Tag: books

A conversation with the Mad Angler, Michael Delp

Published on September 10th, 2024 by - Blog Posts

To find a cranky, resolute, dry-witted champion for Michigan’s water, you need look no farther than Michael Delp. In his prose and poetry – especially as his alter ego, the Mad Angler, he has written lyrically of trout and forcefully condemned polluters. Mike is just out with a collection, The Mad Angler: Poems, that deepens the Mad Angler’s story.

On Friday, September 20 at The Alluvion on Traverse City, the Mad Angler will join the Mad Cellist, Crispin Campbell, as the two perform from their 2019 recording: “The River Under The River – The Mad Angler Meets The Mad Cellist.” Campbell’s cello will echo Delp’s rendering of the sounds of the river, the raucous calls of the crows, and the down and dirty earthiness of the blues.

Mike saves his words for his poetry. Asked to provide a biography, he said:  “Michael Delp lives and writes in Northern Michigan.”  But the world knows him as much more: an accomplished writer and a legendary former instructor of creative writing at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, and a profoundly decent man.

We thought it was a good time to check in with Mike and ask a few questions.

Who is the Mad Angler, what does he stand for,  and what troubles him these days?

The Mad Angler has undergone many transformations over time but his pledge to himself is to one day know what is like to be an actual river…how it would feel to lie down in the grass and suddenly feel yourself undulating away from what you thought you were.

The mad Angler is mad crazy and mad about most every river in America being under siege either from overkill in plastic boats or any number of ways runoff finds its way into streams. We are living in dark times when it comes to those who would steal our water. We need to put up some kind of monitoring system to keep Lake Michigan from being used to water lawns in Arizona.
The mad Angler stands for what he stands in. A river.

Where does your poetic sensibility come from?

Poetic sensitivity: first felt it in the 5th grade in Mrs. Wycoff’s class when she read Huck Finn to us. My DNA hopefully has some Whitman in it, and maybe one tiny speck of that wildly free, Jim Harrison. Mary Oliver wanders around in me as best I can tell.

Do you have any advice for would-be poets?

Advice for would-be poets: learn to weld and play a guitar. Ignore advice about writing. Fish and fall asleep next to a river whenever possible. Figure out how to approach being a sorcerer, knowing that you can’t figure it out.

Any other words of wisdom today?

Poets might be able to save us if we could actually read them without interference from English Teachers.

You can’t have too many fly rods.

The Mad Angler takes solace from the fact that his cabin is at the very end of a dead end road.

Most writers want to be read but too many want to be noticed.

From Mike’s poem, the “Mad Angler Ghazals”:

“The Lives of Lake Ontario,” a new book by Daniel Macfarlane

Published on August 27th, 2024 by - Blog Posts

Lake Ontario is the only one of the Great Lakes that Michigan does not border. Receiving the waste of the other four Great Lakes and the impact of industrial development in its own watershed, Lake Ontario faces special challenges. In his new book, The Lives of Lake Ontario, Daniel Macfarlane explores the checkered environmental history of Lake Ontario.

Macfarlane is an Associate Professor in the School of the Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. He is also a senior fellow at the Bill Graham Center for Contemporary International History, University of Toronto, and President of the International Water History Association. His research and teaching focus on the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin. We asked him several questions about the book.

Why a book on Lake Ontario?

Part of the reason is practical. I’d previously written books about the river (Niagara) that goes into the lake and the river (St. Lawrence) that goes out of the lake. By virtue of producing those books, I realized I had already done a lot of the research necessary for a book on Lake Ontario.

Until I moved to Michigan, it was also the Great Lake I spent the most time at – it is a waterscape I cherish, so researching and writing about a place I love seemed very appealing (and it gave me the excuse to keep going to this lake during our frequent visits to family and friends in Ontario). Additionally, I always liked the idea of a book focused on one Great Lake, partly as a step towards a book on the environmental history of all the Great Lakes, though I think I’m now going to write a book about Lake Michigan first, since that is the lake I’ve been closest to for the last decade.

