Pigeon River Country AssociationSpring 2012 Newsletter

Editor’s Preview: Unfortunately, this issue of our newsletter lacks our usual summary or report on the spring Advisory Council meeting held on April 13th. Apparently nothing noteworthy happened, nor was the promised report from the Department of Environmental Quality representative even on the agenda. However, there is an additional bit of good news nonetheless from the DEQ, and that is that the DEQ recently blocked the effort by Song of the Morning Ranch to circumvent the restrictions on natural gas drilling within the consent agreement area of the PRCSF.

In addition to the quarterly word from the Association president, and the usual report or account of the latest we also have reports of two other special meetings, followed by an editorial on the inanities of political maneuvering around conservation efforts. ( R W Kropf — Editor )

From the President:The trout are active, the morels are out, the trillium are blooming, and spring has come again to the Pigeon River Country. We’ve been active too. First I would like to thank all those people who have sent donations to the Dam Removal Defense Fund. We now have over $1200 in it which allows us to continue our efforts to restore the Pigeon River to a natural free-flowing condition. The big news, however, is that the Court of Appeals has turned down Bill Schlechte’s request for permission to appeal Judge Murphy’s decision. This means, we hope, that at last attention will turn away from court actions and to the dam removal we all want. We have told the Golden Lotus board that we stand ready to help them deal with engineering issues and find funding for the dam removal. We now hope they will proceed to carry out the interim agreement.

There are, however, some other issues that we need to address. First, after the usual Advisory Council report. you will find a report from Stew Smith about a new Huron Pines initiative for the Pigeon and Sturgeon rivers and also a scary report from Drew YoungeDycke on the Michigan House Natural Gas Subcommittee’s recommendation for “drilling and extraction of minerals in currently prohibited areas”. Since we were founded precisely to fight such development in the PRC and succeeded in establishing a “currently prohibited area”, we are quite concerned. Another issue of concern to us is a bill possibly being considered by the Michigan House which would effectively place a permanent cap on the State’s publicly-owned land. Please check our website,

www.pigeonrivercountryforest.org for updates on these and other matters.Please also note that your newsletter address also now shows the expiration date of your membership. After its expiration we will send you two additional newsletters before, sadly, dropping you from our mailing list. So please observe the date and renew, either by mail or on our website.

Finally circle June 30th on your calendar. That’s the day of our annual meeting at the PRC Forest Headquarters. A usual, we’ll begin at noon with lunch, and give you updates on these items and answer any questions you may have. Until then, do plan on getting out and enjoying the wild character of the Pigeon River Country! ( Ray Hoobler. PRCA President )

Winter Sunset 1/11/2012

Next PRC Advisory Council Mee ting will be held on July 13 at PRCSF Headquarters and Information Center beginning at 6:30pm. Public is invited, but if you have something to say, be there on time as public comments are heard right after the meeting agenda is approved.

Pigeon River and Sturgeon River Improvement InitiativeOn February 16, 2012, the Livingston Township Hall was the location for 43 concerned residents, including myself and our own Joe Jarecki, woods and water users, area land owners, Huron Pines staffers, representatives from the National Fish and Wildlife Fundation and several DNR Fisheries Biologists that gathered for a common goal. To explain existing plans and projects and make additional plans to make these watersheds better, cleaner and more natural flowing. This will be accomplished over the next 2 years by improving

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Pigeon River Country AssociationSpring 2012 Newsletter

road stream crossings, stream habitat improvements, improving and re connecting wildlife corridors.

Funding, in part, will be provided by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The Huron Pines organization is looking to be the driving force to accomplish these initiatives. Over the next several months, Huron Pines will be engaged in coalition building as a method to help restore not only the watersheds, but also a complete list of conservation practices that interact with each other and help protect and restore these environments.

An interesting feature of this meeting were the oversized topographical maps that were provided. The Huron Pines staffers encouraged and even prodded concerned citizens to approach these maps and pencil in their specific area of concern. Be it a road/stream crossing, a local seasonal road flooding, illegal hunting or fishing activities or just open discussion about an area, it eventually was being discussed. The NFWF, Huron Pines , local law enforcement and county road commissions need these practical eye and ears to target and correct these wrongs.

There was a discussion regarding a beaver dam downstream from Pickerel Lake that had caused the lake to rise a foot or more, washing out the beach and the overflowing of, and the eventual destruction of the footbridge crossing this creek. This now missing footbridge interrupts the ‘round the lake pathway. Several Huron Pines members were quick to ask me to pencil in on the map the approximate location of this dam which I did. Now I don’t know of any specific action that was taken on this problem, but on a kayak trip around Pickerel Lake this past weekend, I was pleased to discover the lake returning to more normal levels and a discernible current where there was little or none previously.

