Saturday morning’s Earth Day rally at International Park in East Toledo is one of 514 satellite marches being planned in conjunction with the big event on the National Mall in Washington co-sponsored by March for Science and the Earth Day Network.
Some 374 of those satellite events are across the United States, including 12 in Ohio and 14 in Michigan.
Turnouts at many are expected to be larger than usual because of controversy surrounding Trump administration efforts to gut federal spending for climate change and other types of environmental research. Hefty cuts proposed for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and other agencies would affect research into Lake Erie algae and invasive species, among other issues.
The local Earth Day event begins at 10 a.m., and is to be followed by an 11 a.m. march to the Imagination Station, where a teach-in begins at 11:30 a.m.
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Advocates for a Clean Lake Erie, a group created in response to the three-day, 2014 Toledo water crisis that occurred when poisons from an algal toxin got into the city’s water supply, said it will call for a moratorium on factory farms at an event it is hosting at 12:45 p.m. at the Friendship Park Community Center along 131st Street in Point Place.
The event is free and open to the public.
Following the announcement, the group said it will present a new version of a slide show called “The Third Battle for Lake Erie.”
“When we started ACLE just 13 months ago, our sole concern was the health of Lake Erie. Since then we’ve learned how these huge factory farms feed the toxic algae and it’s our belief the lake just can’t take any more of them,” Susan Matz, an ACLE coordinator, said. “Until existing CAFO operators decide to do business without poisoning our drinking water, we certainly don’t want any more of them in our watershed.”
The group is calling upon Ohio officials to stop issuing new permits. The Kasich administration, which has rejected the group’s calls for designating western Lake Erie a state-impaired body of water, is not expected to act on the request. Administration representatives have said repeatedly they believe the goal of a 40 percent reduction in phosphorus releases by 2020 can be achieved through working closer with the agricultural industry on voluntary incentives.
ACLE contends the two largest concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, of some 150 known in the western Lake Erie watershed generate the manure output of Perrysburg, Sylvania, Maumee, Defiance, Fremont, Fostoria and Dayton. The agriculture industry has not disputed that each cow can produce the manure equivalent of 20 humans, but has said the waste is being responsibly managed by storing it in lagoons and getting it absorbed into the soil of fields where it’s spread as fertilizer.
ACLE also said a new group called "Tree Toledo" will discuss its goal of planting 282,313 trees — one for every Toledo resident — at its program. Free tree seedlings will be given away.
America’s first Earth Day was on April 22, 1970, when an estimated 20 million Americans took to the streets.
One of this year’s many speakers at the main event in Washington is Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the now-famous pediatrician who made a scientific connection between contaminated Flint water and lead poisoning among that city’s youth.
A week later, on April 29, at least as many or more people are expected to be in Washington for the People’s Climate March. That one is being organized by activists behind the Sept. 21, 2014 march in New York that drew more than 310,000 people, to date the largest climate change march in history.
Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com, 419-724-6079, or via Twitter @ecowriterohio.
First Published April 21, 2017, 6:40 p.m.