Episode 43- Michele Arquette-Palermo
Brian Kruger:
Welcome to the podcast, the Common Bridge with Richard Helppie. Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology, health and finance space. He and his wife, Leslie, are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors, but with a primary focus on medically and educationally under-served children. My name is Brian Kruger, and from time to time I’ll be the moderator and host of this podcast.
And welcome to the Common Bridge. Rich’s really excited to have as his guest today, Michelle Arquette-Palermo and she’s the head of the Fresh Water Forum at Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. As head of the Freshwater Forum, Michelle oversees all aspects of the forum’s activities including fund development and grant writing, educational programs, teacher professional development, exhibitions, and research and stakeholder engagement. She’s a graduate of Northern Michigan University with a background in ecology and aquatic biology and specializes in water quality assessments. She’s also a graduate of the Walden University with a master’s in non-profit management and leadership. And in 2014, Michelle was recognized by the Michigan Alliance for Environmental and Outdoor Education for excellence in her field, and in 2013 awarded the Michigan Water Environment Association Educational Professional of the Year award. In 2012, Michelle was recognized by General Motors and Earth Force as the Chevy Green Educator of the Year. And in 2007, she earned the Johanna Roscup Award for efforts with the Clinton River Watershed Council. For over 20 years, she’s worked in Southeast Michigan, specializing in collaborating with stakeholder groups to advance scientific knowledge, education, and stewardship of our communities and natural resources. So on the Common Bridge in the last couple of months, Rich has discussed the effects of COVID-19 what it’s had in our society, but this is the first time he’s dealt with environmental aspects of the virus. I think you’re really going to like this. We join Rich and Michelle’s conversation in progress.
Rich Helppie:
Michelle, I really appreciate you coming on the Common Bridge today. As you know, on prior episodes we’ve been talking about the pandemic and its impact on our society. We’ve talked about things like the medical system and the changes that have been employed in courts and in the jails, of course the economic impact and the rising public health issues. But we really appreciate you coming on today to talk about the environmental impact. And in some respects that sounded like a real positive story. And I am not an environmental scientist, but I’d sure like to understand, what do we know today and what are you seeing out there?
Michelle Arquette-Palermo:
So studies are just now really starting to come out probably in about the last month, and the story that’s being told through the analysis of the different data sets that are being collected, is mostly about air and air quality, most notably, carbon dioxide emissions as well as nitrogen dioxide emissions. And those are both very closely tied to manufacturing and also transportation. And when you basically shut down all the major economies across our planet, you are going to see a decrease in those emissions because we are not manufacturing to the level. There’s been some really great aerial photographs of comparing traffic in China during the shutdown versus pre-COVID, and that is also being seen across Europe and the United States. So we know that emissions are down. So clean air is of course tied to that, as we have less pollutants going into the air, we have cleaner air. Some places have blue sky that have not seen blue sky in a very long time, which of course is not really a good thing if you think about it. Our air pollution has been so severe in some communities on this planet that they haven’t been able to see blue sky in a long time. So I think it’s really kind of giving us a glimpse into what we could be.
Rich Helppie:
It is really an exciting, positive output of a very bad situation. I was reading that the carbon emissions have dropped 17%, and that’s a global measure, during the periods in early April. And that those fuels like oil and gas and coal, are just not being used. And to your point, it’s about auto traffic and it’s about manufacturing. I was also surprised to learn that air transportation only represents about 10% of the carbon emissions. That surprised me. I thought it would be much higher.
Michelle Arquette-Palermo:
But that is also having an impact too. I was reading…talking about an airplane diet, we’re all on an airplane diet. So yes, while it doesn’t have the impact, a huge impact, on carbon emissions, 10% is still significant and every little bit is helping. So including air travel, I think is contributing to it. But, like I said, I don’t want to get too excited. What it is, is it’s just a glimpse into what we could be or we could strive for.
Rich Helppie:
Well, I, I concur with you, and I read something that is a little disheartening that says as we are reopening or coming back online, that pollution levels are going back up, and that for the year we are going to end lower than 2019 levels, but we’re going to put ourselves right back in the same situation. And it just seems like a tragic miss if we don’t try to incorporate some of these changes in a policy way, in a more permanent fashion. Have you given much thought to what might be done to sustain some of the gains that have been made around the world in carbon emissions and in air quality improvement?
