Stuart Carlton 0:00
Teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes. Welcome back to teach me about the Great Lakes. A twice monthly podcast in which I A Great Lakes novice, ask people who are smarter and harder working than I am to teach me all about the Great Lakes. My name is Stuart Carlton. I'm Assistant Director at Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant, and I know a lot about forgetting to remember things, but I don't know a lot about the Great Lakes, and that's the point of this year show. I'm joined today by the lake lover herself. Megan Gunn. Megan about to fly off to

Megan Gunn 0:31
Japan. Yes, gonna go on an adventure, and it's gonna be amazing. It's the first break that I've had from I'm taking classes right now, first break from school and work since ever, I don't know, since last year. And so I'm excited to be done for the year. Yeah,

Stuart Carlton 0:48
no, that is exciting. When you're there, are you going to visit Lake baiwa, the largest lake in Japan.

Megan Gunn 0:54
It depends on where it is. I haven't looked in Japan. Just told you I know where any bodies of water are in relation to where we're going to be, and so we'll see. Yeah, okay,

Stuart Carlton 1:03
you could also visit Lake uh, Kasumi, Gara, okay, if you want it, Lake saroma, okay. Lake in washiro nakuami, not kaumi, oh, boy, anyway, before I get in trouble. But when is this? Japan has a lot of lakes, so you as a lake lover, you can visit.

Megan Gunn 1:20
Whenever I go visit new places, I do like to dip my toe, literally and figuratively, dip my toe into whatever body of water is there, because it's like, oh, this is my souvenir. Just so your

Stuart Carlton 1:30
toe is well traveled. My toe is well traveled. Well so, uh, listeners, I'm gonna open up. Give you a open up the kimono, as Megan will say next week. No, I don't think we say that anymore. I'm gonna give you a little peek behind the scenes. Listener, and that is so for these last couple months, Sandy swabota, our editor, has been helping us with guest booking too, because we've been a little short staffed, and I've noticed that Sandy former news she worked with Great Lakes now and all these news publications, all she does is get journalists, nothing but journalists, and that's good. That's great. They're smart. They talk, unlike the academics we often talk to, they can string and send us together in a way that is not I mean, our guests, of course, are always tremendous, but other academics, so that is fantastic, and today is no different. We have another we have an environment reporter that we're going to talk to, but first we shall select the right application and the right music. Oh, gosh,

Megan Gunn 2:25
what jingle are we gonna have today?

Stuart Carlton 2:29
No, not that one that was too slow. Boy, I should have prepped this in advance. Oh, well, see, our

guest today is Kelly house. She's an environment reporter at bridge, Michigan, which is a cool online publication, and she covers all kind of interesting stuff. We're going to talk to her about it. You can to her about it. You can see her work at bridge mi.com that's mi for Michigan, America's high five.

Kelly House 3:10
Kelly, how's it going today? Hi, I'm good. Thanks for having me. Oh, we're so

Stuart Carlton 3:13
glad to have you here. So tell me, how did you get into environmental reporting as a racket? How did that start for you? Were you always outside as a kid? Or do you come to a more from a writing angle, and Michigan just has so much environment that that's what there's to write about. Well,

Kelly House 3:26
I went to college and knew I wanted to be an environmental reporter, and I think it stemmed from reading the paper growing up, you know, being in a household that got multiple paper,

Stuart Carlton 3:38
multiple papers, my goodness, yeah, we got the Detroit

Kelly House 3:41
papers, the Mount Pleasant morning sun, and then our little local weekly in my small town. So I was always reading the paper, and, you know, sort of recognized the public service that journalism provides, and wanted to make that my career. And I also grew up in a small town in northern Michigan where I spent a lot of time in nature and thinking about environmental stuff. So I figured I'd put the two together, and yeah, so I studied it. It took me a while to get to a place where this was my bead. I covered a lot of other stuff before, and then I wound up covering the environment in Oregon, and took the opportunity to come back to Michigan, where I grew up a few years ago, and cover the beat for bridge. You

Megan Gunn 4:30
also have an environmental law degree. How did you go about getting that, and where does that come into play with your journalism?

