Dome Magazine — Covering the People, Issues & Events Shaping Michigan Politics & Policy

Photo by Gary L Howe

by Lester Graham
March 16, 2008

There is an idea, call it the conventional wisdom, that the people who live in northern Michigan have a closer connection to conservation, the environment, than the rest of Michigan. It seems to make sense. Fishing the streams of the Upper Peninsula, watching the water cascade down the Tahquamenon Falls, hearing the wind whisper through the old growth forest of Estevant Pines, being awed by the sunset (or rise) on one of the Great Lakes or just reading Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories about northern Michigan…any one of those leaves you with a sense of wonder. Visitors feel blessed by the experience. Northern Michigan is nature’s gift. How could you live there and not treasure every moment?

But with most large assumptions, like most conventional wisdom, the truth is more complex. The lagging economy of the state, the chronic unemployment of many counties in northern Michigan, leaves many people with little time to fully appreciate the wonder. Often, northern Michigan’s fulltime residents are too busy trying to figure out how they’re going to pay the bills. They’re trying to get work. They’re trying to get food on the table for their families. Those natural resources that northern Michigan’s visitors travel to enjoy are the same natural resources that could mean a job for the people who live there.

So, do the people who live in northern Michigan have a closer connection to the environment? Yes. No. Maybe.

YES.
“The natives who’ve grown up here have history in the place,” says Hans Voss, executive director of the Michigan Land Use Institute. “They have special places that they’ve grown up around. They have a tie to the land that extends back generations through farm families.”

The Institute wants to limit suburban sprawl and works to get the state to apply the “smart growth” approach to development. With offices in Beulah and Traverse City, much of the group’s effort is concentrated in the northern part of the state, basically from Mackinaw to Manistee. He says the people of northern Michigan realize the landscape and natural resources of the area need to be protected or they’ll lose their quality of life and the ability to maintain economically viable communities.

Downstate people often think of northern Michigan residents as mainly hunters and fishers. That stereotype is not completely without basis. Voss says the local environmental ethic “is oftentimes rooted in their experience as hunters or fishers.” Their experiences in nature often make them more aware and build a connection with the natural areas of the state. That translates into noticing changes in nature, wildlife or the fisheries that might be attributed to development pressures or the threat of climate change.

James Clift, policy director of the Michigan Environmental Council, a Lansing-based umbrella group for a multitude of environmental organizations, says long-time residents in northern Michigan also notice that losing the quality of life in the region is threatening their families’ future there. “They see their children moving out of state to get a job. They want more opportunity for their kids in Michigan.” Clift says they realize that protecting the wild areas of Michigan is part of the future of the region. He says the state needs to do more to encourage progressive industries such as building wind turbines and other alternative energy manufacturing instead of further exploiting the natural resources.

NO.
“When it comes to really hard-core conservation issues in northern Michigan, our best supporters, our strongest supporters, those who’ll put in the most money and everything else are from southern Michigan,” states Glen Sheppard, longtime publisher of The North Woods Call. The paper has been, since 1953, the self proclaimed “NEWSpaper for people who love the north.” Sheppard says the majority of longtime northern Michigan residents are too often more concerned about making a living than they are about the natural heritage their grandkids will inherit.

“Too many of them — not all of them, of course — but too many of them see these resources as a waste because they don’t have factories on them, don’t have subdivisions on them, don’t have concrete on them, etc. They see this open space as wasteful,” Sheppard says.

Anne Woiwode with the Sierra Club agrees that not all of the people who’ve called northern Michigan home for generations are oblivious to the splendor of their surroundings. But, she says, there are also a lot of people who work “in a variety of exploitive industries.” She says living among the pristine areas of northern Michigan all of their lives causes some people to take it for granted. “Because they are so used to seeing so much forest, so many miles of rivers and lakes and all that, they’re less in tune with how incredible those resources are.”

