Lately we have heard a great deal about the lead poisoning of children in Flint, Michigan, which may have some wondering about lead in their own communities.  According to Ohio’s Department of Health, lead poisoning is the greatest environmental threat to children in Ohio, and in the past 15 years 40,000 children have suffered lead poisoning in Cuyahoga County alone.

In 2015, the toxic cyanobacterial algal bloom in Lake Erie was the worst in recorded history. You may not be aware of this, simply because the situation received much less press than in previous years, such as 2014 when enormous clouds of microscopic bacteria clogged Toledo’s public water treatment system. A lot has been done in recent years in Canada and the United States, as well as here in Ohio, to strengthen the laws and regulations designed to protect surface water, in an effort to slow the contributions of chemicals that feed these algal blooms. It is too early to say whether these efforts have succeeded; due to the pollution storage capacity in the lake, it will take years to understand how much effect these efforts have had.

On November 9, 2015, we welcomed the first of our second corps of Resident Attorneys, Megan McLaurin Hunter. Even before news outlets were reporting on studies linking the close proximity of shale gas development to premature births, Megan had applied to the Fair Shake Residency Program proposing a practice that brings together her interconnected interests in environmental and reproductive justice. Like the start-up of Fair Shake and the work of the first set of Resident Attorneys in our program, Megan hopes to create a space where a diverse client base can affordably access necessary services, but Megan hopes to consistently practice at the crossroads of women’s health and environmental issues. We couldn’t be more excited that she’s up to the entrepreneurial challenge of forging (read “inventing”) a new access to justice path.