Stuart Carlton 0:00
Teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes. Welcome back to teach me about the Great Lakes. A periodic we say twice monthly, but I don't even know what our release schedule is anymore. Podcast in which I A Great Lakes novice, ask people who are smarter and harder working than I am to teach me all about the Great Lakes. My name is Stuart Carlton, and I know a lot about going to the ATM to take out $300 to buy a new guitar, finding out that the ATM is broken, looking at your watch, realizing the dude is going to meet you in the school parking lot in six minutes, running home, borrowing money from your kids, oh, to then buy the guitar amp. But they don't know a lot about the Great Lakes, and that's the point of this show. So that's why we're here. But it's not when I say we, I don't mean the royal we, because I'm actually not royalty. I mean I'm joined today by the Queen of teaching around the Great Lakes herself, Megan the lake lover gone. Megan bought a guitar lately.

Megan Gunn 0:56
No, I haven't, but I'm curious as to how your children didn't spend all their money on candy or things before they because

Stuart Carlton 1:04
my children are their life is so over full with joy and pleasure that they can't see why they would spend that money. They just hoard it like orcs in the Rings

Megan Gunn 1:14
of Power. Just yeah, or Roblox. That's what the kids do nowadays.

Stuart Carlton 1:18
I'm we'll have to trust you. Okay? I am unaware of Roblox. We've gotten far field. The point is this, it's surprising we have, but we have so quickly, so quickly. You know, I was thinking about episode 101, lately, you know, couple episodes go, and it featured two journalists. Do you remember that? Were you part of that? Yeah, you were there with some journalists. I was there. Yeah, they were so good we thought we'd have another one

Megan Gunn 1:44
on I love talking to journalists. Yeah, they have too much good information.

Stuart Carlton 1:47
They're good information. They're good at talking. Unlike some of the scientists we talk. I'm not talking about any specific guests, but sometimes scientists, they're they're not talk or they're not communication professionals, at least not that sort of

Megan Gunn 1:57
not to regular people. No, that's what our listeners are. Sorry if some of you listeners are not just regular people, regular,

Stuart Carlton 2:02
no, they're mostly graduates. Very few of them are regular. Yeah. If nothing else, the regular thing is not to listen to this show. That is by far the more common behavior. So they're weirdos. Anyway, the point is this, we've got Mike Hawthorn, Michael Hawthorn from the Chicago Tribune, but first, since he's in the Chicago area, we have our special Chicago theme song. Yeah.

Yeah, our guest today, I recorded that for, remember, we did a live thing at the Great Lakes network meeting, yeah. And so I recorded that for that, but then we had so many audio difficulties that I never actually got to play it. So nobody heard it. So this is the first time things in there for just are so pumped, I

Michael Hawthorne 3:15
think I've ever been introduced with music. So there we go.

Megan Gunn 3:19
Welcome, yes.

Stuart Carlton 3:20
And the person we are introducing is Mike lawthorn. He covers environmental issues for Chicago Tribune. You know, a lot of all sorts of environmental stuff, as you can imagine, but a focus on the Great Lakes oftentimes. So Mike, as you're thinking about the Great Lakes now, what are the issues that come to top of mind, environmentally speaking? What are some things you know? What it is is when you're when you're an environmental reporter, a lot of times your job is to report bad news, or to report depth and bad news. So give me some bad news about Lake Michigan. Mike, well,

