Ask John Hartig about his childhood, and you’ll hear about fishing with his father in Northern Michigan, biking around Belle Isle and hiking and canoeing at church camp Up North. Hartig, who manages the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, wants every Michigan kid in even the most urban environment to develop a love for the […]
Quality of Life
Michigan is a great place to live. Bridge will report that fact often — and on potential threats to the assets that make it so.
Posted inQuality of Life
Bandwidth by the barrel: Bloggers take aim
The old saw says it’s unwise to pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel. Updated for the digital era, it might say something about bandwidth or Twitter followers. As old-style editorial-page fire-breathing waned with newspaper cutbacks and consolidation, bloggers happily stepped into the breach to fire their slingshots at policymakers who […]
Posted inQuality of Life
Is it bad to turn on a light?
As Bridge’s Rick Haglund reports in today’s magazine, the high hopes of many political leaders for the impact of “green” energy have yet to materialize. I wouldn’t say those hopes are dashed entirely, but the big talk has exceeded the actual results to date. A new report from the federal Energy Information Administration gives some […]
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The unending ballad of Willie and Bronco
It takes three to make a trend, but maybe the word doesn’t apply for a city like Detroit, where the extraordinary news that fills the daily papers makes it one of the most interesting cities in the country. Last week, a 75-year-old man shot and killed an 18-year-old who had just kicked in his side […]
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State attracts visitors of motor-less bent
For seven days last summer, James Jeske, 66, bicycled along Michigan’s western shore. The 500-mile-long trek took him from New Buffalo at the base of the Mitten to Mackinaw City at the tip of the Lower Peninsula. Jeske did not cycle the peninsula alone, though. He was with 400 other cyclists on the Shoreline West […]
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Michigan's map of LUST
There are approximately 9,100 underground storage tanks in Michigan (LUSTs in environmental parlance) leaking fuel into the surrounding soils and water. While more than 13,000 such sites have been cleaned up over the years, Michigan’s current backlog is the second-largest in the nation. Half of the current sites fall under the responsibility of the state — and the […]
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Gang takes over parks — and tidies them
Tom Nardone’s father was an Elk in Wakefield, Mass., and spent time, as Elks do, in the Elks Hall. His son assumed his dad went to the club mostly to have a place to drink with his buddies. “I didn’t know the money they spent there went to children’s charities,” he said. “It never occurred […]
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Guest column: Asian carp aren't waiting for us
By Patty Birkholz/Michigan Office of the Great Lakes In my role as director of Michigan’s Office of the Great Lakes, many documents come across my desk in the course of a typical week. On Jan. 31, one of the most important documents of the last year arrived in my in-basket. After a high-profile and intense […]
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Ex-priest loves trees, but not the woods
See that guy digging in the dirt, removing dead trees in the middle of Detroit? How did he end up there? His story starts with a middle-class upbringing in Dearborn. But as a youngster, Todd Mistor aspired to be a priest — a shepherd of flocks, not a steward of trees. And it’s a course […]
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Young professional groups sprout to grow Mich. connections
Traveling around Michigan is one of the pleasures of running the Center for Michigan. You get a sense of the rhythm of communities and what trends are developing. One such positive development made the front page of the Battle Creek Enquirer this week: Young professionals banding together to find ways to build strong communities. In […]