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March 14, 2005
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
March 14, 2005 ✦ ✦ ✦ Simply getting a photograph of Michigan’s only known wild wolverine would have been enough for most men. Not for Jeff Ford. Jeff had already written one article about ‹nding the wolverine’s tracks in the September 2004 issue of Woods-N-Water News, a statewide magazine for hunters and other outdoors enthusiasts. Being able to provide a follow-up story with a fully documented picture would be even better. But Jeff’s real motives ran much deeper than that. Just as he’d done as a young boy when he’d read everything he could ‹nd in order to understand the seemingly inexplicable behavior of the Montana grizzly his family had encountered so many years ago, Jeff wanted to solve the mysteries of Michigan’s wolverine. Was it a male or female? Where had it come from? How did it get there? Back in 2004, when the wolverine was ‹rst spotted near Ubly in southern Huron County, the original hypothesis put forward by the Michigan DNR was that the wolverine had come across the border at Port Huron’s Blue Water Bridge from Ontario, Canada, as a stowaway passenger on a garbage truck. No one really thought it likely that the wolverine had been born in the state. Michigan had no viable wolverine population, had not even had a documented sighting in recent history. To have one suddenly show up in the Thumb by natural means was a stretch by anyone’s measure. “It was not only unusual to ‹nd a wolverine in Michigan, but the particular place in Michigan was so out of place,” said retired DNR wildlife biologist Arnie Karr. “The Thumb’s farmland is very different from the normal habitat that wolverines require to survive, and so far away from what is normal habitat for them, which is basically up around the Arctic Circle with a lot of brush, cedars, swamp—and snow and ice that lingers on into summer.” 48 Wolverines mainly feed on carrion and cache their food in snow, said Karr, often using their powerful claws to dig down into the snow and ice to ‹nd dead animals. That frigid environment is a key element to their continued survival, he said. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the species was extirpated from the lower 48 states during the early twentieth century. Reestablished populations have moved down from Canada into the North Cascades Range of Washington and the Northern Rocky Mountains of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. South of the Canadian border, wolverines are restricted to areas in high mountains near the tree line, where conditions are cold year-round and snow cover persists well into the month of May.1 Michigan’s Thumb might be cold by some standards—but it was hardly the ideal environment for a natural, spontaneous eruption of wolverines. Since the animal had originally shown up in the vicinity of a Huron County land‹ll, was it possible it had hopped a ride there from Canada? The idea made perfect sense, especially at a time when Canadian trash had become a hot-button issue in Lansing, the state capital. Over the past two decades, a series of seemingly well-intentioned but insidious events had slowly but surely turned Michigan into Canada’s trash can. The ‹rst occurred in 1978, when the US Supreme Court ruled that waste is an “article of interstate commerce,” effectively limiting a state’s right to regulate trash crossing its borders.2 That was followed in 1979 by the US Environmental Protection Agency’s new waste management regulations, which largely replaced local municipal dumps with huge, highly regulated land‹lls. In 1986, the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste treaty between Canada and the United States of‹cially opened Michigan’s doors to Canadian trash. From there it was only a short step to making the argument that foreign waste was protected by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994—a conceptual wedge that propped that door wide open. On January 1, 2003, the city of Toronto began to ship 100 percent of its garbage to the land‹lls of Michigan. Following years of nonstop public pressure, state legislators ‹nally hammered out a “cease and desist” agreement with Canada, and the March 14, 2005 ✦ 49 [44.197.214.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:09 GMT) practice of‹cially ended on December 31, 2010, when the last load of Toronto trash made its way across the border. But from...