Michael Hawthorne 3:51
you know, the one thing that stands out is that pretty much every fish in Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes in general that's been sampled for the Forever chemicals, PFAs, PFAs, the levels in those fish are really high. And basically the research this was about a year ago, I think that I wrote about this study based on testing by the US Environmental Protection Agency over the years, and the researchers who looked at the at the the results of the of this tissue sampling and blood samples from the fish, found that basically they kind of did like extrapolation, and compared it to drinking PFAs, contaminated drinking water, which is another issue that we have in the lakes and in the country and the world really, and and it wouldn't take a lot of fish to essentially exceed what is considered unsafe through drinking water. So you know, there would have been stories and all. Last couple of years, about, for example, the smell population on on Lake Superior that native tribes depend on. It doesn't take a lot of little smell to really give you a big dose of of these chemicals, and getting them out of our environment likely is going to be even more difficult than the challenges that have and the and the chemicals and the other waste that have contaminated the world's largest source of fresh drinking water over the course of, you know, history, and that's staggering, because there is good news. I mean, a lot of the really bad chemicals from the past, those levels have decreased in the lakes, large part because of regulations and laws that were enacted in many cases, you know, in the 1970s but what regulators even before you know this upcoming Trump, two administration are having difficulty coming to grips with that, and it's a question of whether the laws and the regulations can be enacted fast enough to prevent further harm. So that's that's of great interest to me. And you know, even though, for example, say, like testing in Chicago, Chicago treated Chicago drinking water has both found and not found some of these chemicals. So other places, you know, on the Michigan side of the lake, and also in Wisconsin, the chemicals are out there. I think of the lakes as a big sponge, and they're soaking up all these things that we're putting into the environment, and many of these substances, chemicals and metals. Well, especially the chemicals, transfer pretty easily, unfortunately, between air, land and water, so, you know, and then, and then the, you know, if you really want to get depressed. Just think about the plastics issue. It's just staggering. Basically, we've got 70 years of plastic in Lake Michigan. And you know, a drop of water that falls in in Lake Michigan doesn't leave the lake for a really long time. So unlike some of these other chemicals, like the PCBs and whatnot that sink to the bottom and get basically locked in the sediment, unless disturbed, aren't necessarily that harmful, except the bottom feeding fish. We've done it to ourselves, and as as a researcher put it to me many years ago, and something that stuck with me is we're basically as a society conducting a giant uncontrolled experiment on on human beings and and wildlife, fish. So, you know, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's kind of depressing, you know? And can be overwhelming. I see my role as at least, let's get people talking about this, because then we can actually do something about it. And if it's not widely known, any of these challenges or threats to the quality and health of the Great Lakes, I mean, that's a big deal. 20 million people get their drinking water, right? That's, that's a lot of people, and, you know, both here in the States and also in Canada, and you know, it's the kind of thing that most other countries don't have. So we're really fortunate, and we just need to do a better job taking care of them, and

Stuart Carlton 8:42
what, what's particularly normal, the two you talk about, about the what they call the Forever chemicals, or PFAs, some people, because one of them is it gets some people say PFAs to so you don't get it confused with the P, F O S, P O S, but P fast. I'm not saying P fast. In fact, I said p fast enough already. But anyway, the point is, what's, what's rough about them, and the micro plus, it's these, these invisible things, right? And so there's something in my line of work we call dread risk, which is this notion of something that you dread. One of the things that can lead people to dread is when it's unknowable in nature. And everywhere we're looking, we're finding these. And so they did that study with fish and economy fish. But you know, they're, they're still in the process of doing studies on other forms of protein and other whatever, and so it wouldn't surprise me at all if we end up finding out, well, it's not just fish. It is fish, but

Megan Gunn 9:31
if it's in the air, yeah,

Michael Hawthorne 9:34
in the in the northeast of Vermont Maine, New Hampshire, they've been testing big game and finding it there. And, you know, there's this whole issue also, of that I've written about quite a bit is the land application of sewage sludge on farms, and so that sludge, actually, these chemicals are end up conscious. Traded in the sludge, the sewage. Conventional sewage treatment not only doesn't remove the chemicals from from waste, you know, human and industrial waste actually concentrates them. Then you're going to go spread it on a field this free fertilizer and

Megan Gunn 10:17
to be a vegetarian

Michael Hawthorne 10:21
Michigan farmer who, you know, he can't, he can't sell his animals. And now the state of Michigan is actually using his farm as essentially a test of whether you can essentially feed in water cattle and get the PFAs out of them, because they, you know, he couldn't, he can't sell his meat anymore. It's crazy, and, and, and there probably should be a lot more testing done of farms and farm lands and wells. You know, a lot of people in farm rural areas or are on wells. Are they contaminated? Right? We don't know necessarily, because nobody's looking. And other than that, one farmer, Jason gross dick in southwest Michigan, not a lot of farms have been tested in this country, other than in the state of Maine. And now you've got a situation where Maine and their legislature and governor have passed laws essentially giving money to farmers to try to make them whole for their losses. And whether we see that coming up in the Great Lake states where a lot of this is happening, is still unknown. But again, the only reason it's unknown is because people aren't looking forward, and in my belief, based on my reporting, they don't want to know, because the answer is pretty damn scary.

