WHITEHALL — Local environmental advocate and Whitehall City Council member Tanya Cabala delivered a presentation Wednesday, July 15 at White Lake Community Library to share her thoughts on the dunes of Michigan and why she believes they are a resource worth protecting.
Cabala grew up in West Michigan and admitted even she took Michigan's dunes for granted to an extent - until she started hearing from visiting friends about how great they thought the dunes were and how special they made Michigan. Indeed, Michigan has, according to the state Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE), the largest collection of freshwater dunes on Earth - 275,000-plus acres worth of them. Some of those dunes, of course, are named - Sleeping Bear in Traverse City, Warren Dunes in southwest Michigan, the Silver Lake Sand Dunes in Oceana County - adding to a sense of place, Cabala said.
The dunes were formed by retreating glaciers some 12,000 years ago and are dynamic landscapes, still shifting today, even though most of their movements are undetectable without paying close attention.
One particular dune Cabala focused on no longer exists: Pigeon Hill in Muskegon, which was named for the passenger pigeons that spent a lot of time there. At its height, it was one of the tallest dunes on the Lake Michigan shoreline, and in the early 1900s was home to an "actor colony," as hundreds of vaudeville stars congregated there. Most famous was the family of Buster Keaton, a very well-known star of the time.
The dune is gone now because it was mined by sand companies, who used it to help produce cement, glass and many other items necessary to buoy the Industrial Revolution. At the time, the mining was viewed as a major economic engine, and little thought was given to the environmental or ecological impact. By the mid-1960s, Pigeon Hill's dune was gone.
This phenomenon was not unique to Michigan; Cabala also shared the story of "the Hoosier Slide" dune in Michigan City, Ind., a 200-foot tall tourist attraction so well-known in the early 1900s that couples would climb it to get married at the top. However, like many other dunes, the sand was mined away, and by 1920 it was gone as well. Other dunes in northwest Indiana are now protected as Indiana Dunes National Park.
It was another pair of dunes in Manistee whose mining, Cabala said, led to Michigan's Sand Dune Protection and Management Act of 1976. The dunes, colloquially known as Maggie Thorp and Creeping Joe, were mined out of existence, and soon after, Dennis Cawthorne, Manistee's representative in the state legislature, sponsored the bill. It established a permitting process for sand mining, limiting how much could be done.
Mining did continue, though, and later on, the 1989 Critical Dunes Amendments were enacted, granting protection to about 74,000 acres of dunes on 256 miles of coastline. These protections were weakened in 2012, though, putting the permitting process in the hands of local municipalities. Cabala said that these protections are based more on the slope of the dunes than their ecological significance, and with permitting handled at the local levels, it creates a fragmented plan rather than a cohesive, statewide one. Local municipalities handling the issue resulted in less restrictive standards, with Cabala speculating that a desire to avoid costly legal action led to this.
This is illustrated in a 2017 court case in which Silver Lake homeowner Larry Byl challenged the critical dunes acts, which he said were preventing him from moving sand that was encroaching upon his home. The sand in question, according to media reports of the time, had already destroyed another cottage in the area.
There have been stories of communities protecting their dunes, though, including the local story of the White River Township Barrier Dunes Sanctuary. Established in 1986, the sanctuary was supplemented in 2016 with the addition of a two-acre parcel, Lloyd's Landing, which the township purchased for $900,000, the Muskegon Chronicle reported at the time. Money was raised through donors in the township, the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund and the nonprofit Land Conservancy of West Michigan.
Cabala said more stories like that are possible and would like to see a comprehensive statewide dune protection plan. It would require coordination from state agencies and local governments. Cabala hopes to contribute to it through her work with the West Michigan Environmental Action Council.
