Letter From Michiana: Summer’s gone!
As if embarrassed by its lackadaisical performance, Summer managed a high note on its final day.
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:: Lake Michigan
Letter From Michiana: Indiana’s Environmental Management = Fish Kill
A blast furnace closed water loop at steelmaker ArcelorMittal failed, spilling dangerous levels of cyanide and ammonium-nitrate into the Little Calumet River, which then made its way toward Lake Michigan.
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Letter From Michiana: When the bridge goes up!
It’s August, time for things to get a little squirrely.
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Letter From Michiana: Indiana’s DNR keeps its head in the sand
Instead of helping towns like Long Beach explain to property owners what the Supreme Court ruling means regarding their property or, for that matter, even fully informing themselves and their staff members about the state’s history and law, let alone enforcing that law, the DNR has buried its head in the sand.
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Letter From Michiana: DNR AWOL
This week, the DNR will hold public hearings in Michigan City regarding the plowing of dunes and other construction impinging on public trust land and potentially violating the Federal Clean Water Act. It will be interesting to see who shows up.
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Letter From Michiana: Marram grass
We’re fortunate at our end of the beach. We still have foredunes, the deep banks of marram grass-covered sand that serve as a buffer between the beach, where the lake level has reached a record-setting height, and peoples’ lakefront homes.
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Letter From Michiana: Turbid discoloration
The juxtaposition of U.S. Steel and Lake Michigan invites us to contemplate the extent to which our world is designed.
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Letter From Michiana: Along the Red Arrow Highway
Road conditions notwithstanding, it’s easy, on a sunny afternoon, to imagine yourself behind the wheel of an old time roadster, headed for a rendezvous in some road house where the jukebox is playing big band and blues.
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Letter From Michiana: Weird Spring, weird climate
The lake’s cycles can seem hard to predict. They happen and people get used to them, forgetting that things are bound to change. Now, though, there’s a wild card that’s put the old certainties in a new light — make that a strobe light: climate change.
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Letter From Michiana: Our newest national park
This national park, you realize, is actually a last line of resistance, a green and blue membrane holding back the accumulated pressure human will has piled on the earth and insisted was progress.
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