Kelly House 4:37
I briefly left journalism, and that's when I got that degree thinking that I might not go back into a newsroom, but I wanted to gain more expertise on environmental policy issues, and, you know, maybe become a lawyer. Ultimately, by the time I was done with that, it had become clear. Wishing me why I loved being a journalist, so now I use that legal expertise to just make me a better reporter.

Stuart Carlton 5:07
Nothing like law school to clarify for people how much they like things that are not being an attorney. Yes, exactly. Yeah. I don't have a logic. I always thought I'd be an environmental lawyer when I grew up, and for a while, I toured the LSAT for a test preparation company, and I would suddenly just try to convince all of them not to go to law school and take on six figures of debt for jobs that no longer exist anyway. That's neither here nor there. And now you write about all kind of stuff. And so I think what we'll do today is, so you're, you're in Michigan, which is, you know, there's so much going on in Michigan, and they touch all of these great lakes, just a gross number of Great Lakes that Michigan touches. And so I think we, let's, let's cruise through a couple things and see what you're working on these days. So right now, there's new, new solar and wind energy law right in Michigan. What's Can you tell us a little bit about that,

Kelly House 5:52
please? Yeah, so last year, Michigan legislators approved a spate of of changes to our state's energy laws, all of which are oriented around this goal. Well, now it's a mandate for utilities to get to 100% clean energy by 2040 in our state. So, you know, they approved that requirement, and then a host of laws that they believe will help get us there. One thing that I know is being experienced throughout the region and nationally is that, you know, there's this increased demand and desire to build renewable energy at scales that can make a dent in, you know, our carbon footprint. Meanwhile, there's a lot of local opposition to that, and in Michigan, previously, local governments were the ones deciding whether or not to permit and cite these things, and they were frequently saying no. Utilities in our state essentially said that they are at risk of failing to meet their carbon reduction targets if they can't get these things approved. So now the state of Michigan, in addition to that statewide requirement for 100% clean energy by 2040 has created a statewide permitting system for large scale renewable energy product projects, essentially trying to get around to that local backlash that.

Stuart Carlton 7:17
Yeah, so was that kind of a NIMBY problem? I guess

Kelly House 7:20
some people said that. Some people just don't, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with all of the stats around climate understanding and acceptance in our country. So some people just don't want clean energy, you know, whether it's in their backyard or not. Others, yes, you know, don't want to see farmland converted. Still others just don't want it next door to them.

Megan Gunn 7:45
But they somehow care some way, yeah, oh, could you? Could you also tell us about so that's a sort of feel good, a feel good project that you worked on. Could you tell us about the lake trout and how like they were once almost extinct, but now they're pretty recovered in Lake Superior. Yeah.

Kelly House 8:05
So about a century ago, we unwittingly unleashed this deluge of invasive species into the Great Lakes by building these human made shipping canals that allowed things to come in from the ocean. One of those things, as you know, people who have been around the Great Lakes long enough all know is sea lamprey. And through the mid century, mid 1900s they were just decimating fish populations, whether you're talking about lake trout or white fish. You know, they they basically are like these eel like fish that latch onto the the native fish, suck their blood and juices and drain them dry. Yeah, it's kind of spooky when you describe it that way, and they don't have, you know, natural predators, all the things that are typically associated with invasives. There was like this moonshot effort in the mid century to try to combat them before they literally wiped out some of our most prized native fish. Essentially, we got lucky and discovered a chemical that does suppress lamprey without killing off everything else. And that has really led to the ability to slowly recover lake trout in Lake Superior. So finally, just this month, or excuse me, last month, it's now December, a bi national body of you know US and Canadian government folks as well as tribal government folks sort of acknowledged, okay, we've met our recovery goal. That doesn't mean we can stop these, these treatments with this chemical will need to happen yearly to keep lamprey at bay. And there's also this long term concern, which I'm writing about now. Now, in a story that hasn't published yet, that this chemical that we use to keep lamprey at bay will eventually become less effective in the same way that antibiotics become less effective if we over rely on them. So this is not something that's going to happen tomorrow, but it is on the horizon. So scientists right now are studying other ways that we can control Lamprey, because if this chemical stops being effective, of course, we're back to where we were with fish populations in danger of extinction. But part of the reason that Lake Superior lake trout were specifically able to recover, you know, lamprey are throughout the Great Lakes, and we haven't seen the same recovery in the lower Great Lakes. And the reason is because the water there is warmer, and that warmer water can host other invasive species that are also damaging to fish, and Lake Superior doesn't see that. So I'm talking about zebra and quagga mussels. You know, they can't get the same foothold in Lake Superior, in part, because it's so cold. The same is true of algae blooms that are problematic in the lakes. So it's an interesting example of how cold water and you know, the Great Lakes climate that we're used to is also a line of defense against these other threats. And of course, that gets back to this conversation that we just had about getting off of fossil fuels before we heat Lake Superior and damage that armor that it has against other problematic invaders. No,

