Today on
Stateside, Governor Whitmer is in hot water for violating her own COVID-19 safety guidelines. Plus, how Detroit s air pollution is impacting its citizen. And, how the state is planning to help students returning to school after a year at home.
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Whitmer’s night out leads to criticism over COVID guidelines
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Many residents along the St. Marys River like Bruce Conely blame certain commercial freighters for erosion along the shoreline. “I just want them to go slow,” says one homeowner. “It’s physics. Lighten your load, lessen the speed. We can’t do anything about the water level.”
About twenty people turned out for the April town hall meeting in Bruce Township. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s a big crowd for the small community on the eastern edge of the Upper Peninsula, a few miles south of Sault Ste. Marie. The area has a lot of older people. It feels like everyone knows each other.
The Union Street Dam is the last impediment to a free-flowing Boardman River. Downstream of the dam is a popular fishing spot.
Credit Lexi Krupp / IPR News
A five-foot-long female sturgeon was spotted this week in the Boardman River in Traverse City. Fishery experts say there s ideal spawning habitat for the species upstream, but the large fish can’t get there there’s a dam in the way.
The proposed FishPass project at the Union Street Dam could allow native fish like sturgeon to swim up the Boardman River, while keeping invasives at bay, says Marc Gaden, from the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.
Stateside s conversation with Jennifer Tianen and Yael Mizrahi
In high school English classes, students are often tasked with trudging through the classics. At West Bloomfield High School, in
Jennifer Tianen’s class, they’re getting a different view of one author in the literary canon.
These students have been transcribing the letters of Marjorie Bump, a Petoskey woman who was friends with Ernest Hemingway when he lived at his boyhood summer home of Windemere. She was also a character in his Nick Adams stories, particularly
The End of Something, where Hemingway’s self insert character, Adams, ends up with a broken heart.
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“The environmental impacts are significant enough that the commission really is going to need to look at whether there are feasible alternatives,” says attorney Margrethe Kearney with the Environmental Law & Policy Center.
“Taking that close look could well convince the commission that this is not a project that should be approved.”
This is the first time any statewide agency has acknowledged that greenhouse gas emissions need to be reviewed under Michigan’s Environmental Protection Act.
The law requires the state to determine the environmental impacts of projects like oil and gas pipelines, and evaluate whether there are feasible alternatives.
In the coming months, experts will testify with estimates of the greenhouse gas emissions that would result from the new pipeline, and the social cost of carbon pollution. Then, the commission will release their decision likely not for another year, at the earliest.