Five Bay Landscapes: Saginaw Bay

As landscape architecture professors working and studying the littoral zone of the Great Lakes, we have long been interested in not only what we know about these landscapes, but how we develop our understanding of them as diverse, layered, and ecologically and socially rich places. For us, this has meant approaching these shorelines with “Curious Methods” in an effort to expand our ways of “meeting” a landscape. Our recently published book, Five Bay Landscapes: Curious Explorations of the Great Lakes Basin, is a record and reflection of this practice. In the book, we examine what such landscape analysis methods have to offer us when considering complex systems of the Great Lakes Basin across scales of time and space. Using the “Bay Scale” as a stepping stone between the local and the regional, we explored five different bays as study sites; Saginaw Bay, Nipigon Bay, Green Bay, Maumee Bay, Bay of Quinte, each located in a different Great Lake. With an emphasis on “transcalar” thinking and a plurality of perspectives, each study was an amalgamation of site visits, photography, historical and scientific research, drawings, and collages that helped us to get to know these places a bit better. The following excerpt is the chapter on Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay.

In summer the drainage ditch along the side of Finn Road is carpeted with bright green duckweed. The small aquatic plant, its leaves no wider than an eighth of an inch, grows in large mats on the surface, obscuring the water’s depth. The land is incredibly flat, and there are hundreds of miles of these wide drainage ditches subdividing the tiled cropland of dry beans, corn, and sugar beets. The ditches adhere to and shadow the strict grid of this landscape, which serves as one of the fundamental land-to-water interfaces of the Saginaw Bay. Most vehicles approach this part of Lake Huron by taking the highway to Saginaw, following the Saginaw River to Bay City, then continuing to the river’s mouth, which is flanked by a couple of yacht clubs and the coal dock of a decommissioned power plant. We take a more idiosyncratic approach, ignoring the mouth of the Saginaw and instead following the drainage ditches north until the bright green channels sink into the muted shallows of the lake. At the end of Finn Road, we park and climb onto a wooden platform perched on a berm.

While one might expect such a platform to offer a coveted view of the water, we are instead met by a fifteen-foot-high wall made almost entirely of one reed species, Phragmites australis. The Phragmites field stretches over half a mile, separating the platform from the lake’s edge and obscuring any hint of water. Phragmites are aggressive, pervasive, and often classified in this region as a nuisance, their dense growth being seen as a threat to shoreline views, species diversity, and public safety. Indeed, their field condition is thick and prominent. They are thriving here, and their agency in this landscape is undeniable and fascinating in its own right. All along this bay, no matter which route one takes, the Phragmites will be there, guiding the path to the water’s edge. So, in this moment, instead of trying to bypass these reeds, we revel in the condition of the expanded shoreline and allow ourselves to get lost in this thick and shallow edge.

The Center of It All

The present location of the Saginaw Bay can be understood as a 1,143-square-mile shallow bowl carved along Michigan’s Lake Huron shoreline, a result of thousands of years of geologic and hydrologic change (see the interlude by Marcia Bjornerud in this volume). Like much of the Great Lakes region, this shoreland was formed by sedimentation beneath a shallow sea, pushed and pulled by massive glaciers during the Wisconsin Glaciation, then reshaped again by the melting of glacial waters. The current extent of the Saginaw Bay is a geologically momentary blip for a body of water in continuous fluctuation.

Surrounded by water on three sides, Michigan is the self-proclaimed epicenter of all things Great Lakes. This is not just a cultural claim but a geologic one: the land lies in the bullseye of concentric rings of geologic time that the historian William Ashworth compares to a set of “nesting bowls.”¹ The Saginaw Bay lies near the center of this formation, on rock beds formed in the Pennsylvanian Epoch, the youngest geologic foundation in the Great Lakes Basin.

