Jennifer Granholm, who (you remember?) ran for governor on a conservation ticket, this spring spent a week tramping the state promoting tourism. Tourism conservation isn't. Tourism is transforming once vibrant downtowns into wastelands of fudge, t-shirt and trinket shops. Tourism is jet skis and ORVs. Tourism is highways packed with cars speeding nowhere. Tourism is once scenic sunrise and sunset vistas lost to condos and other sprawling rooflines. Tourism is two-hour, $25 lunches among dazed people with cell phones to their ears. Tourism is septic systems built for four spewing wastes from a dozen directly into ground and surface water. Tourism is mowed and enriched lawns replacing stream and lake protecting vegetation. Tourism is the spread of invasive species. All of that, and more, is tourism. None of it is conservation.
Granholm's haste to sign legislation scientists warn is a long-term threat to the vitality of the Great Lakes was not conservation. Bowing to those Save Our Shoreline property rights demands to pulverize public bottomlands was politics. Rank politics. Another betrayal of her conservation platform. Her failure to provide leadership on the South Fox Island land exchange, on the bid to plunder the sanctity of the AuSable's Mason Tract, in the festering Pigeon River oil issue and others is all the more frustrating because she appears to know better but, apparently, lacks the grit to stand up for the principles she avowed when seeking votes. Some conservationists say have patience. Give her time. She has a budget problem and feral legislatures.
Selling out conservation will not balance the budget or purge the legislature of special-interest/lobbyist- dictated corruption. That takes leadership and integrity that puts the public interest before the next election's Big Bucks donors. It takes being "owned" by what's good for the resource and people ahead of being "owned" by who will pump the most dollars into the campaign's coffers.
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