Stuart Carlton 11:39
that's true. That's interesting armor. I like that phrasing. But so one thing I noticed scrolling the articles is you have a number challenge with environmental reporting is it's tempting to do just like the Monster of the Week type stories, right? In fact, we just did an episode where all I wanted to hear was the top five threats to our water so that I could go home and, you know, feel sad. And so how do you how do you balance? Is that something you actively think about balancing as you put together what you're going to work on, or is it just sort of come through that way? Sometimes

Kelly House 12:06
I do think about balancing it. I don't know if balance is the right word. I don't want to imply that I like look for good news stories, in spite of, you know, the bad news out there, but I do sometimes when I'm literally talking to my editor, I'll, I'll say things like, I need a palette cleanser, like I've been writing, you know, the environment beat can sometimes feel like the doom and gloom beat. You're writing about problems, many of which are long standing and we still haven't solved. We're writing about, at a global level, continued species decline, etc. So yeah, I do sometimes intentionally look for stories where I can tap into my own sense of like hope and joy. And I think readers value hope and joy too. And I sometimes those stories get referred to as fluff. I would beg to differ, because I think people are motivated by a shared sense of wonder as much as they are motivated by a shared sense of fear. I agree.

Stuart Carlton 13:09
I think that. I think that makes total sense. Yeah, fluff, that's interesting to hear that way. I think that. I mean, it can be a little human interesting, maybe, but, but no, I think you've got to tell successes right in this line of work. I mean, sometimes, like, just like you said, I need a palette cleanser. You can't be all negative news. But also because the other thing is, in many ways, in many important ways, like the environmental story is getting better. In a lot of ways, like you look at, for example, Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act have been very successful, right? And to pretend otherwise is to not be honest. And if you don't sort of share those successes. How do you build momentum for future success? Right? It was nothing but bad news. So I think, I think that's really good. Good of you to share that. All right, so let's hear more. So I don't know, but I didn't know about this. There's a bunch of stories now on mining. I guess in the up, they have mining in the up. I did not know. Yeah, that's

Kelly House 13:58
been taking up a lot of my reporting time and energy lately. So really, this year, I've done a lot of reporting on energy transition stuff. In the spring, I was writing a lot about sort of grading Michigan's progress toward building out the infrastructure that we need to get people into EVs, which is obviously both an environmental and an economic story in our region of the world, where many cars are made, yeah, and so the up mining story is part and parcel with that, if people are going to buy EVs, those are made with materials that are different from combustion vehicles, including critical minerals, you know, those minerals that go into making EV batteries. And it turns out that the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and you know, sort of like Minnesota upper Great Lakes, has some of those minerals, specifically copper and nickel, both of which. Are really important to building EV batteries. So the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is already home to the only nickel mine in the United States. But currently, all of that nickel gets shipped out of the country and sold on the global market, mostly for stainless steel. So it has very little bearing on the EV transition, we know that at a national level, there's concern amongst national security and economic people that America doesn't really control or exploit many of the raw materials that go into these batteries. So it feeds into these broader concerns about you know, basically the US economy being usurped by the Chinese economy when it comes to electric vehicles. I'm not our business reporter, so I can't speak as eloquently on that piece, but it's all leading to this huge government subsidized push to expand domestic mining for these critical minerals. So what's happening in the up and in other regions that have stores of these minerals underground is like this massive new mining rush, with prospectors looking to strike pay dirt, looking for this place where they can find a store of this and then go through the steps of trying to actually set up a mine.

