From the Early August 2013 edition of The North Woods Call
I returned to school in mid-July, but it wasn’t the typical classroom setting with textbooks and a course syllabus.
This was experiential learning and hands-on tutoring in the Pigeon River Country, located near Vanderbilt in Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula.
The “professor” was Gaylord-area resident Doug Mummert, a seasoned woodsman, hunter and fisherman. Doug and his wife Judy had invited me to their home to talk natural resources conservation—a subject about which they are as passionate as anybody I’ve ever known.
The discussion began as soon as I arrived Thursday afternoon at their secluded home southeast of town. It continued over dinner and well into the evening, then resumed early the following morning during a hearty breakfast that Judy had prepared.
There was much to learn about the Pigeon River Country—one of the more remote areas in the Lower Peninsula—and the Mummerts generously shared their knowledge and wisdom until I reluctantly drove away at 4:30 p.m. Friday to return home.
The highlight of this crash course in all things Pigeon was a day-long tour of the state forest known as “The Big Wild”—nearly 100,000 acres of trees, wetlands, hills, meadows, rivers, streams, lakes, trails, wildlife and solitude set aside for preservation and the public benefit.
Home to some of author Ernest Hemingway’s favorite Michigan rivers—the Sturgeon, the Black and the Pigeon—the area has been Doug Mummert’s “sandbox” and all-season playground for some 60 years, he said. Since the early 1950s—when Mummert first visited as a teen-ager—he has hunted, fished, snowshoed, canoed, hiked, ran hound dogs, communed with “Ma Nature,” and generally absorbed the quiet and healthy spirit of the land.
That’s precisely why he is determined to see it protected from developers, big oil interests, politicians, bureaucrats and others who would exploit the resource for temporary and short-term advantage.
The threats have been many and varied over the years and Mummert has been among those in the trenches who have fought long and hard against exploitation.
One of the biggest threats came during the 1970s, when fuel shortages were causing long lines at gas pumps, and oil companies were eager to tap huge reserves of oil and natural gas under the forest. Opponents claimed that oil drilling activity would harm the Pigeon River Country’s abundant wildlife—particularly the only substantial wild elk herd east of the Mississippi River.
For nearly 10 years, the two sides engaged in a series of lawsuits, consent orders, legislation and compromises until a 1979 landmark Michigan Supreme Court case offered guidance on the type of harm that would justify relief under the Michigan Environmental Protection Act and led to an agreement between the state government, oil industry and environmental groups. The ruling allowed tightly regulated drilling in the southern one-third of the forest under the watchful eye of the Pigeon River Advisory Council and set standards for future oil drilling in Michigan.
Today, the forest is a special management unit in parts of four counties that is administered by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) under a unique “Concept of Management” that carefully outlines what is allowed and what is not. Given that, the Pigeon River Country should be a model for resource conservation.
But there are still many threats, Mummert said, including conflicts among user groups, ongoing pressure to commercialize state natural resources and the continued deterioration of Michigan’s once-vaunted “conservation system” in favor of political interests.
“We’re losing our conservation system,” Mummert said. “It seems like the legislature wants to run it, rather than the DNR, and they’re catering to special and commercial interests.”
Pure water will soon be our most precious natural resource, Mummert said, if it isn’t already. Northern Michigan and the Pigeon River Country are great examples of that, he said, and act as somewhat of a “sponge” to collect and filter fresh water.
“Everyone should agree that it’s proper to have pure water,” Mummert said, and no activities should be allowed that threaten that—including the quest for more oil and gas resources.
In addition, wildlife is an indicator of a healthy environment. “If we manage for the most sensitive creatures out there, everything else will benefit, too,” Mummert said.
That means you can’t be all things to all people, he said. Some user activities—dirt bikes, four-wheelers, snowmobiles and other “fast movers”—have much greater impact on the resource than others. They need to be carefully managed—even prohibited—because smaller individual footprints mean better and more long-term resource protection.
Viewing the forest panorama from Inspiration Point above the old Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the Pigeon River Country, Mummert quietly reflected on past efforts to save the forest.
“What we’re looking at now is here because of what we did before,” he said.
A DNR official once told Mummert that he had destroyed his credibility by saying “no to everything.” Yet, Mummert doesn’t consider himself to be a “preservationist,” and even chaffs at the label “environmentalist.”
“I’m a traditionalist,” he said, “and a conservationist. You have to believe in something and center your life around it. Otherwise, you won’t do it.”
That’s a good lesson for us all.
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