The two countries have just updated a 25-year old water quality agreement that adds new commitments to reduce nutrient pollution, curb invasive species, and help cities adapt to climate change.

But environmentalists on both sides of the border are concerned that neither the US nor Canada will spend what’s needed to implement the changes.

Over the past four years, the U.S. has significantly stepped up spending on the Great Lakes, pouring more than $1 billion into clean-up. That’s won praise from environmental advocates like Andy Buchsbaum, director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes program office, who says the US investment represents “tremendous progress,” particularly in cleaning up toxic hotspots.

But others charge that in recent years, Canada hasn’t been doing its fair share. In an article this month in the Toronto Globe & Mail, Canadian advocate Bob Oliver, CEO of Pollution Probe, said Canada’s investment over the same period has remained relatively stagnant, capped at about $50 million a year.

Some citizen groups, such as the Council of Canadians, say future spending plans by Canada are quote – “absurdly inadequate.”

Some Canadian coastal landowners like Bob Duncanson are frustrated that problems like dropping lake levels and new algae blooms aren’t being dealt with faster

Like any frustrated taxpayer, they’re never doing enough, but they’re taxing me too much. So it’s a double-edged sword.

Canadian government officials claim they are making headway on combating new Great Lakes threats like nutrient pollution and invasive species, despite the lack of a national investment strategy like the US Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

“Within Environment Canada, we have already initiated a new program focused on Lake Erie,” says Michael Goffin, head of Canada’s federal environmental protection agency for the province of Ontario, a region that encompasses four of the five Great Lakes.

Goffin says this summer, Environment Canada began new water quality monitoring on Lake Erie and its Canadian tributaries, trying to pinpoint the source of algae blooms that have plagued the lake for the last decade.

And the funding continues for the next four years. That will allow us to achieve the commitment contained with the amended Great Lakes water quality agreement to have new targets in place within three years in force of that agreement.

Goffin is referring to one of the provisions in the new Great Lakes Water Quality agreement that would identify targets for reducing phosphorus, the nutrient that’s causing the algae blooms. In an editorial this week, the Toronto Star called that “hardly ambitious.” But Goffin frames it positively.

“On some things like the phosphorus issue, there’s a need for coordination and a need for urgent action. And the government of Canada has recognized that,” Goffin says.

Canada is also committed to spending about18-Million dollars fighting Asian Carp. The invasive fish species could deal a severe blow to Canada’s multi-million dollar commercial fishing industry. Government officials say these and other steps will make a difference.

Paul Evans, head of Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, says what impacts Lake Erie also hurts the Canadian economy.

95 percent of Ontarians live within the Great Lakes basin, 80-percent of Ontarians take their drinking water from the Great Lakes, so it’s an important piece of our daily life.

Evans says he wishes that Canada, with its much smaller resources, could match what the federal US government is now doing to restore the lakes.

“The amount of investment through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, we look on that with somewhat a bit of envy. But we’re trying to take on whatever steps we can within our fiscal resources.”

Some Americans at the conference give Canada high marks when you consider performance over the span of several decades. Andy Buchsbaum, from the National Wildlife Federation, says Canada has got the US beat on implementing previous Great Lakes agreements.

I believe, based on history, the last 25 years, Canada uses the Great Lakes water quality agreement as a much more defined set of policy objectives and policy measures than the US does.

But he warns that both countries need to continue their efforts to step up funding on the Great Lakes or risk losing the progress that’s already been made. For ideastream/for Ohio Public Radio, I’m Karen Schaefer.

The sounds of Italian opera spill from a corner restaurant, while across the street, patrons at a sidewalk cafe munch cannoli with their cappuccino.

Cleveland native and Italian tour guide Diana Maiola Cirino says the location of Little Italy was a perfect fit for Italian immigrants who began arriving here in 1885.

“You know, Italians have always lived in small hilltop towns, sometimes surrounded by walls. And created their own little communities that could take on a lot of dimension, with a lot of people…And that’s what they found here.”

Little Italy was not the first Italian neighborhood in Cleveland, but it has been the most enduring.

In 1911, more than 90 percent of Little Italy’s residents were Italian-born. Angelo Vitantonio invented the first hand-cranked pasta machine here in 1906. And the neighborhood is still known for its authentic Italian restaurants, most focusing on the cuisine of Italy’s southern regions.

“Moligia, Napoli, and southern Italy, Calabria and Sicily,” says Francesca Mignosa, who works for Cirino.

“Usually, southern immigrants left Italy for hope and a better life in America.”

Mignosa came to Cleveland from her native Sicily for college a few years ago. She stops in front of Holy Rosary Church, which holds outdoor processions during the four-day street festival for the Feast of Assumption in mid-August.

Mignosa says for Cleveland’s Italian-Americans, religion and education go hand in hand.

