Introduction: "Pure Michigan": Environmental Histories of the Great Lakes State

Abstract

Introduction “Pure Michigan”: Environmental Histories of the Great Lakes State No state identifies with the Great Lakes quite like Michigan. Bordering four of the five Great Lakes, the state is located almost entirely within the basin of these sweetwater seas, the world’s largest system of fresh water. Michigan exemplifies the historical complexities and themes of North American landscapes and waterscapes, from indigenous lands and practices to the difficult questions of deindustrialization. Its unique maritime position places the state within still more expansive transnational, borderlands, and technological histories. And within its borders have emerged some of the most challenging social and environmental problems of the industrial era. This special issue of The Michigan Historical Review showcases five articles that consider the relationship between nature and history in Michigan, and the wider region of the Great Lakes basin. “Nature”—and humanity’s place in it—means somewhat different things in each case, from canoed waterways to shipping channels, from forest camps to urban floodplains. Three themes run across space and time: the presence of water in all its forms in Michigan’s history, the ways in which the politics and powers of statehood have relied on expanding control of nature, and the innumerable ways in which environmental conditions have shaped human capacity and choice. We are delighted to publish the winner of this journal’s 2018 Graduate Student Essay Prize, John William Nelson’s “The Ecology of Travel on the Great Lakes Frontier: Native Knowledge, European Dependence, and the Environmental Specifics of Contact.” Nelson describes what he calls “the ecologies of movement” along and across the waterways of the Great Lakes watershed. His story conveys the physicality of maritime movement, as a project of human effort and technological adaptation, affected by seasonal changes and climate. And he locates the more familiar Euro-American narrative of exploration in an existing indigenous landscape of routes, portages, and other kinds of environmental knowledge or “ecological expertise.” Equally important is the biological abundance from land and lake that undergirded both regional movement and cross-cultural exchanges through foodstuffs and provisioning. This is an evocative account of human ecology in the eighteenth century, and a wonderful introduction to some of the major themes and questions in environmental history and indigenous history. Questions of mobility and navigation take on a different cast and urgency in the nineteenth century in ways that illuminate the politics and viii The Michigan Historical Review priorities of the Industrial Age. In “Dredge a River, Make a Nation Great: Shipping, Commerce, and Territoriality in the Detroit River, 1870-1905,” Ramya Swayamprakash explores the remarkable environmental transformations normalized in the service of commercial shipping. But she also stresses the political motivations for and investment in these early megaprojects. While the Detroit River was a crucial route for the everlarger commercial shipping fleets, dredging and channelization actively created new territories to fall under state authority, which was particularly important in a transnational border waterway. Constructing shipping routes improved the navigability and thus the profitability of the river, but it also demonstrated the presence of American expertise and capital. Swayamprakash asks us to envision an ecology of infrastructure, a hybrid of natural and anthropogenic making, and to read the aspirations and technologies of modern engineering as a component of state-building as well as an ideological project of “improvement.” But many of us have encountered “nature” in the Great Lakes State more often through recreation than through infrastructure or industry. So Kristen Hengtgen’s account of school camping programs, “Learning Conservation through Work: Michigan as a Pioneer of the School Camping Movement, 1940-1955,” does what good history often does: have us look at the familiar somewhat differently. These school programs were rooted in anxieties about youth and social order in an urban age, but also propelled by an idealistic vision of the capacity for education to propagate engaged, healthy citizens with a sense of collective responsibility for the state’s natural resources. In other words, democracy entailed concern for both human and “natural welfare”—an admittedly appealing notion. But this was grounded, literally, in a strongly utilitarian tradition, which saw the forest in terms of material value, conservation in terms of “wise use,” and educational...