Approximately thirteen thousand years ago, the region was covered by one of the first emerging glacial lakes, aptly named Lake Saginaw. The shores of this ancient lake extended deep into present-day Michigan. Our vantage point at the end of Finn Road would have been some fifty miles into that lake. At that point in history, the waters moved in the opposite direction, flowing southwest toward what is now the Mississippi River. As the glaciers retreated, the shoreline of Lake Saginaw (later known as Lake Stanley) moved east into what is today Lake Huron, so that ten thousand years ago our current location would have been almost one hundred miles inland. These fluctuations can be tracked by evidence left within the moving littoral zone, where water and wind push and pull the rocks, sediment, and vegetation into ridges, swales, and slopes. The movement of this active interface indicates where the water has been, and where it may go in the future. But for now, it lies in the wide shallow pan called the Saginaw Bay.

The entire Saginaw region is likewise a shallow gradient of the former lakebed. At many points within the 8,700-square-mile watershed, the river and its floodplain drop only one foot of elevation per linear mile. With such gradual topography, even small changes in water levels can have a large effect on landscape composition. A rise of one inch can cover almost fifty yards, so the water of the bay is constantly giving and taking territory. This is significant within a system where water levels can vary by more than a foot from one year to the next. Of course, water levels rise and fall dramatically in many coastal places, but since ocean tides fluctuate daily, the cycle is better understood by the average observer. The slower cycles of the Great Lakes often allow for several seasons of vegetal growth between high and low conditions, making it appear, to a casual observer or newcomer, that the water levels have permanently changed. The bay’s flat, gradual bathymetry, which calms water movement and promotes sediment buildup, has helped establish an edge condition that supports one of the country’s largest contiguous freshwater marshes. Covering forty thousand acres of shoreline around the bay, large parts of this marsh are managed by the state of Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which is considerably motivated by the hunting and fishing activities that the large coastal environment offers.

Perforated and Planted

When the first European colonial settlers arrived in the Saginaw area, the marsh around the bay was likely three times its present size. And while many see the value in wetlands today, in the very recent past they were considered a nuisance. An 1815 report by Surveyor General Edward Tiffin claimed the land was not “worth the cost of surveying,” as only “one acre in a hundred was worth cultivation.”² Yet this sentiment would not last long, for the agricultural potential of this land soon became evident.

At the time of European settlement, central Michigan was a collection of continuous gradients spanning from wetland marshes to upland forests, with extensive pinewoods in the north and hardwoods in the south. Not surprisingly, one of the first settler industries was forestry, and Michigan became a national leader in lumber production. Among a series of other extraction experiments in the mid- to late nineteenth century, the most successful was salt production. Wells dug in central Michigan produced a brine that could be evaporated and processed into salt. This required large amounts of heat, which was supplied by waste wood from the Saginaw Valley lumber mills. Thus, for half a century, the waste of deforestation fueled the production of salt, a process that continued until the old-growth forests were mostly logged and the lumber industry began to decline.³

The other significant extracted resource was coal, first discovered in the region in 1861.⁴ The Michigan coal industry peaked in 1907, when the state was producing about 2 million short tons through 37 operating mines (still just a minuscule share of the national production of 394 million tons). All these mines were located within the Pennsylvanian Epoch stones of the Saginaw watershed, and most were in Bay and Saginaw Counties. While this coal was lauded for its quality, the costs of production and transport made it more expensive for the Detroit market than coal mined in West Virginia or Ohio. Michigan coal was sent to western markets in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, but high export costs and low quantity eventually led to the industry’s collapse. Today the main reminder of the once-strong industry is the public danger posed by its legacy infrastructure, and there are renewed efforts to locate abandoned coal-mine shafts and fill them to prevent collapse.

Thanks to its unique geology, central Michigan had a bit of everything, but not enough of any one resource to support an extraction economy over the long term. Today the coal, salt, and lumber industries are essentially gone. In the 1950s a significant oil strike in southern Michigan, near the Ohio border, spurred a regional desire to drill exploration wells. As an industry, oil has fared no better than coal or salt, although oil derricks can still be found quietly pumping in agricultural fields. When it came to the extraction industries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Michigan was a jack of all trades and master of none. Yet the short-lived experiments encouraged settlement along the Saginaw River, where the “worthless” marsh landscape Tiffin described was discovered to be extremely fertile ground. By the late 1800s, this once-forested landscape with its rich wetland soils was being drained and planted into the highly productive agricultural region found today.

