Stunning silence broken?
Michigan anglers fight to save protected river from gas drilling

An accessible, unspoiled place where you can escape modern life is more than a luxury.

It can be sustaining.

Revitalizing.

If you know of such a spot, you’re probably fondly remembering the last time you were there. Enjoy it for a moment — slow down, summon the smells, sounds and colors.

Now imagine an energy company believes your special place just happens to be sitting on top of a gas reserve. And the government that was guarding the area, is now considering a permit that would open it up for drilling.

A remote section of the Huron-Manistee National Forest near the AuSable River’s South Branch, east of Grayling, Mich. is where anglers, an energy company, and state and federal agencies are clashing over a plan to drill for natural gas.

Wading in the AuSable’s waters with fly rod in hand, stalking trout, is communion with nature.

Bald eagles soar overhead while hungry trout eye bugs dancing on the water. The gentle harmony of wings and wind commingle with fins and water, transporting human visitors from manmade cacophony — here, the earth’s music rules.

It’s also the site of a case that reflects the ongoing struggle between conservation and energy exploration, with the federal government increasingly choosing the side of industry.

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is reviewing a permit application to drill near the secluded spot on the AuSable River.

The DEQ rejected Savoy Energy’s original proposal to drill within 700 feet of the protected area, but is now considering an alternate site proposal about a third of a mile away.

A 5,300-acre state-owned wilderness area surrounds miles of the AuSable’s South Branch. Its name — the Mason Tract — doesn’t call any specific visions to mind, but the land is treasured for the serenity found within.

While the state-owned surface rights to the Mason Tract are off limits to drilling, the mineral rights below the surface are federally owned.

The only way to access the potential gas more than two miles underground is by slant drilling from federal land outside the wilderness.

“One of the great trout streams of America,” reads the sign leading into the Mason Tract.

“The whole essence of the Mason Tract is that it’s a quiet area within close proximity to major populations of Michigan,” said Anglers of the AuSable’s Rusty Gates.

“Where else east of the Rockies is there 14 or 15 miles of river that’s totally open to the public to recreate and use?” Gates asked rhetorically. “This is a real crown jewel of a recreational area for Michigan, and it’s been a sleeper for many years.”

Located in the Mio district of the Huron-Manistee National Forest, the area is about a three-hour drive from two major urban centers — Detroit and Lansing.

Only foot traffic is allowed in the Mason Tract and few roads lead there, providing a serene respite for those seeking to get away from modern society.

In the 1950s, George W. Mason, an auto industrialist and outdoor enthusiast, donated the land to the state to preserve the river experience, said his grandson Tim Mason, who now lives in Woodstock, Illinois.

“The fundamental thing here is that when my grandfather gave that property he did not envision the state or federal government creating anything on the outskirts of the property to take away from the experience of the Au Sable, Mason said.

“And that experience was one of stunning silence. This is not what he intended.”
Tom Pangborn, Savoy Energy’s chief executive officer, wouldn’t comment on the dispute.

Savoy already has federal and state leases that give it some property rights, but it now needs federal and state permits to proceed with drilling.

The latest proposal is about one-third of a mile from the Mason Tract boundary, on national forest land. That proposal includes plans to build a production facility — for pulling gas out of the ground — about two miles from the Mason Tract.

While drilling would create a temporary noise disturbance, a distant production facility should minimize long-term noise pollution, said Hal Fitch, chief of geological and land management for the DEQ.

Critics say chemical byproducts of drilling and potential environmental damage pose unacceptable risks. Roads that are improved to accommodate drill rigs would attract more visitors, eventually spoiling the area.

“We asked that Savoy be required to downgrade their roads after they’re finished drilling, to avoid increased traffic,” said Rich Bowman, executive director for the Michigan Council of Trout Unlimited, although he offered a balanced perspective.

“I’d probably get shot for saying this, but Savoy Energy are not bad people,” he said. “They’re genuinely interested in protecting the outdoors, and they believe that they can do this exploration and still protect the outdoors.”

“Oil and gas exploration is not the end of the environmental world — it just needs to be done correctly.”

Although the mineral rights below Mason Tract are federally owned, the state has a financial stake in drilling because it owns mineral leases near Savoy’s proposed site.

Those mineral leases mean the state would share in drilling revenues. Michigan has about 5,300 oil and gas leases covering 625,000 acres, which will bring in $52 million in royalties this year. The money goes to the Natural Resources Trust Fund, which acquires and maintains public lands.

Complicating the matter is a landmark lawsuit in which Michigan was ordered to compensate the Miller Brothers Oil Co. more than $90 million for refusing to allow slant drilling in the Nordhouse Dunes Wilderness Area near Ludington.

In that case, the mineral rights below the protected area were privately owned.