Stuart Carlton 16:22
Are they still called prospectors, like dungarees with the little right? Anyway, in our last episode, we had on Jill Ryan and Ann Bauman from freshwater futures, and they were talking about one of these big top five threats to our lake water is the mineral extraction, or the resource extraction in general. But so that's really complicated, though, when I hear you talk about it, because there's an actual because there's an actual security aspect, there's finance aspect, there's business, there is the environmental piece. There's a climate piece, more specifically. So that's a really complicated issue. And so is this something? Is this, I guess it's really explosive up there in terms of the growth. Well,

Kelly House 16:58
no new mines have been established. The explosion that's happening is this explosion of people searching for the stores so that they can go through the process of setting up a mine. So to be clear, no new mines have been launched yet, but there's this looming sort of sense that there is more mineral to exploit, if only we can find it and then permit, you know, the we, being the companies that are that are doing this exploring. So there's one active proposal on the table that's made a lot of waves. That's the copper wood project, which is very close to porcupine, mountains, wilderness State Park. That's an active proposal to establish a copper mine. They don't really have the funding to do it yet. They have cleared many of the permitting hurdles, though, beyond that, there are companies literally out in the woods. They're not, you know, doing what you're describing with, like pickaxes or, you know, panning or anything, but they are just out in the woods drilling exploratory holes, hoping that they identify like a big vein of nickel, yeah, but we're

Stuart Carlton 18:06
watching this Rings of Power. You ever seen this by watching with my daughter? It's this, anyway, it's kind of mid show set in The Lord of the Rings universe. But they're talking about, oh boy, whatever the super magical metal is, mithril. Anyway, maybe they'll find myth roll there, and that will be good for for everybody. Oh, actually, yeah, thinking about the themes of the show, maybe that won't be good for, you know what? That's not the point. So this is more in a decadal time scale than we're talking about for companies to get established and things like that. That makes sense,

Kelly House 18:34
yeah, maybe even more than a decade. So, you know, there's this sense of immediacy from many community members around these these prospectors both because a lot of these towns have a long legacy of mining, and some locals are like, Yes, bring it on. Like we would accept a mine tomorrow if it brings back these jobs that have been lost. You know, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan has gone through generations now of economic decline, people leaving, you know, population decline as people go to find jobs elsewhere. The flip side of that argument, of course, are the people who live nearby and say, you know, I'm fearful that prospecting is it's just a matter of time before mine is set up, and they're fearful of the environmental consequences. You know, the up is riddled with examples of waste left behind by the industry, some of which is going to cost billions of dollars to clean up. And we don't, we still don't have a plan for waste that were deposited like a century ago. So their concerns are, are we going to repeat that history? Do we have safeguards in place to prevent another era of, you know, profit at the expense of the environment and the people and the people you do it better? I

Stuart Carlton 19:56
think about that a lot like so a lot of the research that I do when I'm not doing this on. Senses in Great Lakes, areas of concern. And our listeners probably know what those are, but if not, it's heavily impounded areas that the federal government has to declare it as areas of concern. And they're working there's a process by which they hope to first remediate whatever the problem was and then restore the environment and hopefully revitalize the communities. And there are 43 areas of concern, but those aren't the only 43 areas, right? It's not like the Great Lakes is all good news, except for these 43 and I don't know a lot about the history about how those were picked, you know, back in 1985 or whatever it was, but there's just a ton of areas, like Kelly's talking about, where there is no plan, and probably a ton of areas where there's not even any measurement, right, all right. The other big story I have to ask about this is the most vital news. Probably, deer are ravaging the suburbs in Michigan. So tell me about the deer, and what are we doing about this? So they come and they eat. They eat hosta. That's what they do. If you have hosta, forget it. The deer will just munch on that. They will sit out. You will look out your window, you'll see your Hostas getting munched by deer, and they will look at you, and they'll wink and point one little paw at you, and then they'll start munching again, at least this is my experience with deer at my in laws house. So is deer a major problem in Michigan suburbs? On up the

