Tourism Isn't Neutral. But Neither Is Ignorance.
"Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind." — Aldo Leopold, "Conservation Esthetic," A Sand County Almanac
Tourism Isn't Neutral. But Neither Is Ignorance.
I want to tell you something that most outdoor tourism businesses would never say out loud: bringing people into wild places is not a neutral act. Every kayak on the water, every boot on a trail, every group we lead into the Les Cheneaux Islands creates some measure of impact on the very thing we're asking people to love. Our presence landing on any of the islands, including Government Island, however careful, is still presence. Our plastic kayaks scraping against rocks release microplastics into the water. We follow Leave No Trace principles and we ask every guest to do the same — and we mean it. But we don't pretend the impact doesn't exist.
We do it anyway. Because we believe Leopold was right. And because we've watched it happen with our own eyes.
The alternative isn't neutral either.
There's a trail just east of Cedarville that most people now know as the Narnia Trail. Trail counters recorded more than 50,000 people hiking it through October 2025 alone — making it the most visited property in The Nature Conservancy's entire Michigan portfolio. TNC is actively working on mitigation: boardwalks, educational signage, and hopefully never fences. But the damage accumulates faster than solutions can be built. I have watched a path that was 18 inches wide widen to nearly three feet in a single season. Hikers are unintentionally destroying the fragile lichen covering the giant boulders by climbing on them — lichen that takes decades to grow back. Nobody is doing it maliciously. They found the trail on a list, followed the directions, took the photos, and left. Most have no idea what they disturbed, or why it matters.
That is the unreceptive mind Leopold was writing about. Not a bad person. Just an uninformed one.
Now imagine that same person on a kayak, pausing beside a massive boulder deposited here by a retreating glacier thousands of years ago — a glacial erratic, carried from somewhere far north and dropped precisely here as the ice melted. A guide points to the lichen crusting its surface and says: that colony is forty years old. When it's gone, it doesn't come back on a human timescale.
Something changes. It doesn't always change loudly. Sometimes it's just a quieter kind of attention for the rest of the tour. But it changes.
That is what ecotourism is supposed to do. Not just get people outside. Get them outside and make them care about what's out there.
The water we paddle tells a story that most visitors never hear — and it is not a reassuring one.
Beneath the surface of Lake Huron, a catastrophe is unfolding in slow motion. Quagga mussels — invasive filter feeders native to eastern Europe, transported to the Great Lakes in the ballast water of cargo ships in the late 1980s — now exist in numbers that are genuinely difficult to comprehend. Quadrillions. They filter the entire volume of Lake Michigan in less than a week, stripping the water of the phytoplankton that forms the base of the food chain. The result is water so clear it looks tropical — and is nearly biologically dead across vast swaths of the lake floor. Lake whitefish populations have declined as much as 80 percent in parts of the Great Lakes. The cisco — Atikameg in Anishinaabemowin, a word that carries thousands of years of cultural weight — has sustained Indigenous communities and commercial fisheries in this region for generations, and it is collapsing. Quagga mussels filter so efficiently that UV rays now penetrate to depths they never reached before, literally sunburning embryonic fish before they can develop. The Great Lakes have tripled in clarity over three decades. That clarity is not a sign of health. It is the visual record of a food chain being dismantled from the bottom up. When you see the mussel-crusted rocks just under the surface on a summer paddle, you are looking at the front line of that dismantling. The quaggas are not only destroying the living ecosystem — their anchoring tendrils bore into old shipwrecks on the lake floor, and the weight of their colonies is collapsing hulls that have rested undisturbed for a century or more.
The sea lamprey — another invasive, this one entering through the Welland Canal a century ago — nearly destroyed Great Lakes fishing entirely before a binational scientific program developed a targeted lampricide in the 1950s and pulled the fishery back from the edge. That program requires ongoing annual treatment of tributaries throughout the Great Lakes watershed. We know from the reduced treatments during 2020–2022, when the pandemic disrupted operations, exactly how fast lamprey populations surge when the work pauses — and it is alarming. That program's funding has never had the long-term guarantee it deserves, and it remains a political hot potato in an era when federal conservation commitments are under pressure.
From the water, you can read the forest too — if someone tells you what you're looking at.
The spruce along these shorelines don't look quite right in places. Stands of pale dead wood standing among the cedars. The spruce budworm — a native moth whose population explosions are amplified by warmer winters that no longer kill off larvae — is moving through the forests of the eastern Upper Peninsula at a scale foresters haven't seen in decades. The cedar dominance along these shorelines is itself a story: a century of indiscriminate logging stripped most of the white pine, and decades of fire suppression designed to protect cottages and human development prevented the natural succession that would have allowed white pine, birch, hemlock, and tamarack to regenerate alongside the cedar. Clearcutting followed by suppression hasn't done these forests any favors. And with climate pressure, heat, disease, and the short growing season this far north, the problems compound. The dominoes affecting one system cascade onto the next.
The Blackburnian warbler migrates from the Andes to nest and feed in exactly these forests — drawn here specifically to dine on spruce budworm larvae. It faces pressure at both ends of its range and along every mile of its migration route between. The bald eagles we watch soaring over the Les Cheneaux — a recovery story that felt like a triumph not long ago — now confront avian influenza. Eagles contract H5N1 by eating infected waterfowl. Red-breasted mergansers, which winter on Lake Michigan before migrating north through this region, died in the hundreds along the Chicago lakefront in early February 2025, washing ashore in numbers that longtime observers described as unlike anything they had ever seen. At Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota, occupied bald eagle nests plunged 50 percent in 2022, with H5N1 confirmed as the cause in 38 percent of eagles that could be diagnosed. Nationwide, at least 606 confirmed eagle deaths across 45 states — and experts believe that number represents only a fraction of the true toll. With cuts to scientific research, we may never know the precise local impact on the populations we watch from our kayaks here. But the merganser die-offs along Lake Michigan are not an unreasonable thing to consider when an eagle circles overhead in the Les Cheneaux.
