- [Announcer] Coming up on Great Lakes Now.

bringing back a fish that vanished from our region nearly a century ago.

- So you can actually see the tiny arctic grayling within the egg and see its eyes develop.

- [Announcer] Salt, it can make our roads safer, but it also causes problems.

- Road salt is one issue that is easily remedied.

- [Announcer] And a forester's take on how to love a forest.

- What is this like amazing resource?

How do we harvest it in the right way?

(bright music) - [Announcer] This program was brought to you by the Fred & Barbara Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Richard C. Devereux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at Detroit PBS, the Polk Family Fund, DTE Foundation and contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Welcome to Great Lakes now, I'm Rob Green.

The arctic grayling disappeared from rivers in our region almost a century ago, but they may be coming back if an effort to restore them succeeds.

- Turn me on, we might have to adjust the hertz.

- [Rob] On a creek in northern Michigan, a fisheries team from the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians is electrofishing to find out what types of fish are living in these waters.

Alex Ontkos is an inland fisheries biologist.

- We're doing fish community surveys in support of the Michigan Arctic Grayling Initiative, along with the habitat work that we do to find just the right place to put 'em.

We also look at the fish community 'cause we want 'em to have good neighbors.

We want not too many brown trout.

Brook trout are a good thing.

They're representative of cold water and probably use similar habitats to arctic grayling.

So if we go out and catch a lot of brook trout, that's a good sign that the water quality's good for the arctic grayling.

Electrofishing is a pretty common method for fish community surveys in freshwater environments, essentially creates electrical field that's almost like a fish stun gun.

- Oh, lamb prairie as well in there.

- It temporarily stuns them just long enough to be able to scoop them up with a net.

That way we can identify 'em, count 'em, measure 'em, and weigh 'em and collect those data for further analysis.

The ultimate goal of the Michigan Arctic Grayling Initiative is to produce self-sustaining populations of arctic grayling.

We just really want to know where the right places for these fish to go.

- [Rob] Arctic grayling were once common in the northern part of Michigan's lower peninsula.

But in the late 1800s and early 1900s, their numbers collapsed.

And by 1936, arctic grayling had vanished from the state.

They disappeared for three main reasons.

- The first and probably the most significant is the environmental degradation that happened due to the logging practices of the day and all that virgin white pine timber that was in the Northern Lower Peninsula.

They would cut right up to the edges of the streams, roll 'em down the streams and even gouge the streams out as they floated the logs down the river.

- [Rob] Even decades later, the damage done is still evident.

- We'll come across big logs like this in the rivers and streams pretty regularly.

The habitat destruction associated with timber harvest was a really big thing in Michigan in the late 1800s, was a major part of why grayling got wiped out in Michigan.

- [Rob] The grayling were also easy to catch and they were harvested in large numbers and sold in urban markets.

- And then the third reason was competition with and predation by introduced species.

And that's brook trout, rainbow trout and brown trout, with brown trout far and away being the most significant of those three.

- [Rob] Arctic grayling have been successfully reintroduced to some rivers in Montana.

So there's hope for this effort in Michigan.

Tony Beck is the fish culture manager at the Michigan DNR's Marquette State Fish Hatchery.

- The broodstock we obtain were from the state of Alaska.

We're using a process that we learned that the state of Montana was using to bring that successful reintroduction.

So we're gonna pattern our model off of what they were able to successfully do.

- [Rob] It's a years long process.

Grayling eggs must be brought in from Alaska and reared in isolation for 18 months before they're taken to the Marquette Hatchery.

There, they're reared to maturity and the mature fish are then spawned to get a new batch of fertilized eggs.

- And then within 13 days, we then package up those eggs and transfer those out to the tribal partners.

Packaging it up was kind of exciting but nerve wracking at the same time.

We hadn't done this before, we were confident we could do it.

We were excited to do it, but there's a lot on the line.

Our tribal partners have also been great to work with.

They've done a lot of research on the receiving streams, trying to find the best candidates of streams that we can put them in.

- [Rob] One tribal partner in this restoration project is the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians.

Frank Beaver is the Band's head of natural resources.

(attendee singing in Indigenous language) - This is the release ceremony where we have given kind of thanks to the partners who have come together and to formalize this event for releasing the eggs.

Since this is the first egg release in the state of Michigan for our grayling.

(everyone applauding) This has been a very exciting day.

I can feel there's a lot of optimism in the air today.

We've had a lot of questions to get us from where we first started the program to if we would even make it to today, to putting these eggs out in the wild out in these river systems.

And today we're gonna do it.

And that's amazing.

This is a way for us to reconnect with a native species and with the habitatsand the systems that support that species.

So for us, this is a relationship that we have with our fish, with our species, and with those habitats.

So for me, this is reestablishing a relationship that's been broken and then lost.

