Great
Lakes
Protection Gets Boost From
New Website
1,000+ Environmental Groups
Listed
May 29,2002
Michigan - What are "exotic
species", and where do they come from? How clean is my drinking water? What’s the safest
way to fertilize my lawn? These are just a few examples
of questions you can have answered by checking out a
new non-profit website, the Great Lakes Directory
. This incredible resource was put together with
the involvement of over a thousand environmental organizations
in the Great Lakes region.
The website boasts hundreds of diverse
environmental articles related to the Great
Lakes, advocacy tools for concerned citizens
and organizations, as well as free environmental software
and games, events calendars, grant funding info, and a user-friendly search
engine that allows visitors to find local and regional
grassroots organizations that are focused on environmental
issues.
According to Craig
Minowa, one of the website’s designers,
this online resource is already receiving unexpectedly
high levels of visitors, considering the fact that it
is only now being released. "Although we’re only
officially releasing the website in May, word of mouth
has our traffic levels up so high, we may need to change
our web servers to be able to handle the heavy use,"
said Minowa. GreatLakesDirectory.org is already
receiving one new hit every 20 seconds!
Although there are websites out there
that cover just about anything and everything, the Great
Lakes Directory seems to have found a relatively
vacant niche. "One-fifth of the world’s surface
freshwater is in our Great Lakes,"
said Minowa, "so it’s nice to see over a thousand
environmental organizations standing together to create
a resource that educates citizens and provides them
with tools for getting involved".
GreatLakesDirectory.org is a
project of the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council’s Great
Lakes Aquatic Habitat Network and Fund (GLAHNF). Jill
Ryan, GLAHNF’s Director, says the idea
behind the website is to assist grassroots groups and
citizens in protecting lakes, rivers, and wetlands throughout
the Great Lakes
Basin. The Great Lakes Aquatic Habitat Network and
Fund empowers citizens to take action at the community
level to protect aquatic habitats throughout the Great
Lakes Basin. This website will assist citizens by providing
timely information and resources relating to aquatic
habitat protection said Ryan.
The Great Lakes Directory has
been developed and tested over the past year through
a generous grant from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation,
and was officially launched on May 15, 2002.