None of these are separate problems. They are one system under pressure from multiple directions simultaneously, each failure making the next one worse. And across the UP and the Great Lakes watershed, proposed sulfide mining operations add yet another layer of pressure on ecosystems already struggling to absorb everything else. Near Ontonagon in the western UP, the proposed Copperwood Mine — a copper sulfide operation owned by a Canadian company — would tunnel within 100 feet of Lake Superior, directly adjacent to the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, on land ceded under the 1842 Treaty of La Pointe. Its tailings pond would sit on terrain sloping toward the lake. The proposed Twin Metals copper-nickel mine in northeastern Minnesota sits upstream in the Rainy River watershed — a watershed that flows directly into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Sulfide mining of this type has a well-documented history of acid drainage and toxic leaching. For eagles already navigating avian flu, collapsing food chains, and warming winters, the last thing the Great Lakes ecosystem needs is another source of toxic pressure on the water.
And closer to home — much closer — Government Island, the federally designated roadless area in the heart of the Les Cheneaux that we paddle to on many Bigger Dipper and Perfect Picnic Day trips, sits within the Hiawatha National Forest and has been protected from road construction, logging, and development under the 2001 Roadless Rule. In June 2025, the Trump administration announced it would rescind that rule. Formal rulemaking began in August. The process is not yet complete, and litigation is expected — but if the rescission stands, being an island is no protection. Timber is timber. The irony of logging an island accessible only by boat, in the middle of a federally permitted ecotour route, in a region whose entire economy depends on the pristine character of this landscape, apparently does not register as an obstacle. The Horseshoe Bay Wilderness, where we run our Hiawatha Perfect Picnic Day tours, holds a separate and stronger designation under the Wilderness Act — that requires an act of Congress to undo, a higher bar. But the roadless rule has been the practical protection for places like Government Island, and it is currently in jeopardy.
There is reason for hope — but it comes from people willing to fight for it.
The same tribal nations whose treaty rights have been contested, litigated, and undermined for 150 years are now leading some of the most important conservation and restoration work happening in the Great Lakes. The Bay Mills Indian Community, the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians are partnering with The Nature Conservancy and Michigan DNR to restore river-spawning runs of lake whitefish — runs lost more than a century ago when log drives and dams scoured river bottoms clean and blocked upstream passage. Biologists are stocking whitefish eggs in the Jordan River and in the Carp River, a Lake Huron tributary right here in the Upper Peninsula, hoping to rewire the fish's instincts — because whitefish spawn only in the spot where they were born, and generations have forgotten rivers exist. They are also physically hauling live adult fish upriver, trying to restore spawning behavior that a century of habitat loss erased. Atikameg — "the canary in the coal mine," one scientist called it. The people who have always known that are doing the most urgent work to bring it back.
There are two documentaries worth finding if you want to understand what's at stake beneath the surface of the water you're paddling. All Too Clear: Beneath the Surface of the Great Lakes uses extraordinary underwater drone footage to document the quagga mussel invasion and what it has done to the lake floor — images that no one had ever captured before and that are genuinely difficult to forget. It's a Canadian production with limited US streaming availability; search for it, and paying to stream it is a worthwhile investment. The Fish Thief: A Great Lakes Mystery, narrated by J.K. Simmons and available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, YouTube, and Tubi, tells the full story of the sea lamprey invasion and the remarkable binational scientific effort that beat it back — and the ongoing vigilance required to keep it that way. Both are worth your time before or after a trip out here. They will change what you see when you look at the water.
This is why ecotourism, done well, is not just recreation. It is — to borrow Leopold's framing — the work of building receptivity. The guide who explains what a glacial erratic is. The naturalist who names the warbler before you even know to ask. The moment on the water when someone notices the unusual clarity of the lake and understands for the first time what it actually means.
Leopold didn't just write about building receptivity. He built the legal framework to protect wild places from the unreceptive mind. In 1924, while working for the US Forest Service in New Mexico, he designated the Gila Wilderness — the first federally protected wilderness area in the United States. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area, managed as wilderness by the USFS since 1909 and one of the original areas formally designated under the Wilderness Act of 1964, follows directly in that tradition. The places we paddle through, the shorelines we land on, the islands we ask our guests to treat gently — they exist within a conservation legacy that Leopold helped create. We try to honor it on every trip.
We've watched people leave a tour and look up the Great Lakes Compact. We've had guests ask about 1836 Treaty fishing rights, what tribal sovereignty means for Great Lakes conservation, and what tribes are doing to restore the habitats and fish they have always known as kin. We've had people call their state or national congressional representatives. We've had people simply tell their kids something true about the water they swam in that summer — something that might matter to a decision made twenty years from now.
That is worth some microplastics on a rock shelf. Not casually, not carelessly — but worth it. Because the person who has never been out here, who has never had a guide point to a mussel-crusted rock and say look at what's happening here — that person is not neutral either. Their indifference has a cost. Their ignorance has a vote.
Leopold wrote about building receptivity into the unlovely human mind. He wasn't being cruel. He was being honest about what it takes to make people care about something they've never experienced — and about what happens to wild places when nobody does.
We bring people out here because we believe the experience changes them. And we believe changed people make different choices. That's not just a job. That's the calling.
Come out and see it for yourself.