Group wants to lift state ban on Upper Peninsula dark sky preserves

• Michigan legislation bans state-sanctioned dark sky preserves in the Upper Peninsula
• Dark sky preserves restrict light pollution to preserve the visibility of the night sky
• A group affiliated with a campaign to stop mining near a state park in the UP wants to see dark sky preserves allowed there

Watching a meteor shower at an international dark sky park at the Keweenaw Mountain Lodge in the Upper Peninsula led Tom Grotewohl to wonder if the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park could have a similar designation.

Dark sky parks, preserves and sanctuaries maintain low light pollution to enhance opportunities to view the nighttime stars and other celestial events. 

Michigan has 10 dark sky places, some designated by DarkSky International, others by the state. Only one is in the Upper Peninsula.

“The Porcupine Mountains are a very remote area with incredible north-facing beaches and very clear skies … ideal for stargazing,” Grotewohl, a Wakefield Township resident, told Bridge Michigan.

But Grotewohl worries that might not last. 

Highland Copper hopes to open the Copperwood project, a mining operation next to the state park in Ontonagon. Grotewohl, a founder of Protect the Porkies, a campaign to stop the mine from opening, said he’s worried how a 24-7 mining operation could obstruct the night sky, among other things.

In November 2023, a representative of the Protect the Porkies campaign reached out to Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources, requesting that the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park be turned into a dark sky area. The DNR responded with a letter saying doing so would violate state law that says “a dark sky preserve shall not be established in the Upper Peninsula.”

The Keweenaw Mountain Lodge was designated by DarkSky International, not the state, and sits on private land, not state-owned land like the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. State-sanctioned dark sky preserves are prohibited in the Upper Peninsula.

Grotewohl and others want to change that. They recently launched a petition to get state legislation to allow dark sky preserves anywhere in the UP. As of Tuesday, more than 3,000 people had signed it. Last week, more than 100 people attended a virtual meeting the Protect the Porkies campaign hosted about overturning the ban. During the meeting, a Facebook group called UP Dark Skies was created for advocates to stay in the loop on the issue.

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It’s hard to know how many of the supporters live in the UP.

While some Yoopers Bridge talked to were in favor of the effort, many didn’t see the point. 

“We don’t have (the) light pollution in the UP that there is below the bridge,” said Jim Bullock, a UP resident living in Newberry. “We have ‘dark’ skies all over here.”

The dominant sentiment seemed to be, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” But advocates see that same point — that the skies are mostly dark in the UP — as the reason to push for preservation.

Why are dark sky preserves prohibited in the UP?

State Sen. Ed McBroom, who represents most of the UP, said he had something to do with the ban. 

“I was there when we did it,” he told Bridge.

In 2012, then-state Rep. Frank Foster, a Republican whose district spanned from Petoskey to Sault Ste. Marie, sponsored the “Dark Sky Coast” bill. It aimed to turn some state lands, including Wilderness State Park in Foster’s district, into dark sky preserves.

McBroom said he told Foster and other dark-sky bill backers, “We would support that if they would also sign off on not having one in the Upper Peninsula.”

Yoopers were tired of land restrictions, McBroom said, and he wanted to make sure land in the UP could be developed and taxed. It wasn’t about mining in particular, McBroom insists.

“Our concerns were that a dark sky preserve could present some sort of difficulty for any form of development, not specific to one enterprise or another,” he said.

The 2012 legislation, which ended up passing, included a provision that said a dark sky preserve could not restrict the use and development of land. 

McBroom said he’d be “open to the idea” of supporting legislation to allow a state park in the UP to be turned into a dark sky preserve if “it would be something that that local area wanted and not something that was pushed on them by a department or bureaucracy.”

In the dark

Yooper Kathleen Heideman has had her eye on light pollution surrounding a different mine, Eagle Mine in Marquette County, for a while now. In last week’s virtual meeting about the dark sky prohibition in the UP, Heideman used satellite imagery to show there was little to no light pollution at the site of that mine in 1992, before the mine was installed. 

“You can see this beautiful, big, black blob of darkness out there,” she said.

But Heideman said that, in 2008, when permits for mineral exploration were approved, light registered on the map. By 2022, a heat map showing a sea of dark blues and greens is interrupted with an island of light green and yellow, indicating light pollution where the mine is located today.

“And then here is a view from space at a scale that you can see three-quarters of the United States. And you can still make out the dot for Eagle Mine in this map,” Heideman said.

Grotewohl insists the dark sky effort isn’t about stopping the Copperwood mine project over in Gogebic County. He said the Protect the Porkies campaign is about halting development of the mine, but the dark sky campaign is “completely separate.”

“It’s not that the Porkies or any other state park being a dark sky preserve will stop any sort of industrial activity in the area,” Grotewohl said, “but it will certainly motivate the conversation surrounding what kind of lighting that those operations should use.”

The state’s dark sky legislation calls for downward-facing lighting that “wherever practical and appropriate” uses motion sensors and is not on 24-7. Grotewohl said he’d like to see that type of lighting on the Copperwood mine, should the project move forward. 

The push for state-sanctioned dark sky preserves in the UP goes beyond lighting regulation. Grotewohl and others say creating more preserves will continue to put the area on the map for “astrotourists,” travelers who go places to see the northern lights, stars or astronomical events.

“We have people coming to the Keweenaw Peninsula just to access our dark skies, not just from the Midwest but across the country,” said Brad Barnett, executive director of Visit Keweenaw.

In looking at the top five reasons to travel to the Keweenaw Peninsula, dark sky viewing was the only activity listed for all four seasons, according to a 2024 University of Michigan Economic Growth Institute study commissioned by Visit Keweenaw and the Western Upper Peninsula Planning and Development Region. In fact, for the whole UP, the only other activity listed as a reason to visit in all four seasons was “Arts, Culture, & History.”

Cynthia Johnson, who helped found an “international dark sky sanctuary” on Beaver Island, said in the virtual event the designation is not only a way to draw people to the area, it’s a way to protect wildlife. Scientists say artificial light can interrupt animals’ sleep, migration and mating rituals.

“If light pollution is harming animals, insects, birds — all these things — what's it doing to your reproductive life? What's it doing to your sex life?” Johnson asked in the virtual meeting.

Grotewohl said that, after the petition circulates for a while, he and other dark sky supporters plan to talk to every legislator in the UP about lifting the prohibition.