Water quality
Valuing Regional Water Supply Planning and Conservation Alternatives
Water for Life: Addressing a 21st Century Crisis
Susan E. Boehme
Outreach Coordinator and Coastal Sediment Specialist
Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, UIUC Extension Liaison to the U.S. EPA Great Lakes National Program Office
Contaminants and the Great Lakes" Historic and Emerging Concerns
Clean water is our most important resource and one we have historically abused and continue to abuse in many ways. During the industrial revolution water and waterways were considered a commodity to be used without concern for the biology that depended on them. After the Clean Water Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency regulatory action began to improve and protect these resources. But the regulations were developed for each contaminant, not for the river/lake ecosystem and new, some quite possibly harmful chemicals are developed every day. From a regulatory point of view a new paradigm is needed to both continue to find the best technologies to address the historic contaminants already in the Great Lakes, but also to define new strategies to look at emerging contaminants like pharmaceuticals and personal care products, in a more holistic way to avoid future contamination.
Susan Boehme is the outreach coordinator and an Extension specialist with the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant College Program. Susan works as a liaison to the U.S. EPA Great Lakes National Program Office in Chicago, IL. She coordinates federal, state and community stakeholder efforts to remove contaminated sediments from various waterbodies in the Great Lakes basin in an effort to improve environmental and human health. Susan received her undergraduate degree in Geology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Oceanography from North Carolina State University. Her graduate research focused on the biologically-mediated chemical transformations occurring in coastal marine sediments. During her postdoctoral work at Rutgers University and at the Max-Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (Bremen, Germany) she continued her investigations of sediment chemistry in shallow to deep sediments globally. Her work also included studies of sea surface-atmospheric exchange of CO2, water column distributions of nutrients and chemical constituents, and development of new instrumentation for in-situ measurements. Susan’s desire to bring a scientific perspective to public policy led her to the New York Academy of Sciences where she became the director of the New York/New Jersey Industrial Ecology Harbor Project. She has over ten years of pollution prevention experience and continues to work with Great Lakes communities on issues such as unwanted medicine disposal, e-waste and emerging contaminants.