“We always have to recognize that the constitution bars the state from denying all use of those mineral rights unless we compensate for it,” said DEQ’s Fitch.

At the time this article went to press, Fitch expected a decision on Savoy’s proposal in early December.

Assuming DEQ gives its nod, the federal government will consider a surface permit — where Savoy wants to set up its rig on national forest land to slant drill under the Mason Tract.

The federal analysis should take about six months, meaning the earliest that drilling could start would be mid-2004.

Mike Weber, district ranger for the Huron-Manistee Mio district, said he thinks gas drilling can work in the area. “We feel like we can mitigate any concerns that folks have about effects on their recreation experience in the Mason Tract.”

The Mason Tract case may be an indication of a larger trend brought on by the Bush administration. According to a recent National Public Radio report, “federal land managers have been ordered to expedite the permit process and reduce environmental impediments wherever the oil industry wants to drill.”

The report focused on natural gas exploration in the Rocky Mountain foothills of the American west, which some industry sources say could be the Persian Gulf of natural gas.

Energy demand and the regulatory climate have changed dramatically in the past year, NPR reported, quoting Assistant Secretary of the Interior Rebecca Watson’s statement to western state Governors meeting in Montana to discuss the issue.

“I believe the American west will play a major role in our energy future,” Watson said.
“That role requires that we use the resources of our public lands. We cannot lock those resources away.”

Demand for natural gas to provide heat and generate electricity is expected to increase by half over the next 20 years, according to the NPR report.

Montana Senator Max Baucus proposed an idea that might save places like the Mason Tract from drilling: swapping leases that have already been granted in environmentally sensitive areas for leases elsewhere.

Tim Mason, whose grandfather donated the disputed area in Michigan, hopes such a plan could preserve the AuSable’s pristine condition.

“It would take vision, hard work and a lot of effort, but it was done in the mind of one over 50 years ago,” Mason said. “It can be done today.”

Anglers of the AuSable is more pragmatic, musing in a bumper sticker, “If nature had wanted to protect the brown trout, they would have been born with law degrees.”

RESOURCE

http://www.flymartonline.com

This site gives a guide to the state’s best angling destinations and makes an attempt to get the low-tech sport of fishing into the web logging Internet community. Check out the fish stories.

A war of words
Early environmentalist Albert Stroll Jr.
adopted Isle Royale as his own

By Brian Foley

There is a smidge of land in Lake Superior that literally sits closer to Minnesota and Canada, but essentially belongs to Michigan. On a sunny day, it appears to be a break in the blue glistening crystals of the enveloping lake. On a misty day, it sits as a haunting, enchanted island welcoming curiosity.

This modest archipelago is Isle Royale National Park, a point of contention that began when the French first claimed it as theirs in 1671 and ended with the park’s establishment in 1940. Since then its serene setting has prospered without uncertainty. One man persisted to make it so, using the power of print to provide us with the chance of experiencing what he already knew: a description of Isle Royale is beyond words.
Like Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond and John Muir’s Yosemite, Isle Royale National Park belongs to Albert Stoll, Jr., the conservation writer and editor of the Detroit News for nearly three decades. From the early 1920s through 1950, he used writing to fight for the park’s establishment. And like so many other environmental writers before and after him, his quest was an arduous one that lasted decades.

Stoll wrote on an array of topics at the Detroit News, mostly on conservation and outdoor topics; his love of the wilderness stemmed from his youth. Born in Detroit in 1883, he grew up among the cedar swamps near Oxford, Michigan, where he became accustomed to exploring the wilderness that surrounded his home.

Although his environmental values reflected in his active life, he only started to illuminate it through his writing when he saw a void in Michigan’s environmental stature. Isle Royale was to fill that void, and it suddenly became a crusade that captivated Michigan readers and dared the politicians of Washington to listen.

In 1922 the battle began. “If the great eagle which I have seen sweeping the length of Chickenbone Lake soared such a height that his keen eyes viewed the whole of Isle Royale stretched out below him, he would behold a continent of green,” he wrote, using an eagle’s eye view.

“But he could not see the things which man alone can see; and man himself to see them must take the wilderness trail with all those hardships and adventures which challenge man and womanhood in primitive places and linger afterwards forever in the memory,” referring to humankind’s diminishing relationship with Nature.

Readers received Stoll’s idea of Michigan’s own park well, and political figures who were friends of Stoll gave him favorable feedback. But the politicians did not act.

Stoll turned on private enterprise. “That commerce, possessing so complete a power over so much, should be permitted to erase Michigan’s last wilderness from the map, to extinguish the bloom, to convert Isle Royale into a millyard, is unthinkable,” he wrote. “The Michigan legislature alone may have to preserve the State’s finest possession until such time as the Government perceives clearly that Isle Royale is a jewel for a national setting.”

