Leadership for the next generation of Great Lakes stewardship

We face a new era of challenges and opportunities in stewarding the Great Lakes. The management and policy regimes first developed over 100 years ago are ill-equipped to handle the complex, interrelated, generational problems confronting the Great Lakes region today. Fortunately, there is a generational opportunity right now to start toward true 21st-century stewardship because U.S. EPA is drafting a new Great Lakes restoration plan. To strengthen and reshape our institutions, policies and scientific inquiry, we need to create and apply a new set of Great Lakes stewardship principles based on boundary-spanning, justice and systems thinking. It is time to rethink institutions from the ground up, focusing especially on engaging communities meaningfully when generating new knowledge and making new policies. This will require support from Great Lakes decision-makers at all levels as well as a groundswell of support from universities, non-governmental organizations and grassroots citizen movements.