current state law protects only wetlands that cover 12.4 acres or more. The new bill, in both Senate and Assembly versions, would protect wetlands as small as one acre.

In an election year, lawmakers “feel they have to have something environmental to take to the voters,” said Higby, who predicted it would pass this week. As of Monday night, the wetlands protection act had passed the Assembly and had made it as far as the Rules Committee in the Senate.

State lawmakers are likely to return in July.

Casualty of sprawl

Even very small wetlands are vital to the health of the Great Lakes, said Margaret Wooster, a Buffalo-based water quality consultant and former executive director of Great Lakes United, an advocacy and education group.

”The big wetlands are either protected or destroyed,” said Wooster. But the very small ones are being filled in — a little-noticed casualty of suburban sprawl, she said.

In New York, protecting only big wetlands is not enough, agreed Sander. “We need something stronger than that.”

Wetlands reduce the risk of flooding, he said, filter water from streams feeding into the lakes and provide areas where fish can spawn.

Sander acknowledges that there was a time when he cared only about his fishing catch and not about the ecosystem it came from.

”Now I’m more curious about what goes on under the water,” he said.