• This summer, Bridge Michigan is embarking on a project to explore the state’s rivers
• Michigan has 76,000 miles of flowing water, with a cumulative shoreline 76 times longer than the state’s Great Lakes coast
• Those waterways shaped Michigan’s landscape, culture and economy, but paid a price and are still working toward recovery

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Michigan may be known as the Great Lakes state, but most of its residents have a river to thank for their hometown’s existence.

“Just looking at settlement patterns in Michigan tells us a lot about how important our rivers are,” said Lisa Dechano-Cook, a Western Michigan University geographer who co-wrote the book “Kalamazoo River.”

“You wanted to be near water, especially running water, so that you could get from place to place.”

When combined, Michigan’s 76,000 miles of rivers, creeks and streams have a shoreline 46 times the length of Michigan’s Great Lakes coast. That means in most of the state, the nearest water body is more likely a river than one of those big lakes. 

Even some of the state’s most well-known inland lakes — from Oakland County’s Kent Lake to central Michigan’s Lake Ovid — are actually rivers that have been slowed, deepened and widened by dams.

“I really don’t think (rivers) get the proper credit and thought,” said Melissa DeSimone, executive director of the Michigan Lakes and Streams Association. 

While Michigan’s rivers provide drinking water for millions and an abundance of recreational opportunities, they also struggle with widespread E. coli and PFAS pollution, development pressure, legacy contamination that makes fish unsafe to eat and a host of other challenges.

Related:

• Bridge wants to hear from you about Michigan rivers
• Michigan’s latest dam safety crisis revives calls for reforms, funding
• $1B windfall fuels toxic cleanup of Great Lakes, but uphill battle looms
• What it’s like to cheer all night at Au Sable canoe race

This summer, Bridge Michigan will embark upon a monthslong exploration of the state’s rivers, from the recreational opportunities they provide to the struggles they face. 

So why the focus? 

History of rivers

When Dechano-Cook thinks about rivers, her geographer’s mind gravitates to the way they’ve shaped Michigan’s landscape. 

Glacial rivers deposited sand and gravel to form long, narrow ridges on the Earth, called eskers. In other areas, flowing water carved into the land, creating vast depressions like the Kalamazoo River Valley.

“It’s really hard to imagine what Michigan would be like without them,” DeChano said of the state’s rivers.

Rivers have also played important roles in the state’s culture and industry. 

Native American creation stories document how humans settled in the Great Lakes region primarily because a key food source — wild rice — grew in the local rivers and lakes. 

As Europeans arrived, they built riverside settlements for easy access to food, water and water-based transportation across what was then a densely forested region.

They later used rivers to raze those forests, with lumbermen floating logs downstream to water-powered sawmills. The eskers were mined to build roads. Rivers were dammed to produce electricity or regulate water levels. And factories began to crowd riverbanks, where flowing water made for convenient shipping and waste disposal.

All of it came with consequences for the environment. 

By the mid-1900s, many Michigan rivers were dangerously polluted with industrial waste. In others, native fish species went extinct after logging and dams destroyed their habitat. Wild rice beds became scarce. A handful of dirt scooped from the Detroit River would come up black with oil, while a man died of leptospirosis, also known as rat fever, after ingesting water from the polluted River Rouge in 1985.

“The regulations were few and far between,” said Robert Burns, who grew up in Grosse Ile in the 1960s and 1970s and has served as the Detroit riverkeeper for more than 20 years.

Few people wanted to spend time on the water. And if they did, privatized industrial shorelines posed a barrier to access.

Citizens began mounting public pressure campaigns, urging lawmakers to address the nation’s water pollution concerns. 

Congress heeded the call in 1972, passing the Clean Water Act that requires industry to better contain its waste. Decades of restoration efforts followed, with hundreds of millions spent to remove contaminated sediment and reclaim shorelines from Muskegon to Marquette for use by fish, wildlife and humans.

Recreational opportunities

Now, when the spring walleye and silver bass are running, hundreds of fishing boats bob in the Detroit River’s teal water. In summer, Belle Isle’s swimming beaches often reach capacity by midday.

“Cleaning up in the water and making more access points to the water have been key catalysts for showing people this wonderful resource that we’ve always had but that was underappreciated,” said Harry Jones, who teaches kids to sail as president of the Detroit Community Sailing Center. 

It’s a story echoed across the state: As Michigan’s rivers have begun to heal, new opportunities for outdoor recreation have emerged: Trophy pike fishing in the Kalamazoo River. Biking along the Huron. An effort to bring whitewater rafting to the Grand. 

Farther afield from the state’s population centers, reforestation and dam removal efforts have restored water quality and reconnected habitat to such a degree that species managers believe it may be possible to revive Arctic grayling, a fish that disappeared from Michigan’s rivers nearly a century ago.

Water-based recreation in Michigan has become a multi-billion-dollar industry, though it’s not clear how that breaks down between rivers and lakes. Rebecca Esselman, executive director of the Huron River Watershed Council, is betting a massive chunk of it comes from rivers.

“Almost every Michigander, if they are reminiscing about their childhood or their experience with nature, they have a river story,” Esselman said. 

“Catching crayfish or floating paper boats down a creek in a neighborhood park. Because there are so many rivers throughout the state, they are in our backyards and in our parks. They’re engaged with in a very informal, playful way.’”

Her organization commissioned a 2017 study that found recreation on the Huron River alone brought in $53.5 million annually.

Challenges 

Those numbers are a clarion call to protect the hard-fought gains Michigan rivers have made, DeSimone said.

While the average Michigan river is healthier today than it was 50 years ago, unaddressed problems and emerging threats leave them at risk of backsliding.

“It seems like we’re always having to remediate and defend,” she said. “We’re on our back foot.”

Despite decades of political debate and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent, the state has not fixed longstanding nutrient and E. coli pollution caused by intensive agriculture, leaking septic systems and municipal sewer overflows. Roughly half of Michigan’s total river miles exceed standards for safe swimming.

Lawmakers have not heeded years of warnings about the decrepit condition of Michigan’s dams and the state’s lack of money or regulatory authority to speed repairs or removals. The result is increasingly frequent failure scares that threaten public safety and the environment.

Meanwhile, Michigan is just beginning to respond to more newly known hazards, such as the PFAS “forever chemicals” that have sullied hundreds of Michigan water bodies, making fish unsafe to eat.

From his perch on the Detroit River, Burns still feels optimistic. He believes that, with another decade of work and a billion or so dollars, it’s possible to clean up the contaminated sediment that is hindering the river’s comeback. 

If Michigan can avoid re-polluting the river, he said, it may soon be eligible for removal from the US and Canada’s Areas of Concern list. 

“We’re never going to get the river back to what it was pre-settlement,” he said. “All in all, I think we’re headed in the right direction.”

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