- [Rob] The Little River Band of Ottawa Indians will place their eggs directly into in-stream incubators in three different rivers where they will hatch in the waters of the rivers themselves.

- So the incubators that we use, we have a couple different sizes, but for the most part they use the same basic principle, a black tub.

It has a stainless steel egg tray that sits above a manifold.

Water goes in through the bottom of the incubator, disperses evenly up through the egg tray, and then just spills out two outlet pipes at the top of the incubator.

Freshly laid arctic grayling eggs are really small, they're only about three millimeters or so, but once those eggs are fertilized, they develop relatively quickly.

It's not too long before you can actually see the little fish within the egg.

They're usually pretty clear.

So you can actually see the tiny arctic graying within the egg and see its eyes develop and they move around quite a bit, which is always cool to see.

And then once the eggs hatch, the fry will slowly make their way out of the incubator just using the natural flow that goes through it.

- If all goes well, the grayling will imprint on the water of each river, meaning they will see that river as home and return there to spawn in the future.

- Arctic grayling are important to the ecosystem in Michigan because they were always a very prolific fish species.

I mean, before we had a lot of brook trout in the lower peninsula of Michigan, it would've been arctic grayling, so it would've been kind of like our cold water predatory fish species.

You know, that's supposed to be here.

- [Rob] The Little River Band isn't the only tribal partner working to restore arctic grayling.

The Grand Traverses Bay Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians also received grayling eggs and today they're releasing their fish into the Boardman Ottaway River.

But their eggs didn't mature in an instream incubator like the Little River Band's.

Dan Mays is the lead fish and wildlife biologist for the Grand Traverse Band.

- We've decided to do things a little bit differently at GTB.

We're raising 'em in a streamside hatchery.

We're using water from the stream that was selected, imprinting those fish on that water, raising them to finger length stage and stocking 'em out at three to four inches in length.

We decided to do that because we feel that's the best chance of survival, getting them to size.

We're doing what we think is best for the fish.

Prior to releasing the fish, we implant a small tag, it's called a passive integrated transponder in their abdomen.

And that tag, we can track where they go.

What we want to see is these fish reproducing on their own.

We don't wanna keep stocking these fish.

We're looking for a self-sustaining population.

Today we released just over 500 five-inch fish and we're very hopeful that this is successful.

It's an iconic species to Michigan, to the tribe.

- If I was gonna name one, that would be the one I would've named right there.

- And it's very important to me personally as well.

- The arctic grayling has been missing from our area for quite some years, and so it's exciting that we're getting a chance to bring this relative back to our home community, back to its home environment and hopefully can be here for a good long while.

- [Rob] Later, the Little River band's biologists return hoping to find a thriving population of young arctic grayling, but they don't catch any.

- But we're a couple trips in.

We've been doing it for a few months now and haven't caught one.

I'm still hopeful that we will.

I know they're out here somewhere.

It's just looking for a needle in a haystack.

You know, we gotta be kind of in the right place at the right time.

- [Rob] For the team from the Grand Traverse Bay Band, there's encouraging data.

Downstream of the stocking site, their antenna detected the tracking tags implanted in the grayling 186 times, suggesting about 40% of the stocked fish avoided predators and migrated downstream, mostly at night to avoid being eaten.

The work hasn't ended.

More fish will be released in the years to come, and there's hope that the grayling will be back for good.

- Raising these fish three, four inches, seeing them, seeing that dorsal fin, and seeing how energetic these fish are, that gives me hope.

- There is so much research that led up to the incubators being put in the water and the eggs going in this last May.

I'm really optimistic that all the work that everyone's done through the years has got us started off on the right foot.

(bright music) - When winter hits and the roads get icy, out come the salt trucks, that can help prevent traffic accidents.

But road salt is not without its costs.

From Ontario, our friends at TVO bring us the story.

- [Narrator] As the snow melts and the earth wakes up, winter starts to let go.

Spring is here.

Finally.

Runoff flows into rivers and lakes.

But these waters that we welcome carry something we can't see.

Road salt, chemically known as sodium chloride, it works by lowering the freezing point of water, making it harder for ice to form.

Ontarians are no strangers to winter storms with ice causing issues for communities across the province.

- A winter storm warning is in effect stretching from Windsor to Montreal.

- A brutal ice storm left hundreds of thousands of Ontarians in the dark.

- Up in Muskoka, the same system is bringing even more snow.

- And it's in Muskoka where environmentalists are sounding the alarm bells on road salt.

- But right now we're coming down to Muskoka Bay, Gravenhurst Bay, and there's a creek running into the bay here that I've been sampling for the last two and a half years.

- [Narrator] Neil Hutchinson has dedicated his life to water quality.

After working as an aquatic scientist across Canada, he's now retired and part of the Friends of the Muskoka Watershed, a group focused on identifying and addressing threats to Muskoka's waterways.

