A few weeks ago, we stood at the edge of Belle Isle, where the Detroit River meets Lake St. Clair, watching the first sheets of ice rumbling into the shoreline like a slow moving freight train. This would normally have occurred a month earlier. Climate change has made ice watch part of the weather report. …
For several years, environmental and governmental groups have dealt with strategies for addressing invasive plant and aquatic animals brought into the Great Lakes from foreign environments. Most recently, the invasion has come from the interior; specifically from the south, where Asian carp were imported to clean catfish ponds of algae, but were fond to multiple …
Carp chronicles: Marketing meets environmental management Read More »
Does nature have rights? We have enough trouble ensuring that human beings have equal rights, much less equity in a free society. But does water, land, and air have a right to exist in a safe environment? And do we have a right to violate it? Several years ago, while vacationing on Pelee Island, the …
When will the courts honor the rights of nature? Read More »
On land surrounding the lakes there are four seasons, more or less. In some areas, spring is a split second and autumn extends long into November. In some areas winter is snowbound, cold, and dark for months. But there are really only two seasons on the lakes: in summer, the lakes are magnets for swimmers, …
“The sun shines for an average of three hours per day, making most days gloomy and mildly wet. The sea temperature in January is 37.4 degrees Fahrenheit on average, and activities around the lakes are virtually non-existent.” — Weather-us.com My favorite author is Jim Harrison; not the best, perhaps, but the one that I identify …
Searching for Jim Harrison and a sense of the northern winter Read More »
If you’re isolated somewhere near the Midwest and want to do something that’s really socially distant and really cold, consider surfing the Great Lakes. Well, maybe that’s not such a good idea if you’ve never done it, and never done it in waters approaching freezing (at the time of this writing, the temperature in Lake …
John Hartig looks out the window at his converted cottage on Hickory Island and sees freighters passing on the Detroit River to the east and the open waters of Lake Erie to the south. On a clear day, he can see the Ohio coastline. For someone whose career has been in and around this waterway, …
John Hartig helps us connect rivers with lakes, and good stewardship of both Read More »
Hayes Scriven has a priceless view of perhaps’s America’s greatest lake — Superior. It’s a view that captivated Scriven as a student at the University of Minnesota – Duluth, where he majored in history. After working in a museum in southern Minnesota for 12 years, he moved his young family back to the North Shore, …
Drawn to the fury, majesty, and history of Lake Superior Read More »
Bell’s “Two-Hearted Ale,” named after the river in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that inspired Ernest Hemingway’s tale, is the finest craft beer in America. Bell’s “Third Coast Beer,” brewed in Kalamazoo, Michigan, is second best, in my book. But more appropriate for this blog, drinking the beer for the first time several years ago got me …
This ‘Freshwater Coast’ is the third coast of America Read More »
What lies below the surface is intriguing: in literature, in psychoanalysis, and in archeology. In spirituality one might look beyond the surface. What lies below the surface of Straits of Mackinac, and the lakes that the Straits connect, is space that interests university archeologists and Native American tribal citizen scientists. Why are large rocks seemingly …
Looking through the surface of the Straits deep into the past Read More »