We have a duty to take care of Lake Michigan

Waukegan’s shoreline is full of environmental hazards, including a coal-power plant, nearby coal ash ponds, four toxic-waste sites and other sources of industrial pollution.

Brian Ernst/Sun-Times

The Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board’s call to protect Lake Michigan from toxic contaminants that are stored near the lake’s shores should arouse a strong response from communities that ring its waters.

Such a response would be very much in keeping with tradition in the Great Lakes region, where states and localities have been fierce in the protection of the Great Lakes both from diversions of water outside the basin as well as from pollutants.

Legislation such as the Great Lakes Compact and the various Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement are testaments to the historical efforts made by the Great Lakes states. Let’s not forget the efforts from the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario to protect the Great Lakes ecosystem, as well as evidence of the bipartisan nature of these efforts.

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The aspirations contained in these agreements to preserve the integrity and sustainability of the Great Lakes can only be fully realized by people organizing at the local level when necessary to address problems that are specific to that community.

Complaints and demands can then be routed in many directions, legally and politically, in an effort to achieve a good result. We are all the caretakers of the Great Lakes. As such we have a duty not to allow our great water resource to be wasted, polluted or dissipated. We have not and will not “sit on our hands.”

Kathleen H. MacKay, Downtown

Offensive language

The mayor used bad language about a man who has been instrumental in overthrowing a precedent that is a half-century old, recognizing that women should not be forced to give birth by the state or by any one of the 50 states. 

All he and his fellow unelected judicial fanatics have done is endanger the health and, in some cases, the lives of millions of poor women in this country. What next? How horrible to curse a man who stated he wants to go beyond that to ban same-sex marriage and contraception laws. 

Mayor Lori Lightfoot should apologize to Justice Clarence Thomas as soon as he apologizes for imposing his minority political views and religious beliefs on the rest of the country.

Michael Gorman, River North

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