Kelly House 21:11
up less so, less so. Okay, yeah, for such a, for such a, you know, gentle giant of a creature, deer are certainly controversial. And you know what it really comes down to surprise? Surprise is this is the consequences of our own actions as humans. First of all, long ago, we nearly wiped out white tailed deer from the landscape across the US, you know. So we changed. We regulated hunting, right? We put in place many different things to try to rebound the population that succeeded, but in more recent decades, first of all, hunting is now basically the number one check on deer populations. You know, we've eradicated a lot of predators. Hunting is in decline, though, so there are fewer and fewer hunters on the landscape, to take these deer off the landscape. And then at the same time, we have continued land use patterns that sort of sprawl into, you know, sprawl across the state. So deer are in closer proximity to humans. They have access to hostas, as you noted, they have access to corn fields, and they are oftentimes inaccessible to hunters. Because, as you can imagine, while there might be lots of deer, there are lots of deer in my community of Lansing, it's not really safe for me to shoot a deer, you know, on the river pathway, where other walkers and bikers are like walking by constantly, yeah. So they've, you know, we sort of have this imbalance between the number of hunters and the number of deer, and also where hunters can be and where deer want to be, and all of it is leading to this overpopulation problem that we are trying regulators are trying to trim around the margins, doing the easiest thing you can do, adjusting hunting regulations to make you know now in Michigan, you can kill like 12 deer a year if you want to, and if you have permits, but who has the freezer space for that, right, or Who has the desire? So? Bottom line, tweaking hunting regulations is not really going to solve the problem. We don't have a clear idea of what will. I

Megan Gunn 23:29
mean. One thought is to bring back their natural predators, right? But people probably also don't want big wolves in their backyards. But then that's one way. Yeah,

Kelly House 23:39
I mean, but also, could wolves even survive in the landscape that we've created wolves, you know? So, yeah, that is a piece of it, right? We've we've wiped out the natural predators, we've encroached upon the habitat, and now we're complaining about the consequences, which is more dear. So no easy answers, but definitely a conversation that's going to continue to pick up steam.

Stuart Carlton 24:04
Yeah, this isn't my my training was in human dimensions of wildlife, and my advisor at the time, Dr Susan Jacob, said, Hi Susan, if you're listening at the University of Florida, she's not listening, but was on, you know, what they call the wildland urban interface, right? Which is this area where humans and nature is kind of rub in, come into each other, and this idea of wildlife acceptance capacity, and that's basically, you know, different people have different levels of wildlife that they'll tolerate. And I think it's interesting that the deer issue and the wolf issue, you know, is we're still talking about it 40 years later, and it's critical like that. That's fascinating, yeah,

Kelly House 24:44
and to expound a little bit, because you just mentioned deer and wolves the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it's a whole different ball game. Deer populations there are. Population growth is limited by a number of factors, including the winters. Are just much harsher. Deer there behave differently. They're migratory because of the winter, the harsh winters, they migrate south, and, you know, just have different patterns. Of course, there are far fewer suburban land use. You know, it's more wilderness. There are also more predators up there and talking about the social acceptance, you know, up there, there's a higher social acceptance for the number of deer because there are fewer deer, and there is lower social acceptance for the predator. So it is interesting to think about how the land use changes interact with like regional attitudes about predator and pray and all of it. Alright?

