What if Ohio had cleaner rivers, lakes, and streams?

Small ephemeral waterfall flows into Lake Erie on Kelley’s Island. Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial on Ohio’s South Bass Island is on the background. (Getty Images)

In 2022, a childhood friend of mine was married in Denmark.

I flew out to Copenhagen with a few of my friends and we spent the week seeing a very different life than we were used to living in Ohio.

As someone whose primary mode of transportation is my bicycle, I was of course impressed by the bike infrastructure in the city. It was hard to not appreciate a place where biking is the norm rather than something you get yelled at by motorists for doing.

But what I keep going back to when I think about Copenhagen is the quality of their public waterways. Every day after work there were hundreds of young people hanging out next to the canal, taking dips in the water. We ended up taking a boat around and jumping into the water along the way.

This is a canal that goes right through the city center of Copenhagen. Could you imagine that being the norm in the Cuyahoga, Ohio, or Scioto rivers?

When I asked people about this phenomenon, they told me that the canal did not used to be swimmable. They talked about how a large ballot initiative was passed a decade ago and it was cleaned up so now it is safe enough to swim in. This was a decision made by residents of the city.

Ohio’s waterways are one of its most valuable assets. Before the railways came through, Ohio had one of the most extensive canal systems in the world. Even today, University of Toledo Economist Kevin Egan says that the counties along Lake Erie account for a majority of the state’s tourism industry.

And the state is making strides to improve its water quality. The H2Ohio program is helping curb fertilizer runoff. Ohio State University recently was awarded $4.9 million for water quality initiatives.

It is needed. According to objective measures, Ohio has exceptionally poor water quality. I was in a meeting earlier this year where a data analyst with the Ohio EPA disputed this claim, saying that Ohio looks bad because we do more testing than other states. I asked him for the data to support this claim but he failed to get back to me about it.

So as it stands today, objective measures say Ohio’s water quality is poor and evidence we have about how people use our public waterways suggests people who engage in public recreation think so, too.

But what if that changed? What if our rivers in our cities and in the country were safer places to use for swimming, boating, and fishing? Recent trends in migration within the United States suggest that rural areas that are growing are those with a capacity for recreation. Improving the water quality of Ohio’s streams, rivers, and lakes could be a boon for rural counties looking to figure out what their future economy looks like.

On top of that, there are benefits to clean surface water. Ecological diversity will make our ecosystems more resilient. In an era of changing climate, resiliency matters. And it won’t just be good for plants, animals, and ecosystems: it will be good for people, too.

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