Megan Gunn 11:45
I believe just all these things that you're saying scary. A former

Michael Hawthorne 11:49
colleague of mine used to sit across from me. He's a science writer too, right? But he said, It must suck being you, you know, I'm kind of, I'm one of those people that with my family and friends, you know, I could be like, overlooking, like, say, the, I think of a specific example. It's like, the, we're in Southern California, overlooking the ocean at sunset, and it's just so beautiful. And how do I blur? What do I blurt out? I'm like, What's up with all those oil derricks out there? You know? It's that Debbie Downer character from from Saturday Night Live, but people i The one I do find, I mean, I've been doing this now, writing about the environment for 25 years, and you know, it resonates with people. I was a political reporter beforehand, and other than, you know, the political community, I didn't get nearly the the feedback from readers that I get from my stories as an environment reporter, and that's been the case for all 24 years. So it's a It's one reason why I keep doing it.

Megan Gunn 12:52
I mean, I think that's because people more and more feel more connected to the environment and see that they can have some kind of impact change in that way. And so I guess you

Michael Hawthorne 13:04
there are examples of that actually working. I mean, I'm going back a while. This is 2007 but, but, you know, a reader had called me and said, Hey, I hear something. I'm not quite sure if this is true. I hoping, I'm hoping you can look into it. But it sure seems like the state of Indiana is getting ready to allow the big oil company, BP to increase the amount of pollution it dumps into Lake Michigan from its refinery on the southwestern shore of the lake in Whiting, Indiana. So, you know, digging into that, sure enough, that's what they were going to do. And the outcry this was a story in like, July of 2007 and, you know, I thought it was a good story, and it was interesting. It was going to get people talking, but the outcry was just intense. And you had the you had the point where you had elected leaders, you know, in Illinois, especially, really vociferously opposing this effort. You ended up having the US, EPA step in and essentially getting BP to back down. And eventually the mayor of Chicago, at that time, Richard M Daley, the CEO of or the American or North American CEO of CEO came to the mayor's office and said, We're not going to do this. And, you know, to the point where, like at the Lollapalooza music festival that summer, I was there with a friend, and may not have been, you know, in most cogent state at that point of the evening, but, but all of a sudden, any Vetter, the lead singer of Pearl Jam says starts reading from one of my stories about the BP situation, right? Resonated right? It to multiple levels, not just with politicians, but then with, you know, one of the biggest rock groups in the world. It was, it was, it was humbling and staggering, and it was also a sign that, hey. Uh, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on, and people are distracted by so many things, even more so today than in 2007 but as you said, Megan, they care. They care. They care about our lakes. They care about our drinking water. And, you know, I've, I'm lucky to work for a publication that, even though, you know, we've gone through a lot of hardship and a lot of, you know, layoffs and buyouts and things like that, different owners that you know aren't necessarily interested in journalism, but you know, we keep going on. But you know, predecessors in my job. We had a guy named Casey Bucha. He was one of the first environment reporters in the whole country. And I look back when, when Casey retired. This was more than a decade ago. I was asked to write for one of the editors, like, basically an appreciation of Casey. So I went back to his stories from, you know, the 50s and 60s. He was writing about this stuff. Then, you know, they had, they had a whole series then called Save our great lake, about Lake Michigan. And he and a colleague, Bill Jones, went around the lakes, and they, they were writing about the Cuyahoga River catching on fire before the fire that that actually helped lead to the passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act. So I see myself also as a steward of a legacy that I'm fortunate enough to be able to revisit some of those stories that, yeah, he wrote about years ago. Because, as a mentor once mentioned to me, environment stories don't break. They ooze. And so, you know? I mean the Forever chemicals, for example. I mean I first wrote about those in 2002 right? And so I was always looking for a way to get back to it. But as I joke to when I speak to civic groups and students, I kind of move up and down the periodic table. And so I took a break from flooring for a while, and went to bromine, right? And that, you know, then lead when

Stuart Carlton 17:06
I go back to fluoride, I'm

Michael Hawthorne 17:09
gonna have to do that too, right? Yeah, we'll see.

