Shifting sand is natural to Michigan’s dunes. How to cope is controversial

LANSING – Michigan’s sand dunes face serious threats as climate change and environmental factors continue to evolve, as do the communities surrounding them, experts say.

Lake Michigan communities have seen problems in recent years as a result of sand dunes shifting, said Emily Smith, the land and water conservation policy manager at the Michigan Environmental Council.

“Sand dunes are already extremely unique in Michigan,” Smith said. “We have globally rare ecosystems here. They are ever-changing because it’s sand and blows around.”

Smith said Lake Michigan’s coast has a greater concentration of sand dunes than the other Great Lakes.

According to the National Park Service, these dune habitats on Great Lakes coastlines are fragile.

“From climate change, we get more extreme weather on our Great Lakes coasts and higher wave action from that weather, which increases the erosion on the lakeshore,” Smith said.

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The effects of climate change can be seen at all the Great Lakes, but Lake Michigan has seen more frequent erosion and high water events along its shore.

Erosion, despite its bad rap, is an important natural, expected process of a healthy coastal system, said Zach Chamberlin, the Great Lakes shorelands specialist with the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy’s Water Resource Division.

“There’s this kind of cyclical nature of erosion and accretion over time,” Chamberlin said. “That cycle is important and healthy for a dune system. So, erosion isn’t necessarily something that you have to do something about.”

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on the Leelanau Peninsula has about 4 square miles of dune formations. Over time, Sleeping Bear has seen active dunes gradually change with dramatic results, according to the park.

“Old photographs of the dune show a densely vegetated mound, vaguely resembling a sleeping bear,” the park website says. “As wind erosion destroyed the original shape and much of the vegetation, the interior of the dune was revealed.”

While Sleeping Bear Dunes is in the controlled environment of a vast protected land, its dunes aren’t immune to the effects of intense erosion as shown in past stretches of both stability and change.

“Ultimately, these are really dynamic areas, and that’s part of what makes them so unique,” Chamberlin said. “Why we all love them is because they do change a lot over time.”

Smith and Chamberlin said that a problem with infrastructure built along dunes close to the shoreline is the adverse effects of erosion. In some cases, Smith said homes have been at risk of falling into Lake Michigan.

“Where erosion can become a problem is when structures or infrastructure is placed too closely to the shoreline or that erosion over time comes too far inland,” Chamberlin said. “I would encourage everyone on the Great Lakes shoreline to place structures as far landward as possible.”

One approach has been to stabilize dunes by shoreline hardening, a technique of installing rigid structures, like seawall or rocks, in dunes that are at risk of or experiencing erosion. It is a way to hold sections of the coastline in place and block the natural movement of sediment.

“They can be effective at stopping erosion immediately, but they have unintended consequences,” Chamberlin said. “So, when you put in a barrier like that, you’re stopping that cycle of sand movement back and forth.”

But, Smith said, “While it might lessen the effects of erosion for that one specific area, there is clear evidence that the wave action just moves around the particular hardened area and then creates harsher effects of erosion around it.”

A 2026 study on lake effects and refiguring of Lake Michigan’s public coast found that as climate change continues to accelerate water level speed and magnitude dynamics across the Great Lakes, the “widespread adoption of shoreline hardening increases erosion, starves sediment and limits access.”

The study by Caroline Brodeur, an expert on landscape architecture and urban planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, found that coastal shorelines are “defined by low and high lake levels and compromised by attachments to stability through extensive hardening.”

Her study, “Lake Effects: Refiguring Lake Michigan’s Public Coast,” appeared in a master in landscape architecture thesis at Harvard.

According to Bridge Michigan, 19% of Michigan’s western shore is hardened, a temporary solution protecting some properties from erosion.

However, in the long term, hardening results in worse erosion, according to Ethan Theuerkauf, an assistant professor in Michigan State University’s Department of Geography, Environment and Spatial Sciences.

Smith said, “Any shoreline hardening that goes in, the moment it’s finished is also the moment it starts deteriorating” – referring to upkeep, safety measures and “making sure it’s not crumbling as soon as they expect it to.”

After many provisions that protected critical dunes in shorelines were removed by legislation in 2012, Smith said efforts to limit hardening or stop people from building infrastructure so close to shore are being made.

The intent of the change in the law was to make way for development.

Smith said Michigan Environment Council initiatives to put provisions and regulations on anti-erosion techniques back into law are being perceived as “anti-development.”

“We don’t see it that way,” Smith said. “We just want the development to be smarter.”

“If you’re trying to build a house on a shoreline, maybe don’t do it within a certain area of the shoreline to where it falls into the lake,” she said. “We don’t want these same issues popping up in another 50 years.”

Sandbags are one preventative measure put into effect as a temporary solution to erosive wave action.

Smith said the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy issued temporary sandbag permits during 2019 and 2020 high water events.

“People were really in a bind,” Smith said. The department “had said, ‘Okay, we will issue these temporary sandbag permits. You can place sandbags along the shoreline to protect your home and property. However, they need to be removed once the high water recedes back to normal baseline.’”

Pushback happened when a lot of homeowners didn’t remove the sandbags, and a pending bill in the Legislature proposes allowing them to keep them there.

Smith said the Michigan Environmental Council does not support the bill, which would allow sandbags to be used without a permit on all Great Lakes shores.

“We are opposed to that because now there’s plastic” from the sandbags “that’s being leached into Lake Michigan, which supplies drinking water for a great number of people along the lakeshore,” Smith said.

Researchers have looked at alternative solutions for shoreline rejuvenation, and Smith said one potential safe solution is beach nourishment.

“There is one that is probably ‘of the natural,’” Smith said, using air-quotes. “I’m using air quotes because it’s natural in so far as the materials that are used, but it’s unnatural because they truck the sand into that area and build up a shoreline essentially.”

However, that approach not only requires continued monitoring and upkeep, but there is also a high failure rate because the sand “isn’t supposed to be there,” Smith said.

“There are instances of higher success rates when it’s coupled with planting of natural vegetation, whether that’s trees, dune grasses or other kinds of shrubs to help keep the sand in place,” Smith said.

Smith said that introducing natural vegetation is its own alternative solution to prevent erosion. And the Sleeping Bear Dunes website states that vegetation tends to hold the sand in place.

The National Park Service website for Sleeping Bear Dunes says that its initiative of successful restoration recreates the “predisturbance contours and vegetation” and establishes key vegetation monitoring plans.

According to the Environmental Quality, Great Lakes and Agency, sand movement is natural, but construction can accelerate erosion. The methods recommended to land owners and managers to minimize adverse impacts is to restabilize – and Smith said natural vegetation has potential to do that.

“We say native vegetation because that’s where the deepest roots are going to develop,” Smith said. “Non-native plants tend to have more shallow roots and are easily washed out or don’t stabilize the area as well.”

Clamberlin said that, ultimately, all approaches in place to ward off erosion have shortcomings and drawbacks with negative environmental impacts.

“There isn’t, there isn’t really a one-size-fits-all solution,” Chamberlin said. “I am a really strong advocate that it’s a suite of options that people need to take at a community level.”

This story was originally published by the Capital News Service

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