Relative to the other four Great Lakes, is Ontario undervalued, underexamined and/or underprotected?

Yes, I think so. First, I argue that it is now the most degraded Great Lake – and thus arguably the most underprotected, though I’d suggest that all the Great Lakes are drastically underprotected. It is the furthest downstream of the Great Lakes, and therefore gets the cumulative pollution of the upper lakes. Not to mention the pollution that comes from the Niagara River, the region with likely the most toxic and industrial inputs out of all the Great Lakes basin, plus the effluent of the Golden Horseshoe.

I also think it is the most undervalued Great Lake. Most people who live around it don’t seem to love it or engage with it in the same ways folks do with the other Great Lakes; in fact, people frequently leave Lake Ontario to go vacation at other lakes. That said, I’m not sure Lake Ontario is underexamined compared to the other Great Lakes, and that is because the Great Lakes as a whole are drastically underexamined, especially in the American environmental history and water history literature. The Great Lakes are an area of water abundance, but water scarcity narratives about the arid southwest often dominate discussions about water. But Lake Ontario alone has more surface freshwater than the entire U.S. southwest.

How would you rate the performance of the federal, provincial and state governments in recent years in protecting and restoring Lake Ontario?

Terrible. There’s no sugarcoating it. We’re failing Lake Ontario (and the rest of the Great Lakes) at every governmental level. Have there been some victories and successes? Sure. The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements and Areas of Concern programs, for example, or the spending pulses from the Great Lake Restoration Initiative in the United States. The 2008 Great Lakes Compact and the companion agreement with Canada are better than what we had before to protect against diversions out of the basin. Indigenous voices have been better incorporated, though there is still a long way to go in that regard.

But the failures are much more pronounced. We never kept up the funding that led to initial success in cleaning up Lakes Ontario and Erie. Not only have we failed to maintain funding and regulatory enforcement, but because we’ve been bedeviled in recent decades by a whole host of problems that weren’t even on the radar in the Cold War era – new chemicals like PFAS; climate change, agriculture, and other forces combining to bring back eutrophication problems; saturating the water and aquatic life with plastics, and so on. I could make a pretty good case that Lake Ontario (and the Great Lakes in general) is now in the worst ecological condition it has ever been – worse even than in the lead up to the first Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1972.

In the book, you discuss re-engagement with the lake by the public. Do you think this will be enough to assure a healthy Lake Ontario in years to come? If not, what else is needed?

I argue that, for much of the twentieth century, people and cities metaphorically and literally turned their back on Lake Ontario. Lately, we’ve seen signs of people turning back toward the lake. That is undoubtedly a positive, since people who care about Lake Ontario will fight to protect it.

I think there is today a greater willingness to protect the Great Lakes than ever before, and people are sensitive about directly hurting the lakes. If we see raw sewage or garbage being dumped into a lake, we say something. The problem is we all hurt the lakes indirectly without realizing it just by living the average North American lifestyle – hopping on an airplane and burning carbon dioxide; single-use plastics that end up in the water and bioaccumulate in organisms up the food chain; buying food sourced from factory farms and unsustainable agriculture, causing runoff that poisons the lakes; purchasing products whose production or supply chain involved myriad chemicals that leach into the lake; and so on. We say we love the Great Lakes, and we mean it, but so many of our day-to-day actions actively hurt them; the problem is that many of those impacts are very difficult, almost impossible, to avoid given the ways our current society and economy is structured.

I’m a firm believer that in order to adequately protect the lakes and our environments we have to change those larger structures – our political and economic systems – but I’m also a firm believer that those larger structural changes result from individual actions and stories multiplied many times over (including the way we vote and spend our money). I doubt that we can get a healthy Lake Ontario or wider Great Lakes without major societal shifts in North America.

New Book Explores the Heart of the Two Hearted River

Published on July 17th, 2024 by - Blog Posts

What do former FLOW board member Bob Otwell and Ernest Hemingway have in common?

