Lexi Krupp

John Janssen remembers the moment he realized Lake Michigan was about to change.

Early in his career, Phil Myers was teaching an ecology course at a research station just south of the Mackinac Bridge, near Pellston.

Before the semester started, he set up mouse traps to see what animals were around for his students to work with. When he checked the traps though, he had a problem. 

“What I was catching was not what was supposed to be there,” Myers recalls.

Bob Sanders and Angela Kujawa have driven on snowmobile trails near the Manistee National Forest every week this winter following a steady beeping sound. 

There was a plan to release hundreds of pine martens — a slender, furry predator native to the Upper Midwest — in Michigan's lower peninsula over several years.

That never happened.

A years-long effort to build an experimental fish ladder on the Boardman River in Traverse City is in jeopardy. That’s all because of a man who decided to sue the city to protect a place he loves. 

The plan to dig a nearly four-mile tunnel underneath the Straits of Mackinac and replace the Line 5 oil and gas pipelines continues to move forward. 

Grand Traverse Bay and inland lakes across Michigan, like Lake Leelanau and Torch Lake, will be ice-free by the end of the century if carbon emissions continue at current levels. 

At a lock and dam site in the suburbs of Chicago, there’s a plan to build a set of booby traps to keep invasive carp from reaching the Great Lakes. 

It would involve a barrier of bubbles, an electric field, underwater speakers, and a price tag of over $800 million dollars. 

A dispute between Michigan's Department of Natural Resources and the commercial fishing industry is heading to court. 

The state announced it will prohibit fishing in water deeper than 80 feet and other restrictions commercial fishers say will mean the end of their livelihoods. 

In a dim, out-of-the-way corner of the state fish hatchery in Marquette are a few thousand skinny, grey fish, each no more than nine inches long.

“They are skittish,” says Jim Aho, who runs the facility for the Department of Natural Resources. “Movement above them definitely puts stress on them, so they’re in a dark, quiet few tanks here.” 

Arctic grayling were wiped out of Michigan nearly a century ago. Since then, researchers have been trying to restore the iconic fish to the state, without success. 

Now, more than 50 collaborators across the state think they have a shot. 

Read the full feature here.

When winter hits northern Michigan, there’s usually a bump in the number of people who don’t know where their next meal will come from. But this year, the pandemic has made food insecurity in the region much worse. 

When Jordan Roberts first visited an old gravel mine outside of Grayling, in the middle of northern Michigan, he was struck by the landscape.

“If I were a teenager I would just have so much fun on this gravel pit,” he said. “It's this massive sand dune.”

The former mine, now managed by Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources, has been vacant for years. Most recently state police used the area, known as 7 Mile Pit, as a shooting range.

There’s a lot of interest in solar energy in Michigan as the technology becomes cheaper and more efficient, and utility companies set ambitious renewable energy goals. But building up the state's solar capacity will require miles and miles of land. And that could be a problem, because many people don't want solar farms in their communities. 

The state is poised to award over $40 million to fund public land projects this year. The money will go towards big-ticket properties like thousands of acres next to the Pigeon River Country State Forest, land along the St.

For public land advocates in Michigan, Christmas comes the first week of December each year.

That’s when the Michigan Natural Resources Trust fund board decides how to spend the earnings of its massive endowment.