She says the classic divide in the disputes in northern Michigan is between the people who want to protect the wild areas and those who say they need to use the natural resources in ways that bring jobs. “That’s not to say that there isn’t some legitimacy in that because of high unemployment, especially in the Upper Peninsula,” Woiwode concedes, adding that some believe what they need “is a lot of development in that place in order to address the local needs economically.”

As to the hunter and fisher stereotype, Woiwode says there's no question that some of the strongest advocates for careful management of northern Michigan's wild places are hunters and fishers, but she argues that within the hunting and fishing community there are those “who are working to maximize whatever kind of output they want, whether it’s trees or game or some other product.” In other words, the interest is in the kind of game they want to hunt or the fish they want to catch rather than preserving the entire ecosystem.

MAYBE.
Everyone hedges a bit about painting the whole of northern Michigan with a broad brush. But everyone seems to agree that the influence of southern Michigan residents who are retiring to northern Michigan is affecting attitudes about protecting the environment in a positive way.

Michigan Land Use Institute chose new path

The Michigan Land Use Institute chose northern Michigan as its base of operations from the beginning. Co-founders Keith Schneider and Hans Voss decided there was more opportunity there for MLUI’s progressive stance on smart growth and sustainability.

Since 1995 MLUI has taken a different approach to influencing state policy. Instead of joining the many environmental groups based in Lansing, it has worked out of Benzie County and in Traverse City.

“Distance from the ‘inside Lansing network’ allows us a stronger, more independent voice,” Executive Director Voss explains. “That said, we’re back and forth between here and Lansing quite a bit, and we lean on our allied groups that are more in the day-to-day network of Lansing to make sure we’re still connected.” Voss concedes there are disadvantages to being so far removed from the state capital, but he says there are also advantages. The trick has been to leverage those advantages.

That’s resulted in the group working more closely with regional approaches to solve problems. It’s concentrated much of its efforts in an area from Mackinaw to Manistee.

MLUI is also different in how it tackles issues such as sprawl, energy and local agriculture. Instead of lobbying political figures in Lansing and conducting research, the group attempts to influence the people of Michigan through advocacy journalism.

That came naturally. Founder Keith Schneider has been a contributing reporter for The New York Times since 1981. He was a national correspondent for the paper from 1985 to 1995. Journalism was certain to be part of MLUI’s mission. Schneider recently took the communications director post for the Apollo Alliance, a national coalition of business, labor, environmental and community leaders working to reduce dependence on foreign oil, cut greenhouse gases and push for use of renewable fuels such as wind and solar and encourage domestic manufacturing in those industries. Voss says Schneider will continue to contribute articles to MLUI. He’s expected to file reports on the attempt to build more coal-fired power plants in Michigan, as well as reports on the burgeoning renewable energy sector.

Voss, who became director in 2000, says advocacy journalism translates the policy issues in a way that people understand. “We believe that the only way you build a popular movement for big ideas to change the future is to reach people in their hearts and minds.”

Voss says the Michigan Land Use Institute also works to win the hearts and minds of the people on the other side of the issues his group pushes. He cites an example in Traverse City. Ten years ago MLUI fought against a proposal to build a highway and bridge south of the city. The group won that fight. The bridge was denied. Today, the group is working with some of the very people who were fighting for the bridge.

“I think our ability to gain the respect of our adversaries and turn them into partners has been significant,” he says, adding that it’s an approach that has worked again and again for the group. “When you disagree with somebody or have a conflict with somebody, chance are you don’t know them well enough. And in almost every circumstance when I’ve reached out and really sat down with someone…I can find that, in fact, we agree much more than we disagree.”

While the MLUI continues to crank out an impressive number of well-researched articles on the issues it’s pushing, it’s also out in communities trying to persuade leaders to get onboard its “Grand Vision” project, a land use and transportation strategy that works with county boards, city councils and zoning boards to control growth in a way that makes economic sense in the long term and still preserves the landscape of northern Michigan that’s so attractive to residents and visitors. MLUI is also trying to develop a local agriculture economy that gives local farmers new markets. For example, instead of importing apples from Washington state, why not sell apples and other produce directly to local schools?