Stuart Carlton 17:12
Alright, you're leaving a lot here on the table I gotta pick up. So I've got my little notebook. I'm on Lake Ontario, my little Field Notes notebook, alright? So I've written down little notes, things I gotta ask about, um, going back to smelt, are you a smelt guy or a smelt guy?

Michael Hawthorne 17:26
I do. I do love, you know, I, I remember we had a, we had an outdoors writer at The tribune before my time, but his name was John hussar, and like, a weekly column, like in the Sunday Sports section, yeah. And once a year, like, there was a big smelt run in the Chicago area on Lake Michigan, that doesn't exist anymore. It's more like the northern part of the lake, and Lake Superior, but, but John would, would write, like, an annual column about doing the, you know, the smelt bank and and you know what his favorite recipes were, what readers favorite recipes, so that that's what drew me to smelt in the first place. And you know, usually in the spring, there's at least one or two restaurants in town that'll have, you know, smelt on the on the on the menu for a short period of time. So there

Stuart Carlton 18:12
we go. So this is my next question. Is Calumet? So my friend down the street, my neighbor and friend whiskey club, Steve, he's he's from Chicago, and he says, Calumet fisheries on the 95th Street Bridge, it's a place to go for smoke. Can you confirm or deny? I can

Michael Hawthorne 18:27
confirm it's a great place to go for lake trout and salmon. Yeah. I mean, I spent a lot of time in that neighborhood. It's the East Side neighborhood, the south southeast, far southeast side of the city, really close to the Indiana border. And pretty much every chance I get, if I'm reporting down there, I stop in. And counting the fisheries

Stuart Carlton 18:50
Excellent. Got to check that out. And then the last one I had on that is, is it true that whoever smelt it dealt it?

Michael Hawthorne 19:01
I've been stuck on a bus a few times with a bunch of reporters, including your colleague Sandy. Oh yeah, Rebecca said it's probably true.

Stuart Carlton 19:08
Okay, excellent. Thank you for that. So this is interesting. Normally, my normally, I derail the guests, and then we can sometimes come back or not, but you're so dialed in, I try to derail you, not this time, and you come back with more depressing news, so I don't know what is it about the environment bent that gives you that? Alright, one more little pickup I got. This is important. Did did you get to go backstage then after Eddie Vetter read your, read your

Michael Hawthorne 19:35
not that time, but not that time. I have a, I have a I have a friend, I guess Mr. Veteran and I have a mutual friend. And so Ed, Ed as my friend, as our friend, Carlson and we were program was playing at the Alpine Valley Music Theater in Wisconsin, in Wisconsin, and I went up with my friend and another friend. And and our mutual friend just kept saying, Well, when we get there, Ed will tell us what we need to do. Okay, okay, who's Ed? And we were on the side of the stage for that show. It was pretty cool.

Stuart Carlton 20:16
Look at that. That is cool. Yeah, the third, third greatest American rock

Michael Hawthorne 20:20
band, a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, and so is any better. And so we've crossed paths a few times in that respect. But you know, if we saw each other, he wouldn't remember me. Let's put

Stuart Carlton 20:31
it that way. Yeah, no, no, that's what you claimed. Yeah. And then yeah. Pearl Jam, just for the record, we this has been we've done a lot of this in a lot of debate on our slack and everything, Pearl Jam is the third greatest American rock band. So it's pretty good. Pretty

Michael Hawthorne 20:46
good. Yeah, I saw again this summer at Wrigley, uh, Wrigley Field. Oh, yeah. It was better than I've ever seen that before. It

Stuart Carlton 20:53
was, you know, somebody I coach baseball with went to that and they said it was really good. And what was cool is, at this point, Pearl Jam's getting a little long in the tooth, as are many of us, right, longer each year, but so there. I mean, so what? 10 came out. I'm not the world's biggest Pearl Jam fan, but 10 came out in about, what, 9192 somewhere in the so you're talking 30 years ago. So the people at that show have been singing these same songs, especially because Pearl Jam hasn't released a relevant album since about 1994