Stuart Carlton 25:42
One more. So our normal our senior producer, Carolyn Foley, who's on assignment right now, she would not let me let you get off the line asking for a line five update. She's very into line five, so I don't know what the latest is. We did a whole episode on line five, and then I'll be honest, like my mind is like a blank slate. So what is, what is the status of line five these days? Oh

Kelly House 26:07
my gosh. Well, I have to admit that I haven't been covering it as closely lately as I sometimes have, in part because there's not a ton okay happening. There are lawsuit you know that the Attorney General of Michigan continues to pursue a lawsuit that's been active for several years now, trying to shut down the pipeline. It's anybody's guess when that might resolve. I'm less familiar with the legal wrangling in Wisconsin over the reroute the Bad River Band, but meanwhile, we do have a new president coming in who's probably going to be much friendlier to oil and gas, not probably he is. You know, he's, his mantra is, drill, baby, drill, unleash oil and gas. So I think what we do know is that we're going to have an administration coming in that's more supportive of the industry. And What's not clear is whether or not, the Trump administration will somehow weigh in to try to influence the ongoing legal battles, although,

Stuart Carlton 27:06
notably, I will point out that our production of crude oil is at record levels right now. So, yeah, I think, I think a lot of that, you know, oil production kind of tends to go up. There was a little break for in the 90s and 2000s but it's kind of been going up. But the attitude is different, right, I think, and the way they talk about it, the way that different presidents and from different political parties talk about it, I think, is pretty different. What's this fascinating? All right? Kelly, tell us a little bit about bridge, Michigan. This is a nonprofit news thing, right? So how did you end up at a nonprofit news site, and what is the mission of bridge?

Kelly House 27:39
Yeah, so bridge is non profit and non partisan, which every news outlet is non partisan, but we like to talk about that. I ended up at bridge. I had worked at a major metropolitan daily out in Oregon before this, and I really just wanted to see what the nonprofit news model is all about. It has some advantages, but often nonprofit newsrooms are smaller, so, you know, that's a trade off. But bridge is primarily covering the intersection between public policy and Michiganders lives. So we don't cover sports. We will not cover the Thanksgiving Day Parade. You know, we cover sort of those core issues that we think are important to quality of life in our state. So obviously, environment, health, public policy in Lansing, writ large, education. We've been around for, I think approaching 13 years now. We've grown a lot since then, but we're still small and scrappy, and we're free to read. I think that's the number one thing for people to know. So if you are at all interested in Michigan environmental news, make bridge one of your links that you click each morning. You can also sign up for my weekly newsletter, which goes to your inbox and includes all the stories that I've written. Again, it's free to read. All right.

Stuart Carlton 29:05
Well, what? How do I sign up for your newsletter? I'm doing I want to I'm at bridge. Am i.com right

Kelly House 29:09
now? Yeah, my newsletter is the environment watch newsletter. All right, I'm

Stuart Carlton 29:13
going to sign up for this. I see the sign up by my click on that. Oh, yeah. And you can choose all your different newsletters. You can, of course, select all they're happy to have you do that. But there's the environment. It comes out on Tuesdays. Done. I'm going to sign up for that right now, and you should sign up too. You should also go to bridge mi.com and click on the Look at this. They have what I'm going to call the University of Texas orange donate button. That is the second nonprofit in a row with the University of Texas orange donate. But I guess that is the official orange of donations, sounds

Megan Gunn 29:41
like it. So I have a question, as somebody that grew up and found their passion in reading newspapers, like physical newspapers, how do you feel about working for a company that publishes purely online?

