The Battle for Bridgman South

How Citizens Rallied to Hold Back The Dune Miners

The Legislature in 1976 enacted the Sand Dune Protection and Management Act, regulating the mining of dunes for industrial purposes primarily along the state’s Lake Michigan shores. Hailed as a “great win for the environment” by the Muskegon Chronicle, the new law soon generated sharp conflicts between environmentalists and citizens living near dune mining operations on one hand, and the Department of Natural Resources on the other.

Like many other statutes whose middle name was “protection,” the Act was as much about governing dune destruction as it was about preventing it. The permit system established under the law corrected the worst abuses of a few sand mining operations, but did little to check the removal of some of the state’s most spectacular remaining dunes. And critics of the DNR suspected the Geological Survey Division, assigned the task of implementing the law, was secretly on the side of the mining industry.

When the law took effect, the Martin Marietta Corporation was coveting the rich sand deposits at a location that would soon be known as Bridgman South, along the Lake Michigan shoreline between St. Joseph and the Indiana line. Bridgman South included some of the most spectacular dunes in the state, including a 225-foot-tall dune known as Mount Edwards. The company had been granted permission to mine under a City of Bridgman ordinance, prompting angry local citizens to organize under the banner of Hope for the Dunes. Don Wilson, one of the principal activists in the group, remembers his wife reading an article about the company’s city mining permit in the newspaper. “She said, ‘What can we do?’” Wilson recalls. “I said, ‘Nothing. They own the property. They’re a big corporation and they’re going to get their way.”

Both of the Wilsons would prove that prediction wrong, as would dozens of other concerned citizens in the community. One of them was Marybeth Pritschet, who was attending college at Western Michigan University but returning to Bridgman on weekends to visit her parents. Noticing a previous mining operation at a site north of Bridgman, just off I-94, Pritschet pulled off the road to inspect the devastation. “There had been dunes there, beautiful dunes with sharp relief, immediately behind houses. They defined what Bridgman was. By the time I got to my parents’ house, I was in tears. I was despondent. I couldn’t believe people would level dunes for any reason.”

Hope for the Dunes soon sprung into action, holding its first meeting at the local American Legion hall in the summer of 1977. The group soon scraped together numerous small contributions and two $1000 checks from a wealthy benefactor. By that autumn, the group had won a temporary restraining order from a local judge to temporarily halt further destruction on all but five areas of the approximately 300-acre site. The court also ordered Martin Marietta to seek government approval of any further mining expansion.

Now Martin Marietta turned to the DNR, seeking a permit under the 1976 state law to mine 144 acres at Bridgman South. At a public hearing on the proposed permit, Wayne Schmidt of the Michigan United Conservation Clubs exploded. “If Mount Edwards isn’t the best of what we have left, then where will the DNR draw the line?” he asked.

Hope for the Dunes also recruited scientific experts from across the Great Lakes region to establish a basis to rebut what it considered the erroneous conclusions of the company’s environmental impact statement. One such conclusion was that the devegetated open mining pit would provide a wildlife interaction zone. Dr. Warren (Herb) Wagner, a University of Michigan botanist, called the site part of “the richest dune community of any dune complex in the world.” Wagner added in an interview published in the Detroit Free Press, “I don’t think we have the right to destroy areas so rare as this one, especially for a short-term gain. That sand will only last the miners a few years, then they will have to go somewhere else.” Chris Graham, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan in landscape architecture who had studied the dunes (and who has long been affiliated with MEC member group Michigan Natural Areas Council), took editorial writer Barbara Stanton of the Free Press on a tour of the site, resulting in a series of prominent, impassioned editorials by the paper calling for protection of Bridgman South.

Although DNR staff and Director Howard Tanner, barraged by public comments, recommended denial of the permit, a hearing officer recommended it be granted.

In the fall of 1981, the verdict came before the Natural Resources Commission itself. Under the 1976 law, the Commission had the final say for the DNR on the Bridgman South permit. At an emotional public hearing, both sides implored the commissioners. “It took 8,000 years to create these dunes,” said Terrence Grady, an assistant attorney general. “It would take only a couple of years to destroy them.” Hope for the Dunes pointed out that foundries did not have to rely on dunes for sand supplies, since a General Motors casting plant in Saginaw used sand dredged from Saginaw Bay.

“You’ve got to consider the economics of the situation,” said John Crow, an attorney representing Martin Marietta. He said the mining of 400,000 tons of sand annually would provide $325,000 each year in payroll to local workers, and could last 20 years or more. Pointing out that the state owned nearly 28 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline in parks, he added, “I guess my point is that we’re saving enough land already.” In the depth of Michigan’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the argument carried weight with some members of the Commission. “How many places do I need to go to look at beautiful rocks?” asked Charles G. Younglove, a commissioner who was also an official of the United Steelworkers Union. The Commission voted 4-3 to approve the mining in November 1981.

But the battle did not end. Hope for the Dunes sued the state to overturn the permit. Michigan Attorney General Frank Kelley intervened in the lawsuit on behalf of the sand dune defenders. In the meantime, a restraining order remained in effect and the operation was stalemated for nearly three years. Helen Milliken, the wife of former Governor William Milliken, appeared at a 1983 Hope for the Dunes fundraiser to call for protection of Bridgman South. In 1984, the Michigan chapter of the Nature Conservancy and Thomas Washington of the Michigan United Conservation Clubs, who chaired the board of the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund, helped broker a deal in which the state would buy most of the site from Unimin Corporation, which had purchased Bridgman South from Martin Marietta. The deal protected the majority of the site, including Mount Edwards. Perhaps realizing all permit conditions would be closely monitored by Hope for the Dunes, Unimin removed little sand from the site before turning it over to the state as part of Warren Dunes State Park.

This resolution did not wipe away the bitter taste in the mouths of advocates who had fought to protect the area. Don Wilson, one of the most outspoken organizers and members of Hope for the Dunes, faulted the DNR for failing to exploit what he believed as its mandate to protect the dunes. “[The state government] historically steps back as industry steps forward so as to accommodate the industry, which is perceived as having the money and power versus the public groups who are seen by the state agencies as financially weak and not organized. Through the years when I was in Lansing, I was occasionally told by DNR personnel not to get emotionally involved. I explained that if I weren’t emotionally involved I wouldn’t be there, that unlike government people I wasn’t being paid so I could be as unconcerned as they.” Wilson argued that the end of mining at the Bridgman site only pushed the miners to other, equally vulnerable areas along the shoreline. Still, the advocacy of Hope for the Dunes had its effect: after the group’s formation in 1977, no mining took place at Bridgman other than the small 5-acre area granted by a local judge.

Pritschet takes a slightly more optimistic view, pointing out that the organizing efforts required of Hope for the Dunes helped educate thousands of Michigan citizens about the unique character of coastal dunes. Still, she says, in the face of government’s refusal to enforce resource protection statutes, “I think citizens have to fight tooth and nail for every square foot of land they want to protect.”