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GLPF
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Interests > Ecosystem
Restoration
Leadership for Ecosystem
Restoration
The Fund encourages applicants to develop and test strategies
that advance the state-of-the-practice in restoring ecosystems.
Over the past four decades, the citizens, industries and
units of government in the Great Lakes basin have carried
out an unprecedented ecosystem restoration effort. This region
has shown the world how performance-based ecosystem restoration
can be undertaken at geographic scale that covers over 400,000
square miles; at a political scale that includes two sovereign
countries, eight states, two provinces and hundreds of other
units of government; and done without harming the economic
engine of two countries. After spending billions of public
and private dollars to minimize chemical pollution and control
the impact of invasive exotic species such as the sea lamprey
and the zebra mussel the waters and biota of the basin are
cleaner then they have been in years.
As a result of these successes, the problems facing the basin
ecosystem are of a fundamentally different character than
those we have learned to solve. They are not, generally, a
matter of cleaning-up local pollution sources. Problems are
increasingly distant from the basin in time and space. They
are frequently the consequence of many small, apparently unrelated
decisions. These new problems require new solutions, and the
Fund encourages applicants to generate preproposals to test
those new solutions. Some of these new solutions are hinted
at in the other current areas of interest: methods to prevent
biological pollution, to restore the pattern of water movements
in the basin ecosystem, and new ways to use the power of the
market place for the benefit if the basin ecosystem. Many
new solutions have not yet been anticipated.
Projects that identify a specific ecological outcome, and
have an innovative, pragmatic plan to achieve it are encouraged.
Areas ripe for such innovation may derive from:
- the degree to which the Great Lakes basin ecosystem is
connected to the global atmospheric and trade systems that
have not been generally considered in efforts to protect
and restore the system's health.
- the nature of the likely new economic activities which
will use the system's human and natural capital.
- the untapped wealth of organizational capacity and leadership
talent that lies in institutions that have not yet been
engaged in ecological health protection and restoration
activities.
- the new understanding that the cumulative result of individual
instances of human intervention in "natural" systems
is not necessarily negative and that positive returns to
scale are possible and desirable.
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