Michelle Arquette-Palermo:
From a policy perspective, I think that this gives us an opportunity to look at, well what if we did have stricter air quality standards? Historical medical research has shown us that poor air quality results in taking about three years off our lives. So if you think about the connection here, if poor air quality results in making this more susceptible to disease and then having less pollution input into the environment is better ultimately for human health, which make us less susceptible to disease. So I want us to think about policy changes that could improve air quality, which would ultimately improve human health, making us less susceptible to disease overall. So that’s where I’m really interested in seeing more and more research done, because we’re doing the medical research on people getting COVID where the air quality is poor, and then we’re watching the response to being shut down, improving air quality because we’re doing less manufacturing, less transportation.
Also, I think about it as a Michigander and home of the auto industry, and of course being sensitive to that, we know that mass transit is also a better alternative for carbon emissions, and not so many cars on the road. So this could have, I think, long term implications if we really think about concentrating on air quality and how to improve that. Through, if it’s more stringent requirements of manufacturing, incentives for people to use public transportation and not have three cars in the driveway. So I think that we have some real opportunity here to take this look and to figuring out how we can improve overall health of the planet and humans.
Rich Helppie:
Well I am in agreement with you on the talking about incentives and if you tax something, you get less of it. If you subsidize it, you get more of it. And I see this as an opportunity not only for an improved, environment, but as you pointed out, the direct link to health, and also to the quality of life. Just to muse for a little bit, if there were incentives for manufacturers to create more modern plants that emit less carbons and retire some of the older plants, if there were incentives to move into more densely populated inner suburbs or into core cities, where we had policies, both state and federal, that incented developers to go to virgin farmland and put in subdivisions, rather than using existing infrastructure, roads and sewers and electric lines and building in the cities. We have taxes on gasoline and that’s fraught with perhaps a regressive outcome.
But if you think about the number of jobs that in our current information economy that people have discovered can be done without that commuting time, without the traffic jams, without all of that carbon emission. Perhaps there’s some tax incentive for working at home or for an employer to not require their people to travel in. I just think about the quality of life if I don’t have to plan my necessary trips around that inevitable traffic jam. And I think about the quality of life with people not wasting two to four hours a day in the car. And I think about that pollution rate coming down, and what can we do now that would head that off.
I think you’ve given some good ideas and I’m sure there are others, but I think it’s what we need to be asking those people that we elect to preserve these gains. There are immediate things is if you look at things like mass transportation, those are very, very long term projects. They take a lot of capital to put in place. And because of the way commuting patterns have developed in so many areas around the car, many of them are impractical. You look what happened in Hawaii, in California, and I know in Michigan we’ve tried things over time and we’re just not a suburb to center city commuting, although on the East coast, the mass transit works really well. So anyway, lots of ideas out there.
Michelle, if we could shift a little bit around water, and I know this is an area that you are, no pun intended, steeped in, that you know quite a bit about. Have we any data today or any anecdotal evidence that perhaps this economic pause, or shutdown, has improved our water quality?
Michelle Arquette-Palermo:
So I’m seeing some, there are some research, some papers coming out, a little bit about water, not a whole lot. But we’ve seen a lot on the internet and there is one research paper that I’ve read in particular that kind of backs up a little bit. We’ve all seen on the internet that the canals in Venice are clear, and that people can actually see the fish. From, a practical standpoint that really does make a whole lot of sense. Boats, people, fish, everything moves through the water. We’re stirring up the sediments in the bottom. They call that turbidity-right after rains, which we just had a couple of days of a whole lot of rain that fell in this state. If you look at every river and a lot of the lakes, they’re going to be very brown. They’re very turbid right now because there’s a whole lot of activity in that water. It is constantly stirring up the sediments on the bottom. So in Venice, without all the boats and without all the tourists and without all the traffic in the canals, the water is going to settle and the sediments will fall to the bottom. And the water column is a lot clearer. So they’re finding that-there was a paper published in Science of the Total Environment looking at some lakes in India and China and they’re finding the very same thing. With industry not in-putting into the water, stirring up sediment, they’re finding that there is a lot more clarity in the water because industry, boating, tourists, all those types of things aren’t stirring it up. So it does make a lot of sense that water would be clearer. As far as industrial inputs, there is some research being done in India showing that water quality as far as contaminants-I shouldn’t say contaminants, sorry-of nutrients, is lower. And that’s because again, industrial inputs aren’t as prominent right now.
In the United States. I’m not finding any research on that. And that I wouldn’t expect to really see a whole lot of change in that realm, mainly because we do have a lot of industrial requirements, permit requirements, for any sort of manufacturing that they have water quality standards that they have to meet. And thanks to the Clean Water act of 1972, where the pollution issues of our surface water is somewhat tied to industrial practices, but it’s not. It’s more of the non-point source pollution, rainwater- what’s washing off the land that really has the biggest impact on water quality. So while we might see a slight improvement, I wouldn’t expect to see a huge improvement, mainly because we have pretty stringent restrictions on what corporations, manufacturing, anybody, can discharge to what we call waters of the state.
Rich Helppie:
That is a fascinating assessment. What about the fresh water supplies? And I know that you are deeply involved with what is going on in the Great Lakes, which I understand is the largest freshwater supply in the world. And in recent days, actually last night, prior to recording this, we saw some very unusual amounts of rainwater that have burst a couple of dams here in Michigan. Is there a way to describe any impact, risks or benefits to the fresh water supply? And does it relate in any way to what we’re seeing happen with the rainfall and with the dam failures? I know that’s a broad question, but it’s something I’m curious about. It’s things that have never happened in my lifetime.
Michelle Arquette-Palermo:
So we have historical-prior to even the rains that fallen this week, earlier this week, we have record levels-Great Lakes water levels right now. People on Lake Michigan are losing their homes. Beaches are a lot smaller, which I was reading an article this morning, if we’re opening up the beaches, but there’s very little beach left because of the high water levels, how are we going to possibly socially distance? I don’t know the answer to that, but it did bring up a very good point. Lake Huron is the same. Well, I haven’t seen as many homes fall into Lake Huron as I have in Lake Michigan reading the news, but they’re losing significant amounts of beach as well. Here’s where I see an impact. We have high water levels and we’re under a Stay-at-home order. Universities have had to suspend research. So in Michigan our field season starts usually March or April. This is when the Department of Environmental Water Quality goes out and does water quality assessment. It’s when Michigan State, U of M, Central-all the universities are going out and doing their field work and doing their research. They’ve had to cancel that. So we’re not going to really be able to do a lot of the research to be able to gather the data and the information that we might need in order to understand what’s happening. Because of high water levels or any sort of response to the pandemic and the stay at home and what we’re doing, so we’re going to have a gap in data. Some researchers are able to still use some of their research, but we’ve had… conferences on the Great Lakes have been canceled. So there are a lot of other impacts that might not necessarily seem connected, but they really are.
And another one I was reading about too, is that the boots on the ground people, who I think of-Trout Unlimited, our local land conservancies, our watershed councils, so they’re all staying home, and their volunteer programs that clean up litter or do water quality monitoring are not happening. Those activities are not happening. So we’re losing that as well. Plus, the donations to these smaller organizations are also down for conservation groups, think of Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited. The people who are out there really promoting conservation, they’re not able to do their work. And so while we might see some environmental impacts from this pandemic, kind of an improvement, I’m concerned three months down the road, four months down the road, a year down the road on this impact that we’re going to have from our smaller groups collecting actual scientific data.
Rich Helppie:
In some respects we’ve just been blinded from gathering information. And the only way we’re seeing it definitively is with catastrophes like the dams breaking up near Midland. That’s a scary situation.
Michelle Arquette-Palermo:
It is a scary situation. I mean we’re kind of caught, and I went down the rabbit hole this morning, of course, being a person who’s an aquatic biologist and very interested in river health and restoration and protection, I really wanted to understand this whole situation, and what’s going on up there on the Tittabawassee, and the Cedar, the other rivers up there. And then you think about, okay, these people have all been displaced, now we have the shelters for them and then the shelters have to put in protections for COVID-19. They’re creating shelters where they have to congregate people but they have to keep them socially distant. What’s the impact of that?
Rich Helppie:
That that was something I was thinking about this morning as well as I was doing my morning reading, in that we know that COVID is more apt to be caught at home because of the accumulative viral load. We know that close quarters like prisons, nursing homes and the like, are even more susceptible. And when they were talking about the shelters being put up, I just had the vision of the high school gym with the cots toe to head, and thought that can’t be good in this situation.
Michelle, I remember in recent years that there was a lot of discussion about the low levels of the inland lakes and rivers and that thwarting both recreation and fishing. And also the Great Lakes, particularly like Huron, losing its level and creating really long beaches. And now we’ve seemed to have swung too far to the other side. Is there an optimal level for Great Lakes and freshwater lakes, and is that something that can be addressed or is the policy really better designed to mitigate the extremes? And if climate change plays a part in that, I know that our listeners would love to hear about that as well.
Michelle Arquette-Palermo:
So Great Lakes levels, inland lakes, rivers, all of these are part of the environment in ecosystems. And what we know about them is that they’re dynamic. They’re not static. They are going to change. And so even our planning resources from our planning-our individual township and county planning documents say build for the 10 year flood or the 20 year flood, or you’re in the one hundred year plain, you hear all those terms. We do take water and the extremes into account. But what we’re finding in the climate impact, is that we have to plan for those extremes and we have to really think about-we’ve always thought about the one hundred year flood and what we’ve always talked about is we have to plan for the one hundred year flood. Well, what we saw in Metro Detroit probably four years ago, five years ago when we had five inches of rain and we had 14 feet of water at the 696 and I-75 interchange where divers had to go down and clean the drains to get the water out of there-they called that a 300 year storm. They’re calling what happened in Midland a 500 year storm. So I think we really need to plan for those extremes because climate…what it’s showing us is that our storms are becoming more frequent and more intense. If I read, yesterday, the gauge, it was-I can’t remember exactly what city it was, but it was East Tawas, Au Gres-somewhere up in that region-they got, a 24 hour period, over eight inches of rain. That event that I talked about in Southeast Michigan was five inches of rain. And then we also have to think from a planning perspective, obviously Royal Oak, where the mixing bowl of 696 and I-75 to come together is very different than East Tawas. We can’t come up with a one size fits all plan. It’s not going to work. What we have to do is take different types of environments. Is it a super urban environment? Is it a rural environment? How can we best plan, build development and think about these extremes? I don’t think we can plan and implement for the 500 year storm all the time. That would be very expensive and I don’t think that we could convince the greater public that that’s what we need to do. And I don’t know that we really need to do that, but we need to start thinking about our footprint and how we can better adapt to more extreme events.
Rich Helppie:
That is very insightful, and I also have some experience in recent years in Southern California with 300 year flood followed by the 100 year flood. And the short version is the 300 year flood overwhelmed some of the water runoff design-terribly. I’ve talked about the need for infrastructure on this podcast and I think a potential policy that would benefit so many areas, is for the federal government to finally use these historic low interest rates, borrow in 50 or 100 year bonds dedicated to infrastructure. Because we can’t keep putting our finger in the dike-literally-in dealing with, as we are in Michigan today, with 95 year old dams, flooding our cities.
Michelle, this has been a great conversation and if you were going to recommend an action or actions for people today, is there anything that comes to mind that our our listeners might take away and say, this is something that they can do to help improve the situation?
Michelle Arquette-Palermo:
Oh, this is always my favorite question, and whether I’m talking to a nine year old or 90 year olds, my experiences, what I tell people to do is to just take a moment and think and to not point fingers. We all do that, right? Well is to actually look in the mirror and think about what can I do to help be part of the change? What are the simple things? Because we often talk about whommitting to do? Am I committing to riding my bike more? Am I committed to donating my time, or my money to my local conservation group? Am I going to start watching the planning commission meetings where I live to make sure that they’re thinking about sustainability long term? Am I purchasing a vehicle that gets more miles to the gallon? Am I going to talk to my employer about working from home more? There are a lot of things that individual people can do to strengthen their own personal input. And as long as we want all the stuff-I just call it the stuff. As long as we want stuff, there’s going to be people who make stuff and we’re going to continue to manufacture stuff. So what is the stuff that I can live without, and how can I make my world a better plat.
Rich Helppie:
Michelle, that is outstanding. I’m standing here cheering you on as you talk through that. And I particularly like the aspects of course, of personal responsibility, not pointing fingers. It’s not going to be something like, oh, if we only elect this person, or kick the person out of office, it’s we, the people, need to lean in and make that change and to be the change. And I believe this COVID opportunity, while it’s caused so much death and devastation, perhaps has opened a door. As we wrap up today, any closing thoughts that you’d like to leave our listeners with? This has just been a great conversation, and very grateful that you decided to devote some of your time today on the Common Bridge.
Michelle Arquette-Palermo:
I’m hopeful. I think the one thing that I’ve recognized, as the person who spends a lot of time kayaking, hiking, biking, all those things, is those places are really crowded right now. And while the loner in me is a little perturbed from time to time, the environmentalist in me loves the fact that I love seeing people outside. I love seeing people on the water, on the trails, and I’m hopeful that those people will continue to enjoy that and do that personal reflection that I just talked about and make that change.
Rich Helppie:
Michelle, very grateful for you appearing today on the Common Bridge. I hope we can continue this dialogue. I hope that people will look up the environmental and conservation groups that you’ve mentioned. Of course, visit the beautiful campus of Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and the Science Institute. A great education, great displays, really a world class organization. This has been the Common Bridge. I’m Rich Helppie, thank you for listening.
Brian Kruger:
You have been listening to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge podcast. Recording and post-production provided by Stunt Three Multimedia. All rights are reserved by Richard Helppie. For more information, visit RichardHelppie.com.
