PEER Strikes Out

Part Two

Back to Part One

Back in 2003, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore was in the middle of something called a Wilderness Suitability Study: how much of the archipelago, already assured of "preservation for future generations" by its status as a national park, merited the extra protection- and strict limitations on management and visitor use- of inclusion in the National Wilderness system? The twenty-one islands were remote, to be sure, and forest was growing over the sites where man and women and eked out their lives long ago, but how much of that area met the stringent criteria of the Wilderness Act: an area

...where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain... an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence... which generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable.

And what of the islands' history? Though the islands were long-deserted, there was a time when hardy pioneers farmed and fished from homesteads on their shores. The 1970 law creating Apostle Islands National Lakeshore was clear in its mandate: Congress directed the NPS to preserve both the natural and historical resources if the Apostle Islands. Wilderness designation, requiring that an area be managed to give the impression that the land had never been trodden by human feet, would make historic preservation nigh-impossible within wilderness boundaries.

In the end, the study group, of which I was a member, offered its recommendation: eighty percent of the park's land area would be designated as Wilderness. Three islands, with particular historic significance, would be excluded from Wilderness designation, along with a few acres on the remaining eighteen: the lighthouses, a handful of docks, and the like. These "excluded" islands would retain every bit of protection they always had: the laws and policies that protect any national park still applied. The purpose of excluding them was to fulfill the charge that Congress had made some thirty years before: to manage the park in a way that values both the natural and human history of the islands.

PEER didn't see things that way, though. The organization released a statement accusing park planners of promoting a scheme to commercialize the islands. The diatribe read, in part:

PEER believes that an unspoken agenda is at work here. Perhaps the NPS vision of a possible way to interpret the environmental history of the islands is to engage in, or authorize others to engage in, large-scale landscape manipulation. Among the possibilities that the NPS may be contemplating is reinstitution of human occupation through lease and sale of Federal lands... so that the new occupants can recreate past husbandry and commercial practices.

The NPS would allow this under the guise of "restoring a cultural landscape." ... PEER's suspicion is abetted by the NPS statement that Basswood and Sand Islands "would provide for flexibility in planning the preservation and interpretation of pioneer farmsteads, historic stone quarries, and logging camps."

In other words, PEER was doing its best to spread a tale that the park was in collusion with unnamed interests to re-establish commercial farming, logging, and quarrying operations on the islands, "under the guise of restoring the historic landscape."

This accusation would have been infuriating if it hadn't been so silly. If the rabble rousers at PEER had done the slightest bit of homework, they would have seen that no one in their right mind would want to take shot at reviving industries that died off many decades before the National Lakeshore was even established.

Farming on the islands- never more than a subsistence proposition- died with the Great Depression. The quarry industry was long gone by that point: the last quarry closed in 1897. Logging? A marginally more credible supposition, I suppose, but still completely untrue.

Basswood Island stone quarry, abandoned since the 1890s.

There's a reason the sons and daughters of the pioneer farmers looked elsewhere for work when they grew to adulthood. There's a reason the stone quarries on the islands lost business to mainland operations. You just don't make money going into business on an island in Lake Superior.

But PEER didn't know that... or perhaps they knew and didn't care. Perhaps PEER (and now I'm using their tactic) understood all along that it doesn't matter if you tell whoppers; even if you're caught eventually, plenty of people will read the initial blaring headlines, and miss the retraction.

Perhaps PEER itself has "an unspoken agenda" to build up its dues-paying membership by any means, fair or foul.

Or maybe PEER just makes an amazing number of honest mistakes; take your pick.

But remember:

When you hear it from PEER, check their sources, my dear.