Kelly House 29:54
That ship has sailed for me so long ago that I just feel fine with you know, I came into the. Um, the era in which that shift was sort of mid step, and so my first couple years of my career, we still talked about like, if you're going to have a story on a one or in the Sunday paper, I think we've largely moved past that important stories are, you're still able to give them their credence, you know. But most readers are reading on their phones now, not even on the computer. So you got to be adaptable in this career. That's one change is the only constant. Well, Kelly,

Stuart Carlton 30:30
this is really interesting. I'm fascinated by your work, and what a cool smorgasbord of stuff that you've talked with us about. We appreciate that. But that's actually not why we invited you here on teach me about the Great Lakes this week. The reason that we invited you here on teach me about the Great Lakes. Ask you two questions. And the first one is this, if you could have a great donut for breakfast or a great sandwich for lunch, which one would you choose? Oh

Kelly House 30:52
my gosh, sandwich. Sandwich. I love the good donut, but

Stuart Carlton 30:56
yeah, but you gotta choose going sandwich. So I heard you say you're in Lansing, right? So I'm gonna go visit my friends in Lansing. I'm gonna make friends in Lansing, and then I'm gonna go visit them, and I'm gonna get a sandwich for lunch. Where should I go to get a sandwich?

Kelly House 31:07
I love babes corner. There are a lot of good sandwich places here, and you probably should get an olive burger if you've never been to Lansing, and that's our local specialty. I don't even know what that is. It's a burger with like, mayonnaise and green olives on it. We

Stuart Carlton 31:23
almost got mayonnaise.

Kelly House 31:28
But yeah, in terms of sandwich place, I love babes. Babes,

Unknown Speaker 31:31
okay, yeah.

Megan Gunn 31:35
Is there a special place in the Great Lakes that you'd like to share with our audience? And what makes it special? I love

Kelly House 31:40
Muskegon, Michigan. I mean, of course, my spot is going to be in Michigan, but it's a city with wonderful history. You know, one thing I love about it is so much of our state's Western shoreline, it feels like bedroom community, second home vibes, you know, and Muskegon is a working city where people live and work. It's got industry. It's got second home stuff. It's got, like, a beautiful shoreline. It had a heavily contaminated lake that's since been, you know, had tons of improvement done to it. So I just think it's like one of those underlooked parts of Michigan's Great Lakes shoreline, also it's the closest beach to my home. So the best beach is the closest beach, and I like it, proximity,

Megan Gunn 32:29
solitude into place. Well,

Stuart Carlton 32:31
Kelly house environment reporter at bridge, Michigan. Thank you for coming on and teaching us all about the Great Lakes. Thank

Kelly House 32:37
you both. I appreciate it. You.

Stuart Carlton 32:52
I love newspapers, and she'd want to get into it. That's fine, but I I do miss the newspaper, but she mentioned she worked. I didn't want to get into this because Sandy would just kill me, but she worked for one of these little hyper local papers. Do you know these? I love these. My in laws live in a place in Florida called long boat key, which is a little barrier island office Sarasota, and there they have the long boat key observer. And my favorite thing to do is to go and get the long boat key observer and read the crime section, because long boat key is not a place with a lot of crime, but so you go through that, they have the police reports, and it's usually things like, someone stole somebody else's plants or, or like, there's an unusual number of people in Longboat Key who dry their thongs, like, this is gentlemen, well, maybe less gentle, but who, like, go to the beach and they get all wet and they decide to dry their thong. First of all, they were a thong to the beach, and then, second of all, they dry their thong and they're not wearing anything. And anyway, the police are notified, and it makes the long boat key observer. So I think crime reporter for small that would that is the pinnacle.

Megan Gunn 33:55
I'm glad that you have that

tease me about the Great Lakes is brought to you by the fine people of Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant. We encourage you to check out the cool stuff we do at IIC grant.org, and at i l i n Sea Grant on Facebook, Instagram and other social media. No,

Stuart Carlton 34:15
I'm not that young. Our senior producer is Carolyn Foley teach me about the Great Lakes. Is produced by Megan the lake lover garden and Rudy miles. Ethan Chitty is our associate producer and our fixer, not our podcast studio Booker. We get a lot of help from multi coumbiante too. Thank you, Moti, for everything. Our super fun podcast artwork is by the one the only the special Joel do Joel Davenport show is edited by Sandy.

Megan Gunn 34:45
If you have a question or comment about the show, please email it to teach me about the Great lakes@gmail.com or leave a message on our hotline at 765, 496, iisg or 4474 thanks for listening and keep grading those links you.

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