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Transforming Lake Michigan into the 'World's Greatest Fishing Hole': The Environmental Politics of Michigan's Great Lakes Sport Fishing, 1965–1985
Kristin M. Szylvian
| IN 1968, Harvey Duck, outdoor editor of the Chicago Daily News, and Dick Kirkpatrick, executive editor of National Wildlife, went on a fishing trip. Within a short time the pair had caught three "beautiful, silvery, pink-fleshed salmon" weighing from three to four pounds, typical of those caught in Puget Sound. Duck and Kirkpatrick were, however, not fishing in the salmon-rich waters of the Pacific Northwest; they were out on Lake Michigan, within "sight of their office!" According to Kirkpatrick, Chicago fishermen routinely caught one- to three-pound coho salmon "right off the downtown docks and breakwaters."1 |
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Duck and Kirkpatrick were among thousands of sports fishermen whose voices formed a chorus of praise for the salmon-stocking program initiated by the Michigan Department of Conservation in Lake Michigan in 1966. Seemingly intoxicated by the immediate success of the salmon program, Duck, Kirkpatrick, and other supporters of the Great Lakes sport fishery focused on its recreational and economic benefits and expressed little concern for the environmental impact of stocking non-indigenous, but wildly popular sport fish in Lake Michigan—the same body of water U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall called "sick," Newsweek reported was "dying," and political cartoonist Bill Mauldin labeled one of the five "Dead Seas."2 They also failed to weigh the social and economic costs of the decision to simultaneously dismantle the commercial fishing industry and prevent subsistence fishers, mainly American Indians, from laying claim to fisheries resources they believed were guaranteed to them under the Ottawa Chippewa Treaty of 1836. |
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This essay examines the environmental, political, economic, and social repercussions of the Michigan Department of Conservation's decision to reverse nearly a century of policy favoring the commercial use of Great Lakes fisheries. It shows that as early as 1959, state conservation officials began to view the recreational use of the fisheries in its Great Lakes waters as serving the greatest public good. Sport fishing and recreational tourism were offered as a means of filling the economic and cultural void created in lakeshore communities by the demise of commercial fishing and other maritime related industries. Today, it is evident that the decision to create the Great Lakes sport fishery and drastically limit or curtail commercial and subsistence fishing has had mixed social and economic effects on the lakes themselves and on inhabitants of lakeshore communities. That decision contributed to a host of unanticipated environmental, economic, and social problems that continue to pit stakeholder groups against each other and the state's conservation agency, now called the Department of Natural Resources (DNR). The result has been financially costly and socially divisive legal battles and incidents of violence and intimidation. |
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This essay joins a discussion—arguably instigated as early as the publication of E. P. Thompson's Whigs and Hunters—that questions the far-ranging social consequences of policies and customs that privilege the recreational use of natural resources over subsistence and commercial use.3 Together, Edward Ives, Karl Jacoby, Mark Spence, Louis Warren, and others have shown that by the twentieth century, federal and state conservation officials were eliminating or sharply curtailing the demands made upon fish and game resources by Indians, squatters, poachers, and those who hunted and fished for the market in favor of those made by sportsmen, often from outside of the community.4 |
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