Images of Michigan's Environmental History

Michigan's
Environmental
History Project

Beginning in the late 1800s, Michigan built a national reputation for leadership in conservation and environmental protection. Today that leadership is threatened by the failure of state officials to consider the future. MEC has launched an environmental history project to tell the story of Michigan's past environmental leadership and to inspire a new generation of Michigan citizens to renew that commitment.

Here are a few photos of Michigan's History:

Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan	Technological advancements, including the crosscutting saw and logging railroads, helped accelerate the timber cut in Michigan during the last decades of the 19th Century. Michigan ranked first among the states in production of lumber in 1870, 1880, and 1890, but by 1920 it was 16th as forests were depleted. Over 200 billion board feet of lumber was produced from Michigan forests by 1929. In the late 1800s states as far as away as Colorado and Wyoming and even some European cities imported Michigan lumber.
With the spring thaw, logs stored close to riverbanks were dumped into rivers and run downstream to sawmills. The river runs poured huge quantities of sediment into rivers. A hundred years later, in 1998, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources reported that sediment from the logging era was still damaging fish habitat in the Manistee and other northern Michigan rivers.	Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan
Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan	The logging of Michigan’s forests in the late 1800s supplied wood to Europe and states as far away as Wyoming, and helped establish communities across the Great Plains. The value of Michigan’s sawed lumber was estimated in 1929 to be $3 billion, more than twice the value of all the gold produced in California to that time. But the industry was ruinous. The failure to log selectively and to replant trees created vast stump fields across northern Michigan. In the first decade of the 1900s, Michigan established forest reserves and began the job of renewing the forests under public ownership.
In 1899, the Michigan Legislature authorized the creation of a forest reserve in Roscommon and Crawford Counties and created an independent Forestry Commission to oversee the renewal of the state's forests. By the1920s, mechanized planting was supplementing manual labor as the former waste lands became public forest land. By 1949, Michigan had more than 3.6 million acres of state forest land, and today it has more public forest land than any state east of the Mississippi River.	Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan

Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan	Michigan became the first state to appoint a paid game warden in 1887, thanks to vigorous lobbying by the Michigan Sportsmen’s Association after the depletion of the state’s passenger pigeon and many fish species. In the 1920s, the title of “game warden” was changed to “conservation officer,” and the job expanded to conservation education as well as enforcement. Today conservation officers patrol the state to enforce fish and game laws and to protect the state’s environment.
Oil and chemical pollution fouled Michigan's waterways after World War II. Outraged by the deaths of thousands of ducks on the Detroit River during the winter of 1948, members of the Michigan United Conservation Clubs dumped hundreds of the dead fowl on the approach to the State Capitol in Lansing. Here Governor Kim Sigler (left) views the ducks with an MUCC official. The Legislature tightened the state's water pollution laws the following year.	Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan
Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan	The accidental mixing of a fire retardant, PBB, with cattle feed led to massive contamination of Michigan's food chain in the early 1970s. Amid fear about the human health impact of eating meat and drinking milk contaminated with the chemical, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources buried thousands of slaughtered animals in two northern Michigan landfills. Siting of the landfills was one of the greatest controversies during the tenure of Governor William Milliken.
Governor William Milliken signs the Michigan Environmental Protection Act into law in July 1970. Standing immediately behind Milliken is Representative Thomas Anderson, the author of many of the state's landmark environmental laws during the 1970s. Milliken is generally regarded as the most environmentally conscientious Michigan governor in the state's history.	Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan
Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan	In the 1950s and 1960s, water pollution fouled rivers and lakes around Michigan. This paper mill waste created a nearly solid stream in southeast Michigan.
Management of the state's mushrooming garbage problem became a severe challenge after World War II. A survey of local governments in the late 1940s found that about a third used hog feeding as a major way of handling trash. By 1962, there were 833 open dumps in the state, many of which eventually leaked chemicals into the state's groundwater, while breeding rats and fires. In 1978, the State Legislature passed Michigan's modern solid waste disposal law, which set strict standards for most landfills.	Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan
Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan	Director of Michigan's conservation and natural resources agency from 1964 until his death in 1972, Ralph MacMullan was a forceful champion for environmental cleanup. His crusade against DDT contributed to the state's decision to cancel most uses of the chemical in 1969, three years before the federal government acted against DDT. MacMullan also won awards for his role in helping revive the Great Lakes sportfishery.
P.J. Hoffmaster was the state's longest-serving conservation director, holding the job from 1934 until his death in 1951. Hoffmaster built the early state parks system and played a decisive role in sparing the Porcupine Mountains from the woodsman's ax in 1945. A state park at Muskegon is named in his memory.	Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan
Courtesy, State Archives of Michigan	Pictured at left, Albert Stolle, Jr. was a Detroit News outdoor writer whose editorials and advocacy helped win widespread support for the protection of Isle Royale as a national park. Stolle's first editorials calling for protection of the island appeared in 1920. The Park was officially dedicated in 1945.
Pollution of the Kalamazoo River was so foul by the 1950s that it attracted national media attention. The October 5, 1953 issue of Life magazine included this photo and the headline, "Four Acres of Carp Corpses on the Kalamazoo." The dumping of organic waste into the river by paper companies consumed the stream's oxygen and drove the carp up Dumont Creek, where they were trapped and died. "Back down the Kalamazoo valley the aroused citizens sought injunction to halt the paper mills' pollution of the river," Life reported. But it would be the mid-1960s before the river's recovery would begin in earnest.
Courtesy, Tim Flynn	One hundred years after the state took ownership of the stump lands, some of them sport enormous old-growth stands. Here, Sierra Club member Tim Flynn, a crusader for protection of old-growth forests, stands amid a grove on state forest land in Roscommon County, not far from the original state preserve.