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As a Michigan senator, I feel a special responsibility to protect the Great Lakes. They are not only a source of clean drinking water for more than 30 million people but are also an integral part of Michigan's heritage and its economy.
Our Great Lakes, harbors, ports, and rivers provide not only vital resources for us to live, but an entire maritime way of life for so many people. The least we can do is protect it, and the way of life it provides for so many.
The States which form the northern border of the United States westward from the Great Lakes to the Pacific coast include an area several times larger than France and could contain ten Englands and still have room to spare.
We've got this proposal which has been languishing in the legislature, the Water Legacy Act, which is derived from a Republican task force on protecting the Great Lakes. Yet nothing has been done on it.
I'm convinced that the Great Lakes region will be at the center of an internally-focused North American economy when the hallucination of oil-powered globalism dissolves. Places like Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit will have a new life, but not at the scale of the twentieth century.
I went camping one time when I was twelve, to the Great Lakes. My friend stepped in really deep muddy water and started screaming and sinking. My mom ran up, and I was just standing there a foot away and wouldn't stick out my hand to pull him up. So I'm probably not the best person to take on a camping trip.
When I grew up in the early '90s, the new World Wide Web felt like a gimmick, and I had no idea of the changes in store. In the summers, I'd backpack through Europe, follow the Grateful Dead. I had a car and a tent and traveled around the Great Lakes and out West. Jack Kerouac was my guiding light, his 'On the Road' a sacred text.