Michael Hawthorne 21:18
I would argue with songs. I would argue with it. Alright? One. Of their best in years. That's

Stuart Carlton 21:24
what they said. They lost me. So I really liked, alright. So, alright, alright. I was into a girl who was in the Pearl Jam in the 90s, and so I didn't lie. 10 was fine. I really like that next album. Versus, yeah, no, no, that was the one after, it's true. Versus what's a great record? I know, yeah, versus is the one that had the two different CD packaging. The first couple 100,000 had this unusual kind. They stopped doing too expensive. I won with the unusual packaging, still sitting at home, assuming the kids love Vitaly. And then they completely lost me after that

Michael Hawthorne 21:57
for a while too, but, but I realized I've got some kind of like you at the time, contemporaneously. I mean, I liked Pearl Jam, but I really like Nirvana

Megan Gunn 22:10
right now, Nirvana, okay,

Michael Hawthorne 22:13
my friend, you know, we're in our mid 20s at this point, and we're saying, and we're saying, who's going to be remembered more Eddie Vedder or Kurt Cobain? Right? Right? So

Megan Gunn 22:23
and well, bringing us back to the great the answer

Stuart Carlton 22:25
now is, unfortunately, there's staying power matters, and Nirvana is not going to have that. Okay? Bringing us back to the Great Lakes. So

Megan Gunn 22:34
you might have told you started with some very depressing stories. Is there one feel good story that you have, or one story that you wrote that you are so proud of the action that was taken afterwards, like the people really rallied, very similar to the to the BP story, or that's one

Michael Hawthorne 22:56
there. You know, there were, there's a bunch of them, actually. I mean, and this was a situation in Detroit as well, actually predated the discovery of it here in Chicago, near Calumet fisheries, a company owned by the Koch Industries, the Koch brothers. Now there's just one of them still alive, and they were storing massive piles of petroleum coke along the Calumet River, just a little bit your title, just a little bit downstream from Calumet fisheries, and it was blowing into a predominantly low income, predominantly Latino neighborhood, and nobody was doing anything about it, and this company basically ignored them. You had a situation where people had to close their windows, you know, it was ruining picnics and and literally baseball games nearby and so. And it also goes back to the BP refinery again. BP had they were producing more of this petroleum coke. It's byproduct from from production of fuels, gasoline and other fuels, and it's a waste product, but this coke industry subsidiary figured out a way to make waste from refineries petroleum coke into essentially a commodity, selling it to aluminum smelters and then also to a handful of the petroleum coke is cheaper than the coal also, though very high in carbon, huge contributor to climate change and and also really dirty, right? And so folks got, I wrote about this and wrote I wrote about how the holding facility on Chicago's Southeast side had been around for a while, but it was due to get even bigger, like significantly bigger, because BP and Whiting, Indiana just over the border under a settlement they reached with federal prosecutors. So they had to safely store their petroleum coke so the dust wouldn't escape the facility and drift into nearby neighborhoods. So what they did is they just shipped it over the border, about 10 miles, and left them in these giant piles that were then affecting people in this neighborhood. And the outcry was significant. Once again, I went to a meeting at a church on the southeast side, and I've never seen citizens so angry, the poor people from the public outreach team at the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. I thought they were going to get burned at the stake. It was that angry. And eventually, though, like all these politicians, then Mayor Rahm Emanuel, you know, it easy also because Koch Industries, the Koch brothers, big backers of right wing causes, anti environment causes, you know, and Republicans in general. Rahm Emanuel, former aide to Democratic President Bill Clinton, Democratic mayor of Chicago, would not miss an opportunity to stay and and they eventually withdrew the piles, and that that situation then had a ripple effect where air monitoring that the US EPA had put around this pet cook facility also picked up the signature of manganese, also used in steel production, can cause brain damage. High levels of manganese in the air wasn't coming from the Koch brothers site. It was coming from another location for a little bit further downstream on the Calumet River, and then that led to testing of residential yards around this other manganese holding facility. They found high levels of manganese in the soil, and this company was forced to clean up those yards and replace it with clean soil. And that led to other things. So eventually, all of these in the neighborhood has a pretty well oiled environmental justice nonprofit in that period when the petcoke situation, this was maybe 2013 if I recall correctly, it was in that group was kind of in a bit of transition. It was a new generation of leaders coming into that group, and they ran with to the point now where, like a woman who formed another group called the southeast side Coalition Against Petco, she was just named the Chicago school board by by our mayor. So it led to other issues a scrap shredding company moved their Shredder, made plans to move their shredder from the predominantly wealthy white north side to this same Southeast side neighborhood where all these other issues had had raised concern that that story about the petroleum coke led to another decades worth of stories about other environmental hazards in that community, and led, ultimately to the US EPA and the Department of Housing and Urban urban development to reach legal settlements with the city of Chicago that a block this shredder from from operating on the southeast side, and also called for a more city wide look at the cumulative effects of pollution on especially black and brown neighborhoods. And while that's a slow process, it's they they are locked in through a court ordered settlement to actually do something about that. So that one story from 2013 led to all these other stories and eventually something that might benefit the entire city, not just one of its most industrial impacted neighborhoods.

