The Great Lakes are a natural wonder of the world and are a resource for us to use and protect. This natural wonder contains 20% of the world’s freshwater supply and 95% of the U.S. fresh surface water. To put that into perspective, if we were to pour out the Great Lakes over the Continental U.S. they would fill up the Grand Canyon and put the U.S. under 9 feet of water.

More than 40 million people depend on this vast, but vulnerable resouce regionally for fresh drinking water, jobs, food, to reconnect with nature, and a place to create memorable family experiences. The Great Lakes basin is a unique environment, containing forest, wetland, marsh, and dune communities and sustaining over 3,500 species of plants and animals.

Lake Erie, Ohio’s Great Lake, is a foundation of health, economic vitality, and recreation for millions of Ohioans. Unique among the Great Lakes, Lake Erie is the shallowest, warmest and most biologically productive. The Lake supports one of the largest freshwater commercial fisheries in the world and the largest sport fishery in the Great Lakes, producing more fish for human consumption than the other four Great Lakes combined.

Lake Erie, along with the tributaries that feed the lake, supplies drinking water to 13 million residents regionally and roughly three million Ohioans. Each year more than seven million people flock to Ohio’s portion of the Lake Erie basin, including Kelleys, South Bass (better known as Put-in-Bay), and Middle Bass islands, to reconnect with nature and families. As a result, a quarter of a million jobs are sustained. Tourism, wildlife watching, and sport fishing contribute $9.75 billion a year in revenue to Ohio’s economy.

The 11,649 square miles that make up Ohio’s Lake Erie basin are comprised of beech-maple, oak, hemlock, and hardwood forests, as well as marshes, vernal pools and bogs, rare oak savannas, lakeshore grasslands, sand dunes, and more.

These habitats sustain more than 1,500 species of plants and animals. Threatened, endangered and rare species located within these extraordinary and unparalleled ecosystems include the bald eagle, wild lupine, Showy Lady’s Slipper orchid, four-toed salamander, Lake Erie water snake and the Karner blue butterfly.

It is clear that Lake Erie’s natural wonders are essential to humans and wildlife alike; providing homes, food, drinking water, recreation and economic stability.

Unfortunately, Lake Erie is facing multiple challenges including:

• A lack of laws to prevent the mass export of its water by cargo tankers to foreign countries such as Saudi Arabia;
• A radical attempt to privatize the Lake Erie shoreline and open it up to uncontrolled commercial development;
• Destruction of irreplaceable coastal habitats and wetlands that are critical to the survival of Great Lakes’ plants and animals. Ohio has already lost 90% of our wetlands; and
• Combined sewer overflows that dump untreated human waste into our waterways. During 2005 more than 10 billion gallons of raw sewage was dumped into Lake Erie and its tributaries.