Published: June 27, 2009 09:05 pm      

Editorial: NMC's new freshwater degree is a perfect fit

It doesn't get more appropriate than this.

The Water Studies Institute at Northwestern Michigan College is launching an associate's degree program this fall in freshwater studies -- smack in the middle of the largest living freshwater lab on planet Earth.

The program is the first of its kind at a community college in the United States.

And given the already sky-high local interest in all things to do with the environment -- the air we breathe, the water we drink and the Great Lakes themselves -- it could hardly be in a more appropriate place.

Water Studies Institute director Hans VanSumeren said the program -- and its location -- are unique.

"No one is offering the first two years to engage in freshwater studies and we have the perfect location to do so," he said.

Perfect is an understatement. Not only is NMC's Maritime Campus located directly on the West Arm of Grand Traverse Bay but the region is home to dozens of inland lakes, including Torch Lake, Crystal Lake and Lake Charlevoix, all unique in their own right.

The associate degree program will offer three areas of concentration: science and technology; global freshwater policy and sustainability; or economy and society.

All three are already hot topics not only in northern Michigan but the Great Lakes basin. Invasive species and bottled water, two longtime environmental battlegrounds, tie in with all three topic areas.

The college has said the degree will build on existing NMC courses, including watershed science and oceanography, and more classes will be added.

VanSumeren said the degree program will prepare students for advanced degrees at a four-year university and for careers in government, planning, sustainable agriculture, sustainable energy and water quality. Those are all topics of great local interest and, given the way the world is going, they'll be areas of national and international concern for years to come.

The politics of freshwater will become more and more crucial to the nation and world in coming decades. The people of the Great Lakes states must be years ahead of the curve on issues of exporting or selling fresh water to the world; the debate must begin now.

The Great Lakes have been identified as one of the prime places in North America for wind turbines and the best places to capture that wind are a few miles off shore. So what will be the rules for wind turbines? What impact could they have on the lakes? We need to know, and soon.

The planned removal of dams along the Boardman River, said to be the biggest project of its kind in the nation, will be one big learning lab.

It's not as though the bay and the lakes have not been scrutinized for years.

Thousands of local school kids have gone out on the Inland Seas program's school ship to measure water clarity and temperature and the Grand Traverse Bay Observing System buoys provide real-time oceanographic and meteorological information.

The Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay, which champions water quality issues, has been around since 1990.

But bringing academic discipline and the rigors of the classroom to the topic can only help all of us better understand the issues and better protect the resource.