- Five or six years ago, we became quite aware of the problem of road salt and the chloride ion, which is the toxic component of road salt in our runoff off our roads, into our very soft waters.

- [Narrator] Many Ontarians are familiar with images like this.

These photos were captured by the Friends of the Muskoka Watershed.

They highlight the excessive amounts of road salt used over the winter.

- Oh, there's a mess.

That's gonna end up in the river.

- Yeah, I wonder how much salt's in that.

Holy moly.

- [Narrator] The documentation is part of a study Neil and a team of citizen scientists have been conducting to see how much of this road salt is draining into Muskoka's watershed.

- What we do is collect a very small quantity of water starting when the melt starts, which is right now, we get access to the snow and salt, which is coming off of the sidewalks, coming outta the parking lots, coming off of the roads.

- Ultimately, we wanna know the concentration of chloride.

Chloride is toxic.

It's declared toxic as is road salt.

But we measure it quite simply with a little pen that you can stick in the water and it immediately reads the conductivity.

- So here's the conductivity meter, that's very, very high, 730.

It's still going up.

Considerably higher than we have in the lake.

- Conductivity is the ability of the water to carry an electrical current.

And the more ions that are dissolved in the water, the more, the higher the conductivity, the better able it is to conduct electricity such that distilled water would have no conductivity.

Whereas seawater has something like 50,000 units of conductivity.

- This whole area of the neighborhood has five different drainage areas that come down and they all go right into Gull Lake.

So there's no filtration or anything.

- [Narrator] Over the past few years, citizen scientists like Sandy Karens and Joanne Smith conducted over 600 measurements at 27 sites in Gravenhurst, Brace Bridge and Huntsville.

They tested drains and creeks year round that flow into large bodies of water like Lake Muskoka, Gull Lake and Jevons Lake.

According to the data, the worst salt concentrations came from four storm drains in Bracebridge.

The findings only confirmed what Neil and his team already knew.

Salt is silently saturating Muskoka's waters.

The Friends of the Muskoka Watershed estimate that Lake Muskoka now holds around 30,000 tons of road salt.

And it's not just in cottage country.

Many Toronto area streams are getting saltier.

Across Ontario, about 2.2 million tons of road salt are spread on public roads every year.

- In 2001, Environment Canada declared road salt to be a hazardous substance and that required the government to set water quality objectives for it and to start paying attention to how it's managed.

Gravenhurst Bay has increased by about 30 or 35 fold in chloride concentrations over the last 50 years.

So, and that's a direct result of runoff from our activities of spreading road salt around in the watershed.

- The Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment has set guidelines for how much salt fresh water ecosystems can handle before it starts harming aquatic life.

But those guidelines might not work everywhere.

- The guidelines, which were actually determined near Toronto back in the early 2000s, came in at a level of 120 milligrams per liter.

But we are far more sensitive up here because we have a different kind of bedrock, which is granite, and it's very different from the bedrock, which is down near Toronto, which is limestone, and the limestone breaks down, so it's kind of buffering the solution.

Whereas up here in Muskoka, we've got the granite, which is rather inert.

So the zooplankton are the ones which are very, very fragile and we're finding that they're dying at a much faster pace than they are down in the GTA where we've got the hard water.

- [Narrator] The Friends of the Muskoka Watershed have gained a new tool in their efforts to combat excessive road salt use.

- Hi.

- How are you doing?

- Hi, I'm Alesha.

- Alesha Breckenridge is the project lead for the Salty Muskoka Project.

- And we're starting a new program to help everybody in Muskoka reduce their excess road salt.

- [Narrator] Thanks to a federal grant from the Canadian Water Agency, they now have boots on the ground.

It's estimated that about 20% of road salt used in Muskoka is applied in parking lots, driveways and sidewalks.

- I'll able to work with the community in reducing the salt use in those sites.

So that means talking to people that live here, talking to small businesses and having those conversations with winter maintenance contractors and also with store owners that can actually bring in some alternatives and collectively just raise the awareness of reducing salt in our community.

- [Narrator] One of the biggest messages she's trying to spread about road salt is that a little goes a long way.

- This cup holds 12 ounces of road salt, but I'm just using sand just to demonstrate that this cup will cover this entire space.

- [Narrator] Road salt is a popular choice because it's cheap and it works.

Research has shown its use can significantly reduce winter related car crashes, but it has its limitations.

- I think we assume that it's gonna work in all temperatures and it actually doesn't.

So road salt, the effectiveness starts to wear off after like minus 10, minus 12.

Road salt doesn't work on ice anymore.

So you have to look at maybe using sand as traction instead.

- [Narrator] It can cause skin irritation for our furry friends and is highly corrosive to buildings.

- I heard just the other day somebody said, our sliding doors are so rusty and it's causing, and they're putting it down to road salt.