Megan Gunn 28:59
This is the feel good I was hoping for. So thank you so much. It

Stuart Carlton 29:04
is really interesting. It

Michael Hawthorne 29:05
took a lot of hard work, though, right? And the people ended up. People ended up on the on the scrap shredder. Of you know people, there was a hunger strike, including a social studies teacher at the neighborhood high school that from the upper story, you can see the scrap shutter right and an air monitor on already on top of that tool that some of shows some of the dirtiest air in the entire city and indeed in the entire region, and that includes the all the big steel mills in Northwest Indiana. So

Stuart Carlton 29:40
you mean like a literal hunger strike,

Michael Hawthorne 29:41
a literal hunger strike, yeah, I

Stuart Carlton 29:44
guess, I guess they didn't mind sealing bread from the mouths of the decadent and that is a deep cut. Eddie Vedder. You can look that one up. Google it, Temple of the dog. Yeah. Uh, Mike, it's been really interesting actually to have you on. Uh, it's really fascinating to hear about all the work you're doing, depressing and otherwise, to hear about massive piles of petroleum coke, to discuss the different eras of Pearl Jam and what have you. But that's actually not why we had you here on teach me about the Great Lakes this week. The reason that we had you on teach me about the Great Lakes is to ask you two questions, the first of which is this, if you could have a great donut for breakfast or a great sandwich for lunch? Which one would you have? Oh,

Michael Hawthorne 30:28
definitely, sandwich sandwich. I love a good sandwich. There's a there's a great sandwich shop on Grand Avenue in in Chicago called tempesta. They also, they also make their own meats and all this other kind of sausages and things like that, but they have fantastic sandwiches, and that's just one of many places that that I love to frequent for lunch. No, I'm

Stuart Carlton 30:51
writing that down. 10 pesto. We'll, we'll check it out. We'll put that yeah, so Chicago is a it's a good sandwich city. I'm from New Orleans, which is also a good sandwich city for me to find a sandwich worth having, well, not worth having, worth mentioning, I guess would be better, but, but Chicago has a notable sandwich or two, fantastic.

Megan Gunn 31:10
The thing that I would like to know is, is there a special place in the Great Lakes that you'd like to share with our audience? And what makes this special up the

Michael Hawthorne 31:18
Lakeshore from Duluth, Minnesota, I think the the Lake Superior shoreline is just beautiful. I go there with my my children. Pretty much every summer we go to the Boundary Waters. And usually the lake that we put in at is maybe about half hour away from Lake Superior. But there's just amazing parks. Yeah, on the Lakeshore there. There's also a, if you go all the way farther, to the almost International Falls, there's a ferry that takes you to Isle royal, the National Park in Lake Superior. And I would say that's probably the most special place I've ever been. I've camped there during the moose rut. I've been with a now retired researcher who studied the relationship between moose and wolves on Isle Royale actually went Bush whacking on the island for moose bones. Almost was charged by a bull moose, until a colleague that was with us accidentally stepped on a hornet's nest and shrieked that scared the bull away, saving us all.