Ditched

Now, the roads of central Michigan cut through flat fields providing expansive views of the seasonal choreography of irrigation systems, tractors, backhoes, plows, cultivators, and the like. With more than 45 percent of the land currently used for food production, the Saginaw Bay watershed is an agricultural powerhouse.⁵ Unlike in other areas (for example, western Michigan, where existing conditions were ideal for growing fruit trees), farming in central Michigan required significant land alterations, the most notable being the ditches—dense and wide grooves that edge the fields in green networks leading out to the bay.

Ditchdigging in the United States was institutionalized by the federal Swamp Lands Act of 1850, which gave Michigan settlers significant support for the conversion of “swamp or overflow lands unfit for cultivation” into farmland. By 1906 they had “reclaimed” almost as much marshland as settlers in Arkansas, Florida, and Louisiana, for whom the act was originally written.⁶ In places like Louisiana, the law was used to fund the creation of embankments and other flood protections to “reclaim” land from the once meandering Mississippi River. Along the Great Lakes, however, draining wetlands was simpler. Farmers merely had to dig ditches and lay drainage tile in order to pull water from the land. Early documentation of this process referenced the Dutch strategy of creating polders as a model for managing wetlands in the Great Lakes Basin, as if this region, too, were battling to save itself from a rising sea.

It is now broadly understood that draining this “undesirable” land has depleted one of the most extensive freshwater wetland ecosystems in the world. Yet, at the time, the desire to increase arable land outweighed any other consideration. A map drawn by the US Department of Agriculture’s Office of Experiment Stations showed the eastern United States as a mere collection of swamp resources waiting to be “leveraged.” The report went so far as to describe the productivity of former wetlands as “unexcelled” in quality, assuming proper flood protection and drainage.⁷

The drainage systems of the Saginaw Bay tracked the patterns of agricultural development determined by the Jeffersonian Grid, so that the land was rendered as a seemingly endless series of quarter-mile crop fields, separated by roads and ditches. This gave rise to a new, small but important Saginaw export industry: the machinery to transform and create such landscapes. The Bay City Dredging Works Company, for example, manufactured a wide range of land-dredging machines, which were used to ditch through wetlands and transform marshes into agricultural land. The most famous of these was a “walking” dredge crane (1916) that eliminated the need for guiding rails.⁸ The walking dredge spanned the ditch, its legs spread as wide as thirty feet, and moved slowly forward on patented skid-like feet. Machines manufactured in the Saginaw region were used all over the country, but their signature mark, a wide, deep ditch, is particularly prominent here in the place where they were designed.

With drains pulling the water from the former marshes, Saginaw Bay farmers put the land to productive use, growing apples, potatoes, corn, soybeans, wheat, and more. Today the region is best known for its dry beans and sugar beets. While farmed in a few places within the Midwest, in Saginaw the sugar beet crop and its processing facilities have put these counties on the national stage. The region continues to rank as one of the largest producers of sugar beets in the United States. The sugar beet, a root vegetable that is processed into a sugar product almost interchangeable with that made from sugarcane, does especially well in the soils and climate of this bay region, tolerating the water fluctuations and benefiting from cold temperatures in the fall and winter.

Like other crops, sugar beets are fertilized with nitrogen and phosphates, and the excess runs off fields into the drainage systems, contributing to nutrient pollution in the bay. This agricultural runoff has been identified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as one of the primary pollution sources in the Saginaw Bay Area of Concern. Another primary source is industrial waste discharges, where we can also look at beets as an agricultural example. Due to their heaviness and bruisability, sugar beets do not travel well and manufacturing plants are thus often located near the fields.⁹ In 1974, the EPA identified two sugar production plants, along with General Motors and Dow Chemical, as the four main polluters of the Saginaw River.¹⁰ Waste from the two sugar plants contributed 98 percent of the total industrial BOD (biochemical oxygen demand) in the study year.