Stoll saw Isle Royale as comparable to Yellowstone and Yosemite. It was an island of tranquility, an environmental utopia, yet to be discovered by Midwesterners eager to escape the sprawling urban climate. “Isle Royale is more than a symbol of a park,” he wrote in an editorial, “rather it is an index to the character of the state; whether all things must yield to commerce or whether out of the first abundance, a slight but precious fragment shall be preserved as Michigan’s share of nature’s bounty.”

A visit to the island would hardly reveal the real danger it once faced in becoming a desolated casualty of human indulgence. Its historical diversity parallels its bio-diversity, creating a learning ambiance for visitors ignorant of the natural destruction the Isle Royale once endured.

Before the arrival of Europeans, Isle Royale was only periodically explored by copper-seeking Native Americans. After the French claimed it during Europe’s New World campaigns, the island rarely hosted visitors, until the 1830s when the American Fur Company saw its potential for fishermen. Fishing flourished in and around Isle Royale until the 1880s when the local market turned its attention towards intensive copper mining. Shoddy mining practices included the scorching of native vegetation to unveil hidden crops of copper.

Ben East was a prominent writer at the time and one of Stoll’s friends. He wrote, “Homes were built for the miners, villages established, and for a time man was near to breaking this wild island to his fashioning.”

During this rapid alteration of the ecosystem, copper became rare and timber became desired. While almost all of the forests of Michigan and Wisconsin succumbed to loggers, Isle Royale only had limited tree harvesting due to its isolated location. The volatile local climate also shied loggers away, especially after a particular incident where a major storm caused Washington Creek to flood, destroying the log barrier and sending countless logs into Lake Superior. Loggers continued to target its forests well into the twentieth century.

When Stoll first decided to fight for the Isle Royale’s preservation, major signs were already brewing that its environment was deteriorating. Animal populations were fluctuating wildly. The beavers were almost wiped out, the caribou vanished, the coyote population dwindled and the moose population exploded.

Gulls and hawks still meandered the skies, but they were soaring above a growing number of shipwrecks surrounding the island. Now the shipwrecks that litter the waters around Isle Royale serve as a scuba diver’s playground.

The more time passed, the more incredulous Stoll grew about the situation. Not one to succumb to the temptations of frustration, Stoll kept his persistence and kept writing. Static politicians provided Stoll fodder for his fire. It suddenly became a moral duty to rescue Isle Royale “from the unconscious vandalism of commerce.”

Stoll got in the faces of his political friends, constantly hounding them on the issue. They tried to appease him by making false promises, only to find their own names in Stoll’s columns the next day. Stephen Mather, director of the National Park Service picked up the newspaper in 1924 to see himself quoted a day after a casual conversation with Stoll. Stoll portrayed Mather as working hard for the park’s creation, quoting him, “This virgin island and all of its romantic beauty will be cherished as one of America’s greatest heritages,” as though the end to the conflict was drawing near.

Stoll’s sedulous ways eventually found the attention of Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a former editor at the Grand Rapids Press. He watched silently for years as Stoll used his writing talents for a cause that increasingly became important for the people of Michigan. Vandenberg finally flexed his political muscle in Washington and created serious consideration for a park. The Cramton-Vandenberg Bill passed in March of 1931 authorizing Isle Royale as a national park, and shortly thereafter, the Detroit News ran an eight part series on Isle Royale introducing its readers to their new prize.
It would be another nine years until the archipelago became an officially established national park.

Few before Stoll’s time used the tools of activism and environmental journalism in such a persistent and forceful manner. His choice of words and compelling prose earned a notoriety that few in history could muster, but his modesty and humility causes present day environmental historians to overlook him. Nevertheless he took these forested islands and turned it into an argument about America, thereby echoing the calls of Progressive Era figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, who both pushed feverishly for the national park system.

To all of them conservation represented American restraint from the abusive ways of timber and mining companies. America’s conservation held an intrinsic form of patriotism, an homage to God’s creation and an opportunity for future generations to enjoy what the continent was blessed with.

Today visitors are awed by the immensity of Isle Royale’s natural beauty, creating an allure that draws them back for a second, third, and fourth time.

“Isle Royale is awesome,” says Jim McGill, a ranger there, who explores the park in search for scenic views for his next painting to add to his collection of watercolors. “In my experience, what visitors find most awesome is the beauty of the wilderness, and peace and solitude. It is truly one of the quietest places in the Midwest.”

The Stoll Memorial Trail now winds through the island. The plaque there reads: “Dedicated to the memory of Albert Stoll, Jr., conservation editor of the Detroit News from 1923-1950, whose untiring efforts made possible the preservation of Isle Royale as a National Park.”