Several volunteer projects will be ongoing this spring, summer and into the fall that will benefit these valuable watersheds. They can be viewed at www.huronpines.org and clicking on the “Volunteer” button at the top right of the page.

The next meeting will be held at the Livingston Township Hall on May 10. 2012 from 6-8PM. Livingston Township donates the use of this hall for these meetings. (Report by Stewart Smith)

Special Report regarding Natural Gas Industry and State Land: Note: The following article was submitted to us by Drew Youngedyke, a policy and communications specialist for the Michigan League of Conservation Voters, and a

new member of the PRCA. After reading his article, the members of the PRCA board unanimously recommended that it be included in this issue of our quarterly newsletter. Drew personally attended the state Natural Gas Subcommittee meeting whose discussions and recommendations he describes in the article that follows. The underlined blue titles and names are links that can be accessed in the web-page copy of this newsletter. (R.W.Kropf, editor )

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State Reps Want to Drill Last Protected Wilderness in Lower Peninsula

by Drew YoungeDyke

The Michigan Constitution directs the legislature to protect natural resources as a "paramount" concern to the people of Michigan. Paramount means "above all else," the highest priority. Instead, the state House Natural Gas Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Aric Nesbitt (R-Lawton), released a report on Tuesday which recommends "drilling and extraction of minerals in currently prohibited areas."

If that quote doesn't outrage you, it should. There are very few truly remote, wild places in the Lower Peninsula that offer the solitude and natural connection sought by hunters, anglers, campers, and hikers, and the habitat required to preserve healthy and abundant fish and wildlife communities. Those few places exist only because they were deliberately set aside from gas and oil development. They include places like the Jordan River Valley, the Mason Tract, and the Pigeon River Country. 

These places are located, however, in the middle of a swath of natural gas and oil deposits that span the northern Lower Peninsula. Wells have been drilled and haul roads have been built through almost every patch of private and public land bigger than 40 acres throughout the region, except for these few unique protected places.

The recommendation in the Natural Gas Subcommittee's report would open these lands to drilling and erase the last pockets of true semiwilderness in the Lower Peninsula. In doing so, this recommendation indicates a profound ignorance of the history of conservation in Michigan, because we've already had this debate.

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Pigeon River Country AssociationSpring 2012 Newsletter

The system currently in place is a compromise that grew out of decades of dispute that resulted in the Natural Resources Trust Fund. 

The Pigeon River Country debate over drilling in the 1970s reached all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court. The Court prohibited drilling, but subsequent legislation forced a compromise which allowed drilling in the southern third of the 105,000-acre forest and prohibited it in the northern two-thirds. Drilling is also prohibited in the 18,000-acre Jordan River Valley, where in 2007 the DNR acquired mineral rights to the valley through a mineral exchange in order to prevent drilling. The 4,500-acre Mason Tract, along the South Branch of the AuSable River, was donated to the state by George Mason in 1954. Attempts to drill beneath the Mason Tract resulted in a permit denial by a federal judge in 2005.

The Natural Gas Subcommittee's recommendation to open these unique places to drilling indicates either complete ignorance of the debates, the lawsuits, and the compromises that went into protecting them or a callous disregard for the hunters and anglers who love them. Unfortunately, the latter seems more likely; this recommendation is just the latest example of a larger agenda to open up the last wild places in the nation to oil and gas development, as evidenced by the Wilderness and Roadless Area Release Act introduced in the U.S. House and Senate.

Michigan conservationists have worked for generations to protect the last few pockets of the closest thing we have to backcountry in the Lower Peninsula. We can't rest on their laurels, though. Proposals like this tell us that some politicians will stop at nothing to destroy the last best places in order to raid every last drop of fossil fuel in Michigan. Those of us who care about these places - the hunters, anglers, hikers, campers, backpackers and birders - have to oppose bad ideas like this loudly and vigorously. 

Drew YoungeDykePolicy & Communications SpecialistMichigan League of Conservation Votersdrew@michiganlcv.org734.222.9650

Conservation and Politics: An EditorialIf we needed anything to else to convince us of the inanities and irrationality of much of the American

political scene, certainly the report given above by Drew YoungDyke hits the nail on the head. It seems that the work of whole generations of conservationists can be undone or overturned, oddly enough, by those who all too often call themselves “conservatives”.

