By Kelly House, Bridge Michigan The Great Lakes News Collaborative includes Bridge Michigan; Circle of Blue; Great Lakes Now at Detroit Public Television; and Michigan Radio, Michigan’s NPR News Leader; who work together to bring audiences news and information about the impact of climate change, pollution, and aging infrastructure on the Great Lakes and drinking water. Read Now at Great Lakes Now.

By Brett Walton, Circle of Blue This is the first story in a series of reports from the Great Lakes News Collaborative that will investigate contemporary water pollution challenges in the Great Lakes region. Called Refresh, the series will explore the shortcomings in the Clean Water Act and how Michigan and other Great Lakes states can more completely address water pollution in the next 50 years. Read Now at Great Lakes Now.

Keep up with energy-related developments in the Great Lakes area with Great Lakes Now’s biweekly headline roundup. Click on the headline to read the full story:   Illinois ComEd seeks record-high $1.5 billion rate hike over next 4 years — Chicago Sun-Times ComEd says that’s the cost of bolstering the region’s electric grid in a statewide effort to phase out carbon emissions and to protect the system from severe weather damage that’s becoming more common due to climate change. Read Now at Great Lakes Now.

If you want to peg the date when humans began the trek to modernity facilitated by a relationship to water, start 10,000 years ago, says Giulio Boccaletti, author of Water: A Biography. That’s when nomads became settlers, began farming and their existence started to depend on rivers and streams. The book continues through the millennia to modern times when America constructed the Hoover Dam and created the Tennessee Valley Authority which Boccaletti says “became a model for the world.” Boccaletti is a scientist and an honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at University of Oxford. Read Now at Great Lakes Now.