“Education is a constant and we’re in front of the Montessori School of Holy Rosary. Maria Montessori was an Italian educator that came to the U.S. And established this new way of teaching or educating which was not actually based on structure, but following a child’s own development.”

After the unification of Italy, more than 25-thousand immigrants fled to Cleveland, escaping extreme poverty. The story of that immigration is told in a mural on the lower end of Mayfield Road.

At the top of the street is Alta House, a settlement house founded in 1895 by John D. Rockefeller. Here local residents still play bocce, a bowling game that dates back to Roman times.

“Something about why they still like playing it!”

By the 1920′s there were six Italian neighborhoods in Cleveland. Many immigrants were skilled bricklayers and masons.

Pamela Dorazio-Dean, associate curator of Italian-American History at the Western Reserve Historical Society, says Cleveland’s Italian immigrant stonemasons literally helped build the city.

“People look at buildings like Severance Hall everyday, they go and admire the beauty of the building, not realizing that it was an Italian immigrant who helped beautify the city.”

Another Italian tradition has made its way here as well: the evening stroll.

“After 6 o’clock or after dinner, la passgiata allungo ligura, along the sea, or in the in the main piazza or estrada principale, the main street,” says Francesca Mignosa. “And I think it also goes back to the concept of enjoying La Dolce Vita, which in American means, the sweet life.”

Enjoying life in Little Italy is a year-round affair. In October, the neighborhood hosts a Columbus Day Parade with marching bands and the floats featuring Italian-American clubs. And Little Italy’s many galleries sponsor annual artwalks in June, October, and December.

You can download an audio tour of Route 20 and explore it on your own. Just visit seeohiofirst.org and click on The New Ohio Guide.

The lion whips and gyrates to the music as it circles the audience. The lion’s red-tongued mouth plucks red -and-gold, cash-filled envelopes from the hands of giggling children.

This is the traditional lion dance of the Chinese Lunar New year, meant to bring good luck. George Kwan, a Cleveland policeman, is the head of the dance troupe. He says it was his father – a native of mainland China – who started him dancing.

“This was my father’s tradition. When he was alive, he trained us. He got us more training than we ever wanted. And we’re continuing on that tradition. Now we’re working on the third generation,” Kwan says.

Today Cleveland’s Asia Town is a vibrant 15-block district of restaurants, groceries, and small shops, marked by distinctive red banners, pagoda-style storefronts, and Chinese zodiac street sculptures.

But in the 1870′s, when the first Chinese immigrants arrived from the gold fields of California, their laundries and garment shops occupied just a few blocks on Ontario Street.

John Grabowski, an historian at the Western Reserve Historical Society, says an incident in 1925 nearly destroyed the community. That’s when murders between rival Chinese gangs, or “tongs,” led to a police raid on Cleveland’s Chinatown.

“They simply went out and arrested everybody was Chinese or picked them up. And that had repercussions. The repercussions were in diplomatic relations with China, it went right to Washington,” Grabowski says.

City officials eventually apologized, but not before they tore down the original Chinese settlement. Later Asian immigrants suffered similar indignities.

During World War II Cleveland’s Japanese-Americans , along with tens of thousands of others nationwide, were rounded up and held in West Coast internment camps. After their release some chose to resettle in Cleveland.

“I felt there were a lot of misunderstandings of cultural differences,” says renowned Cleveland filmmaker Johnny Wu.

Wu is also president of the local chapter of the Organization of Chinese-Americans. He says a few years ago, he began thinking about ways to bridge what he saw as the cultural divide between Cleveland’s Asian and non-Asian populations.

“Lots of people felt that the Asian culture was very tabu for them or very secretive. And also, the Asian community is very close-knit, it doesn’t want to trust anyone outside their own community. So it built this barrier between eastern and western culture,” Wu says.

So five years ago Wu and other Asian -Americans from Japan, Korea, the Phillippines, and Vietnam organized the first day-long Chinese New Year celebration, which now attracts hundreds of visitors.

There’s also a two-day annual Asian Festival held in May, as well as Dragon Boat races on the Cuyahoga River in September.

In the meantime, the region’s Asian population continues to grow, about 33-thousand in the last census, many of them business and medical professionals. And the city of Cleveland is now working on a 10-year plan to make Asia Town an even more vibrant and welcoming neighborhood.

The New Ohio Guide is produced by the Ohio Humanities Council, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. You can find more episodes from “The New Ohio Guide” at www.seeohiofirst.org.

They will attend a memorial for Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones. Hillary Clinton will also attend.

During the past weekend, hundreds of people attended a green energy expo in northeast Ohio. From Ohio Public Radio station WKSU, Karen Schaefer reports, Bill Spratley, head of the statewide non profit Green Energy Ohio brought an expo to Akron

He is making the announcement in the Cleveland suburb Parma. Cuyahoga County has nearly eight thousand state properties on the new list.

Cordray favors making some state parcels available to private development or public use. Cordray is a Democrat who was elected in November.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)