Unknown Speaker 32:31
So that's,

Michael Hawthorne 32:33
that's, that's a pretty special place, but I mean, there, I'm lucky to enough to have some friends have a place on the big lake, uh, north of Muskegon, and it's so remote, it's just nothing but, but cherry orchards up there and beautiful homes and, uh, so why are you so

Stuart Carlton 32:51
depressed in all your work, your life is amazing. Mike, okay, I'm going

Michael Hawthorne 32:56
to bring it back to the depressing part this. This is this place is so remote, but it's kind of a part of Michigan that juts out further west into Lake Michigan. And every morning on this, what seems to be this beautiful, pristine beach, there's this micro plastics everywhere,

Megan Gunn 33:21
right? Can't see him.

Michael Hawthorne 33:22
There's a general store, like, associated with a cherry orchard near where my friends live, and behind the register. You know how some people can collect coins, like quarters and like a big, giant glass jar or something? Yeah. This one is full of like these little cigar tips, plastic cigar tips, cigarillos or tusher suites, and it's what people pick up on the beach.

Megan Gunn 33:56
So somehow that you might for

Michael Hawthorne 33:59
this, you know, whatever, right sewage overflows into the lake, and eventually, like you know, the gyre of the lake ends up depositing this stuff on our beautiful, supposedly pristine beaches. So once again, an example of why, you know, bringing attention to that is so important, and trying to, essentially, like with the Forever chemicals, we got to turn the tap off first before we can, you know, start trying to come to grips with the consequences.

Stuart Carlton 34:33
Michael Hawthorne of the Chicago Tribune, thank you for coming on teaching us all about the Great Lakes. Appreciate it. You.

I mean, it was all fine, like it was all good. We're ending on a nice, little upbeat thing. We're talking sandwiches, talking beautiful remote places,

Megan Gunn 34:58
and a roller coaster ride. Roller coaster ride. That's okay, up and down.

Stuart Carlton 35:02
Interesting perspective, no interesting perspective. So no Pearl Jam. You've not heard of Pearl Jam. You seriously haven't. No

Megan Gunn 35:07
that big album that they came out in 1992 Yeah, I was all of two years old, so literally, a baby. Now

Stuart Carlton 35:17
I am that different. No, but yeah. Well, anyway, no Pearl Jam is the third greatest American rock band, behind REM is second, okay, and the Grateful Dead is first. I've heard it in because you have to look at a combination of the Yes, popular success and grateful that we're not that popular, least successful. But there was a longevity associated with them, and they were hugely popular. They sold out stadiums. And Grateful Dead, more than any other band, encompasses all forms of American music, or at least all ones up until then. So that is why, despite the fact that I'm not a deadhead, unlike Paris Collinsworth, I'm not a deadhead, the Grateful Dead is the greatest American rock group. And interestingly, you probably think about this a lot, most of the most famous American artists are solo artists, rather than groups, at least in the rock and roll era, which I believe it, yeah, it's really like Bob Dylan, right? England has like the Beatles, yes, yeah. Anyway, we're thinking about

Megan Gunn 36:13
I will probably think about it, not anymore, after this conversation,

Stuart Carlton 36:19
I'll do enough for the book.

Megan Gunn 36:25
Teaching about the Great Lakes is brought to you by the fine people at Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant. We encourage you to check out the cool stuff we do at IIC grant.org, and at i l i n Sea Grant on Facebook, Instagram and other social medias. Our

Stuart Carlton 36:38
senior producer is Carolyn Foley. Teaching me about the Great Lakes. Is produced by Megan the lake lover, gun miles. Ethan Chitty is our associate producer and our fixer. Our super fun podcast artwork, which features a moose from Isle Royale, go to teach me not the Great Lakes. Episode Three with Laurene new and heights to hear about her work on the Great Lakes. Adventurer she is, anyway, go check that out to hear about her work on her adventure on Iowa where she's fucking a moose head all around. Recommended. Strongly recommended anyway, that artwork is by Joel Davenport. The show is edited by Sandro samota, who is got a little voodoo doll situation going, Oh, I feel the

Megan Gunn 37:16
pit. If you have a question or comment about the show, please email to teach me about the Great lakes@gmail.com or leave a message on our hotline at 765, 496, I ISG or 4479 Thank you for listening and keep grading those lakes. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai