With Great Lakes comes Great Responsibility

One of the Earth Day Challenge events is a new Chicago Public Television program called Professor Mike's City Science. It will air in the greater Chicago area on Monday, May 5, 2008  at 7:30pm on WYCC Channel 20.   It's geared toward middle school students and their parents. I got to appear on the show as an EPA expert on the Great Lakes.

The first episode is on electronic waste and our challenge to collect one million pounds of e-waste. It opens with a student attempting to throw out an old computer monitor. She is perplexed  when the garbage man refuses to pick it up. She visits Professor Mike to find out why. The show then progresses through an exploration of the Great Lakes, pollution, conservation, invasive species, and what to do with old electronics in a variety of settings ranging from Navy Pier to the Research Vessel Peter Wise Lake Guardian. Professor Mike conducts several experiments in a Mr. Wizard like fashion.

My scene was filmed in a laboratory at a local college decorated with dismantled computers and lots of graduated cylinders filled with brightly colored liquids. When I arrived on set, I was introduced to Professor Mike and sent off to hair and make up. (Apparently the style and polish of a typical government scientist isn't quite up to par with television standards, but one can't disappoint the fans.) After being sufficiently primped, Professor Mike, the student and I began to rehearse our scene. It took a little while to work out all the kinks, but eventually we found a good flow for the information we wanted to share and started to film the scene.

It was really important to both the show's producers and to me that the information be accurate and entertaining without dumbing anything down for the viewers. I gave a lot of general information on the Great Lakes:

• the HOMES acronym for the names of the Great Lakes
• the water in the Great Lakes equals about 10 feet of standing water if spread out over the lower 48 states
• 25 million people get their drinking water from the Great Lakes.

I also did my best to explain how deposition of pollutants from the air impacts the Great Lakes.

The main message, however, was that if we want to keep the Great Lakes GREAT, every person needs to do their part, a little every day, to keep our water clean and to ensure that it is a resource for generations to come. With Great Lakes, there truly comes Great Responsibility.

Beth Murphy works in EPA's Great Lakes National Program Office, and runs the Great Lakes Fish Monitoring Program.