And it is, it's actually a corrosive and so it's damaging a lot of infrastructure around buildings.

- [Narrator] In 2012, two people died and many more were injured when the rooftop parking deck of the Algo Center Mall in Elliot Lake caved in, corrosion caused by years of water and road salt was considered one of the contributing factors.

A forensic study found the rusted steel supports looked like they had spent decades in seawater.

The Friends of the Muskoka watershed did get a win In 2025, the district of Muskoka passed a resolution to safely reduce its road salt use and push the province to establish a committee to advise cities and towns on how best to protect freshwater ecosystems from salt.

But changing policy is just one part of the puzzle.

Liability is another major challenge.

- If I slip and break my hip, then I might sue the store owner who will then have to sue his maintenance person because I slipped because not enough salt was applied.

Well, there are various, several jurisdictions, some in the United States that have got a program where these applicators certify themselves as smart about salt.

So if they can demonstrate that they've taken the course and have not over applied the salt, then they are immune from prosecution for liability.

So we'd like to work with other groups and get the government to have a look at the liability clauses and how we might, you know, make sure it's done properly and still insulate people from claims.

- [Narrator] According to the Friends of the Muskoka Watershed, the path to reducing road salt use and protecting the freshwater ecosystem so vital to Muskoka and the rest of Canada is clear.

It starts with stronger policies, better training and raising awareness.

- I often get overwhelmed by the amount of environmental issues that face us today, but road salt is one issue that is easily remedied and we can reduce our use.

- We could take action to get rid of pollutants and be effective and maintain the beautiful world around us.

So to me it's a matter of the land that we live in, our obligation not to harm it, to tread lightly and to enjoy it for all that it offers.

(bright music) - The Great Lakes region was once a major logging hub.

In the mid to late 1800s, It was supplying lumber to growing cities like Chicago and created boom towns that later had to deal with deforestation.

Now our region's old growth forests are extremely rare, but tending to a forest is more than just seeding trees and lamenting about the lumber industry.

According to Ethan Tapper, he says these two things don't necessarily need to be in opposition.

Ethan is a forester and writer who manages Bear Island, which is his 175 acre forest in Homestead in Vermont.

Today he's here to talk with us about his recently published book, How to Love a Forest.

- What does it mean to love a forest can mean a lot of different things.

Even a forester can mean a lot of different things.

And I think it's sort of like the different types of foresters or different ways the foresters sees themselves sort of illustrates this.

So I think that if you were to ask some foresters what their job is, they would define it, you know, largely as how are we managing this resource and an old school understanding of what we do to care for forests would say something like, forests need to be managed, right?

They have to be managed or they can't grow, which isn't true.

And another old school understanding of sort of in the vein of environmentalism or preservation might say that all we need to do to care for forests is to do nothing.

Leave 'em alone, everything will be fine.

Just get humans out of them, which is also at this moment in time not true.

And so we need to navigate this like really complex reality where we have these forests that are really altered, degraded and in this era of climate change and biodiversity loss and mass extinction and increasing human demands on forests and to figure out how we care for these ecosystems.

In light of all that stuff, which involves in some cases doing less and in some cases doing much more.

- From your perspective, how could the lumber industry and forestry better evolve together?

- I think one thing is that we end up in these, in these sort of like polarized camps where it's like I'm an environmentalist and I hate the lumber industry, or I'm in the lumber industry and I hate environmentalists.

When really it is completely possible if we're willing to like step back a little bit to attain both of the things that those people want while having better ecological and human outcomes.

And the way that we do this is by folks who are mostly focused on the resource, timber, stepping back and realizing, starting to see the work that they do within the context of these ecosystems.

That we actually can have no timber without healthy forest ecosystems.

And that there are absolutely ways maybe not to maximize that resource, but certainly to harvest wood in a way that is completely in keeping with, you know, how we maintain healthy forest ecosystems.

And even doing so while we enrich and restore forest ecosystems.

And then sort of in the other polarity.

It's really important in the environmentalist community that we go a little bit deeper and that we understand that what we want as environmentalists is a world that works.

And we want people to have the resources they need to live these happy and healthy and abundant lives.

And we want to use wood.

We want to use wood instead of these more harmful and ecological in human senses, more harmful resources.

We wanna use local resources instead of these resources that are produced across the world.

And then if we allow ourselves to think a little bit more deeply about it, we'll realize that wood is this like amazing resource.

And the only question is how do we harvest it in the right way?

And it doesn't benefit us or anyone else or any other species on this planet for us to just have these like super polarized and really simplistic views about what we're trying to do here.

(bright music) - Thanks for watching.

You can find more about the stories in this show at greatlakesnow.org.

While you're there, please follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] This program was brought to you by the Fred & Barbara Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at Detroit PBS, Polk Family Fund, DTE Foundation, and contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(bright music)