The list of issues seems exhausting: clean energy in Michigan, public transportation, tax policies and much more. And with each issue there are community workshops, attending municipal government meetings and, of course, articles to write to explain the impact of decisions at the local, regional and state levels.

Voss and his team at Michigan Land Use Institute are a busy bunch. Maybe that’s why they like living in northern Michigan. Voss says there’s nothing better than finishing up work and then taking a walk or a bike ride in some of the most beautiful scenery in the country.

Scenery the MLUI is working to preserve.

— Lester Graham

Hugh McDiarmid, communications director for the Michigan Environmental Council, says the people “who live and breathe northern Michigan are valuable” to the effort to protect natural resources. But, he adds, “The folks who are sort of fleeing the urban areas to get away from it all…may have more appreciation for what they’re running to than folks who were born and raised there.”

MLUI’s Voss says the concerned northern Michigan residents are being joined by “this huge migration of suburban refugees who are fed up with the rat race, being stuck in traffic in Metro Detroit, who are coming up here because they want desperately to live in a community where you can walk downtown and see people you know and have this friendly character of a community within reach.” Since many of them are retirees, they have the time to be active. So they show up to public meetings and voice their feelings about protecting what they’ve come to love about northern Michigan.

The North Woods Call’s Sheppard agrees the migration of southern Michigan retirees to northern Michigan is changing things. He tells the story of a big developer who was being blocked by a local government body. The story goes that the developer was threatening to spend $100,000 on a lawsuit against the local government to counter the zoning blocking his plans to build in a sensitive area. “And this one fellow, a retired auto executive, stood up and said, ‘You’re willing to spend how much?’ The guy said, ‘A hundred thousand dollars.’ And the retiree said, ‘Hell, I’ve already pledged that much.’ He points to another guy in the audience. ‘You?’ ‘I pledge $50,000.’ The son-of-a-bitch, the developer, backed off and left and forgot it,” Sheppard said, laughing.

“Sometimes you get the folks in the north who resent the fact that there are folks in the urban areas who are coming out and saying we’ve got to protect this,” said the Sierra Club’s Woiwode. She says it’s a matter of one side viewing northern Michigan’s natural assets as an economic resource and the other side viewing them as a recreational resource. “That can be a pretty serious conflict,” she notes.

Representing the conflict
For the majority of legislators from northern Michigan, there’s only one real priority: the economy. “The bulk of our legislators are plugged into growth,” Sheppard says. “They want more bodies, more tax revenue.”

While the conventional wisdom is that the northern Michigan delegation is charged with protecting timber and mining interests at any costs, that’s not really true. Legislators from the Upper Peninsula pushed through tough mining restrictions in an effort to protect the environment. And there’s a growing group of northern Michigan legislators who want that growth and want to protect natural areas. Legislators such as Representatives Gary McDowell (D-Rudyard) and Matthew Gillard (D-Alpena) are cited as finding a balance between the needed economic development and protection of natural resources.

When asked whether the concerns of environmentalists in northern Michigan are reflected in their representation in Lansing, the MLUI’s Voss laughed and said emphatically: “We’re working on it!” He says when Rep. Howard Walker (R-Traverse City) was first elected he decided to take on the state government’s efforts to make more of Michigan’s rivers “wild and scenic.” Walker made the case that it was bad policy that threatened the rights of communities and landowners. “Today, after a lot of conversations, Howard Walker is becoming a sincere leader on promoting wind power and renewable energy. So we’re seeing that kind of shift happen within one or two terms of the same elected representative,” Voss says.

MEC’s Clift says the bottom line is simple. If they want jobs and prosperity, the legislators from northern Michigan need to view protection of the resources as good economic development. He explains: “If you look at the tourism business in Michigan, it’s based on protection of the resources.”

Clift and others say the legislators from northern Michigan are reflecting their constituents, both old and new, by continuing to think about the economy — but knowing that protecting the environment plays into the overall success of the region.

Lester Graham is senior editor of the Environment Report, which produces environmental news reports for more than 160 public radio stations.

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