Phragmites

The waste in the Saginaw River from agriculture, other industry, and development travels down to the bay where it meets a fairly new emergent monoculture. As we see from the platform at the end of Finn Road, the extensive wetlands along the lake edge are now largely defined by a nonnative variety of Phragmites. This condition is a result of the unique characteristics of the plant as well as the particulars of the site. From a vantage point at the Quanicassee Wildlife Area at the supposed shoreline of the bay, there is no clear and decisive point where water meets land. Instead, Phragmites occupies a thick gradient that spans from wet to dry, blurring all attempts at clear coastal delineation.

While it has a native cousin, the European variety of Phragmites is more aggressive and has spread quickly and abundantly across North America. As a perennial grass with an incredible capacity to spread (through both seed and rhizomes), it adapts to a variety of regions and watery conditions.¹¹ Phragmites regenerates quickly, tolerates both freshwater and saltwater, and can thrive in degraded soils where other plants often fail. It occupies habitat niches where it faces minimal competition in its initial growth phases, and once established it is very hard to eradicate. Preferring wet soil and full sun, and able to thrive on contaminated sites and in fluctuating conditions, the reed does well along shorelines.¹² Along with the shorelines, it is also often seen on disturbed and newly emergent land such as highway edges, construction sites, lowlands, and ditches, typologies that are all abundant in the Saginaw Bay.

While the deep drain ditches that striate the fields of the Saginaw Bay have established it as a productive agricultural region, the ditched and planted landscape has also generated a particular type of disturbance regime. As the fields grow acre after acre of planted monocultures, the soils are subjected to draining, dredging, digging, and the deposition of chemicals, waste, and excess nutrients. Few plants flourish in such highly disturbed hydric conditions better than Phragmites, as shown by its nearly ubiquitous distribution across the littoral zone.

The Phragmites spread was further enabled by a long period of low water levels throughout the Great Lakes from 1998 to 2013, which provided wide expanses of newly emergent land. Once established, extensive rhizomatic roots of Phragmites made it incredibly resilient to environmental changes and challenges and helped it survive when the long period of low water conditions was followed by years of record high water. Now, a landscape that once supported a marshland gradient full of species such as bulrush, aster, goldenrod, willow, and cattails has been transformed into its own wild monoculture, mirroring the mass of agricultural fields in the landscapes beyond.

Along this thick marsh edge are several points of access and circulation maintained by the Michigan DNR. As the ditches slice toward the bay from the fields, they meet the boundary of the state lands and are adorned with boat ramps and parking spots. These slim navigation channels provide some of the few options for penetrating the thick wall of Phragmites that armors the shore, and so they naturally take the role of access for fishing and waterfowl hunting. That said, the access is variable. Sometimes channel waters are so high that they submerge the docks and at other times they run completely dry, setting the docks down on the dry ground.

Trails running along the marsh connect with other public lands near the shore. Sometimes a trail follows the lipped edge where the marsh meets the agriculture fields, forcing a blatant confrontation between two monocultural grass species and illuminating the limits of human control. On the upland side we see vast stretches of field corn, intentionally planted in clean straight rows. A member of the Poaceae (grass) family, most corn grown in this region has been modified and planted to produce the orderly and highly productive organism situated in the striated fields. From its genes (often genetically modified) to its spacing and nutrient intakes, this corn is thoroughly under control. Across the trail, though, the corn gazes head-to-head with its distant rambunctious cousin, Phragmites.