Let’s think about that for a minute. The word “conserve” comes from the Latin words com (in this case shortened to con) meaning “together” (derived from the preposition cum meaning “with”), combined with the verb servare, meaning “to save” or “to preserve”. In other words, to conserve means to keep things, as much as possible, unchanged or intact, and as it applies to the environment, to protect the whole ecosystem as a balanced organic whole. Thus, a person who calls himself or herself a “Conservative” should be, by all logic of language, also an avid conservationist.

But as we all know, when applied to different subjects, it seems that the application of the term becomes quite the opposite of what was originally meant. It seems that, as the old saying goes, “It all depends on whose ox is being gored.” So instead of attempting to preserve the environment, we end up with a situation where very often people, at least in this country, who like to call themselves politically conservative, turn around and promote the wildest schemes of free market or “free enterprise” exploitation of our natural resources—the common good, the public, and even the future be damned! The only thing “conservative” about such a mentality seems to be the determination to preserve ones imagined right to do whatever one pleases and to hell with everyone else!

No doubt that this is why this so-called “conservative” American political mentality is called “neo-liberalism” by the rest of the world. This is because they see it as just the latest version of the old European laissez faire economics that naively believed whatever the financiers cooked up to make more money would inevitably work out all for the best for everyone. This is the same mentality that has wasted so many of America’s natural resources in the past and as we have seen most lately, even wrecked Wall Street to the point where the US taxpayers had to rescue the country from financial disaster. It also explains why extreme political “conservatism” ends up in “libertarianism” or even outright anarchy—the belief that no government is best of all.

So how explain this twisting of logic and debasement of language that we have seen on the American scene? I suppose a lot of it can be traced

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Pigeon River Country AssociationSpring 2012 Newsletter

to forgetfulness or even just plain ignorance of our own history. As the American philosopher George Santayana used to warn, our ignorance of history dooms us to repeat it. But I think that even more, our popular media, particularly radio and TV, have to bear a large proportion of the blame. Very often, under the pressure of business interests, news programs have become little more than “current events entertainment” shows geared to showcasing as many commercials as possible. In this radio and TV has become not unlike the tabloid newspapers that feature sensational and often inaccurate news reports in a format designed simply to sell papers or products more than to inform or educate. The result is that the public is often grossly misled or even brainwashed into following this or that fad, or, now that political advertising by more or less unidentified “superpacs” is legal, Josef Goebel’s (who was Hitler’s propaganda chief) adage about the public believing any lie if it is repeated often enough is now bearing fruit.

If anyone doubts this, just look at what has happened to the word “liberal” when it comes to the American political scene. It seems that by dint of pure repetition, the term has become a dirty word, not to be pronounced in polite public. As noted above, the fact that the word has to do with freedom or liberty and the ability to choose seems to have been completely lost. Even more, the relationship between this freedom and solid learning and study has been lost. For one, think of the term “liberal arts” — which meant, at least in the ancient world, education in the seven academic disciplines (originally grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy: today add history, philosophy, psychology, political science, sociology, religious studies, and the various sciences, etc.) once thought necessary for the life of anyone who aspired to live as a free person as distinct from the life of a mere slave. Or think again about the Gospel saying “The truth shall make you free.” Instead, today, it seems that even higher education has become a race in “knowing more and more about less and less”. In our race to secure a good income, it seems that ignorance of anything but our chosen specialty has indeed, especially if it pays especially well, become bliss.

How combat all this? For one, I think that straight information about or even from both sides of any disputed question is absolutely necessary. If we only listen to the side that strengthens our prejudices, I think we dupe ourselves. Or to take a prime example from the internet, some of the

garbage that is “forwarded” is simply incredible, and is inexcusable considering that anyone who takes the time to use a “search engine” like Google, can soon discover competing and often much more better informed views (hint: try using a source like www.FactCheck.org — a service of the University of Pennsylvania).

And when it comes to the political side of all of this, I would like to see political advertising especially limited, by law, to “talking heads”, that is, to candidates themselves giving short summaries of what they stand for or of the policies they’d promote: no dramatized ads with background music, etc., etc. If a particular candidate is an idiot, the public should be given a chance to see or hear it for themselves to judge. The airwaves are public property, and no station should be given a license to use the air waves unless they provide this public service for free. In other words, money, most of which goes for all this advertising, should be divorced from politics as much as possible.

Finally, to get back to the subject of conservation, I think that a major part of the solution is particularly to personally spend more time out-of-doors. I don’t think anyone who has lived up here in the woods for thirty or more consecutive years as I have can possibly have any doubt that the climate is changing rather radically. We may argue as to what exactly is causing all this change, but for anyone who has had to put up with the noise of gas well compressors or pumping equipment will not think for a moment that all this industrial development has played a major role. ( R W Kropf, editor )

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