They’ve both written about the Two Hearted River.

In a story published exactly one century ago, The Big Two-Hearted River, Hemingway brought to a wide audience for the first time an unmatched writing style, in this case focusing on the healing journey of a man fishing in the Two Hearted.

In The Real Two Hearted: Life, Love and Lore Along Michigan’s Most Iconic River, Bob Otwell writes of discovering and then making his family at home in a rustic cabin on the banks of the Two Hearted. The word “real” in the title refers to the fact that while Hemingway used the name “Two-Hearted” in the title of his story, he was actually describing the Fox River.

Bob’s book explores the history and the mystery of the actual Two Hearted, which occupies a virtually unblemished watershed in the Upper Peninsula.

In addition to serving on FLOW’s board, Bob founded engineering firm Otwell Mawby P.C., and was executive director of TART Trails, Inc., from 2001-2010 where he was responsible for daily administration, board development, fundraising, strategic planning, and public relations for the not-for-profit bike and pedestrian advocacy organization.

We asked Bob a couple of questions about his book, whose official publishing date is July 18, 2024.

Tell us what the book is about. Is it a recreational read, or a serious environmental policy discussion?

I would say this is a recreational read. The reader may enjoy our family adventures, spending time in a remote camp with no electricity, running water, and no cell service. Hopefully, the reader will appreciate how we spent much of our time just doing the “Boggy’s thing,” which is just putzing around the camp, and being unconnected to the modern world. The reader should also learn something about a variety of topics including the physics of flowing rivers, how this watershed has been protected, and the unique flora and fauna.

What did you find out about the Two Hearted as you went along?

I really enjoyed doing the research for the book. I learned so much about life in the U.P. over the past 100 years. We have enjoyed the old growth white pines surrounding Boggy’s, and I enjoyed reading several books that taught me a little about the value of trees beyond fire wood and lumber. It was hard to know how far to go with some of this research, because there is always more to learn and write about. I enjoyed going back through the three volumes and 30 plus years of our Boggy’s Camp Journals, remembering family adventures, and which friends and family have visited the camp. I appreciate very much that I had these journals to refer to.

If the Two Hearted was a person, what would she be like?

Most of all she would be steady. Whenever we visit, she is flowing steadily, water coming around the bend upstream of Boggy’s Camp and disappearing around the next one downstream. Her mood changes based on weather and flora. She is normally shallow and dark, her color and reflections varying with the sun and time of day. She is flanked by color depending on the location and season: tan from exposed sand banks; green from many evergreens, along with maples, dogwood and alders in the summer; red, orange and yellow maple leaves in autumn and red dogwood branches that pop out when the leaves are absent. She is often flanked by snow from November to May. Sometimes she is completely hidden under snow and ice, falsely presenting herself as a wide, safe white trail through the forest. But then as one travels around a bend, a visible dark shadow in the ice will be seen and you are reminded to be aware; she is there, flowing steady.

The Great Lakes: Fact or Fake | A new book by FLOW senior advisor Dave Dempsey

Published on December 12th, 2023 by - Blog Posts

In this new book by author and FLOW senior advisor Dave Dempsey, learn the true stories beneath the surface of the world’s largest freshwater ecosystem.

Everybody who looks at the Great Lakes knows they’re big, but why are they Great? From sea serpents to sunken ships, from lonely lighthouses to fish on Prozac, this book engages the reader in a quest to find what’s beneath the surface.

Download and enjoy this complimentary excerpt:
The Great Lakes: Fact or Fake (PDF)

 

You can find The Great Lakes: Fact or Fake in Traverse City at Brilliant Books, Horizon Books, and in Suttons Bay at Bay Books.

Dave Dempsey is the author of 12 books on the environment and other topics. He has worked in environmental policy for the Governor of Michigan, the International Joint Commission and various nonprofit organizations since 1982. A graduate of Michigan State University, Dave lives in Traverse City, Michigan.