If the landscape of corn reflects an extreme of vegetal control, then the Phragmites stand epitomizes the vegetal wild. Phragmites thrives through its own natural adaptations, having found ways of growing on almost every continent without the direct help of humans.¹³ While the cornfields are replanted every year and coaxed along with the help of fertilizer, Phragmites survives on its own, despite continuous efforts to eradicate it. As the farm fields leach excess phosphorus and nitrogen, the waterways bring these agricultural amplifiers down to the shore and sink them into a ground thick with Phragmites roots and rhizomes. These rhizomes and roots hold a significant portion of the plant’s biomass and have been known to extend as deeply underground as the stem does above ground.¹⁴ They create a thickly braided mat that supports the towering stems and bobbing heads through the physical fluctuations of the water’s edge. They likewise store energy that allows them to wait out the eradication efforts (burning, mowing, chemical application, etc.) of local land managers. The Quanicassee Wildlife Area serves as a glowing example of this resilience, as host to a series of Phragmites management test-plot sites, many of which are still full of Phragmites.

As the corn follows tight lines dictated by machines, in neat rows and clear channels, Phragmites grow in dense impenetrable clumps. At times the reeds give way to narrow deer paths, but without constant travel these too become quickly overgrown. Descending into a Phragmites stand offers a lesson in disorientation because it has no order, no openings, just plants—everywhere. Wayfinding is limited to sun position, water depth, and maybe the occasional glimpse of a tree. After hiking for just a few minutes we find ourselves immersed in a deafening rustling and clicking of stems blowing in the wind. It is perhaps one of the closest experiences to being “inside” of another organism that we can imagine. Now we can understand the news stories from around the world that have described people getting lost for days in Phragmites. Taking students out in these stands involves strict instructions for partnering and plans for locating each other during fieldwork. On one memorable kayaking trip, a couple of landscape architecture students took turns paddling quickly and launching themselves into the side of the reed stand. Kayak after kayak, the thick wall of Phragmites caught the boats like arrows in a hay bale, holding them within its mass.

Ceding Control

While we immerse ourselves in these stands and play with their remarkable boat-holding density, we recognize that this density, this height, this uncontrollable expanse is what has led many land managers and citizen groups across the Great Lakes to spend millions of dollars in trying to control and eradicate this species. They are not alone: across the country the plant is “battled”; it is mowed, burned, and sprayed heavily with chemicals, all in the name of habitat diversity, water access, or human safety. While the dominant approach here is a militaristic “command and control” a longer glance at landscape history sheds light on the influences that attracted the Phragmites in the first place, the shoreline sediments full of excess nutrients and legacy contaminants.¹⁵ In the Saginaw Bay, the Phragmites are seen as another environmental hazard, but this narrow view overlooks a more interesting relationship. While unpopular with many, an accumulating body of scholarship recognizes the benefits and uses of Phragmites, including phytoremediation, which could be incredibly helpful on this contaminated shore.¹⁶ This is an old species that has been lived with, even lived in, for thousands of years.¹⁷ In other parts of the world, it has long been heralded for its productivity and its ability to withstand saturation. It is used as a building material for thatching, paper, mats, rafts, baskets, and tools, for land stabilization and erosion control, and more recently for biofuel.¹⁸ Also, research on management of Phragmites suggests that living “with” the species, such as grazing animals in it, using it as a material, and so on, may curb its undesirable invasive qualities while providing resources and ecosystem services.¹⁹ All these uses would seem to align well with the local economic interest in productivity around the Great Lakes. However, even as practice and research continue to recognize the inadequacy of “command and control” management of Phragmites, land managers across the basin continue choosing to approach the species with eradication methods that are often toxic and destructive.²⁰ It is clear that these approaches to Phragmites, like all land management, are strongly tied to the values and ethics of those managing the land.²¹ Research done on Anishinaabe approaches to the invasive species of both Phragmites and cattails in Michigan by Nicholas Reo, a Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa, likewise recognizes a key distinction between Euro-American land ethics and those of the Anishinaabe tribal members.²² While observing that all individuals hold their own worldviews, Reo notes that many members approach the work with the Anishinaabe philosophy of “aki” recognizing the importance of relating to all species as kin, not as “separate”; and the responsibility humans have to understand and nurture with all species.²³ Here in the shallows of the Saginaw Bay, where the ditches and the Phragmites lead us to the water’s edge, we see how they might also lead us to a better relationship with the water, one that cedes “command and control,” recognizing the benefits offered in the mass. We accept the invitation to get a bit lost.