M-22 is a scenic road that hugs the Lake Michigan shoreline, it’s the namesake of a triathlon, it’s an apparel brand, and apparently also a hot commodity for thieves. The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) says it has replaced approximately 90 M-22 road signs in the past three years.
Kids going to college who are planning to vote absentee, take note. Same for the elderly who want to vote but no longer have a driver’s license.
Burdickville resident Jim Lively, a program director with the Traverse City-based Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities (formerly the Michigan Land Use Institute) is a key player in the Oil & Water Don’t Mix campaign, which calls on the state to shut down two aging oil pipelines under the Straits of Mackinac.
Like many in Flint’s Latino immigrant community, Yaquelin Vargas said she didn’t learn until late January that Flint’s drinking water was lead poisoned. Vargas, a U.S. citizen, said she drank tap water while she was pregnant, and as she first began breastfeeding Lydia, now 8 months old, who suffers from lead poisoning.
Leelanau County residents and those visiting our shores a year ago definitely know where they were when the storm hit. Where they took shelter, what they saw, and how they helped others in the minutes, hours and days after the megastorm pummeled Glen Arbor and the Sleeping Bear Dunes minutes after 4 p.m. last August 2 is now part of our personal narrative.
I walk into the library and smell it: paper, pages, ink, sometimes leather and glue—the scent of books, the old and new stories. When I open a book, a word odor wafts up with a love tale, war epic, a medieval ballad of loss, or the aroma of an essay on food so good you want to eat it. That’s the first love of a library, that scent. My love of literature started with libraries, with that scent, the spirit of story.
Libraries are the great equalizer in America. Not everyone can afford to buy a book or a computer, but almost everyone can afford to go to the library. Libraries are the cornerstone of democracy. Free access to information is what democracy depends on in order to have an intelligent population.
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore hosted a naturalization ceremony on July 21 for 20 new United States citizens, who hail from 15 different countries. They are white, black and brown; their names and native country religions are Protestant, Catholic and Muslim. Like American immigrants for the last 238 years, they are hardworking, creative and devoted to their new nation.
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore officials worry that the Platte River party scene has reached a pitch where, if left unchecked, could spell disaster: a child cutting their feet on a broken beer bottle; a drunken reveler passing out and drowning in the river, a pedestrian hit by a moving vehicle on Lake Michigan Road, where the speed limit remains 55 miles per hour—even near the mouth of the river where cars line the road for half a mile on hot summer weekends.
For his doctoral dissertation, Lukas Bell-Dereske has been studying dune grass in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. He created an experiment in which he mimicked one of the effects of climate change — increased precipitation in larger pulses — to see how dune plants would respond.