Introducing: [Un]Natural Selection

Lake trout are on life support in Lake Michigan. Every year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spends tens of millions of dollars raising and stocking them. But what if there was another way? Genetic engineering is advancing fast. Could it be used for conservation?

Over time, people have caused extensive damage to rivers by scouring their banks with logs, channelizing them through towns and cutting them up with dams. In the last 50 years, scientists have discovered removing dams can vastly improve conditions in rivers. But not all dams can come down. Sometimes they are our greatest protection against invasive species.

Most people think of the wilderness as a place untouched by humans, but that’s far from the truth. Evidence stored in tree rings in the Minnesota Boundary Waters affirms an oral history of Indigenous land management through controlled burns. Those intentional fires created one of the Great Lakes’ most popular wilderness destinations.

North Manitou Island is like a petri dish. It shows what happens when the deer exhaust a food supply, and all the young plants and greenery are eaten to a nub. It’s a cautionary tale about the entangled fates of whitetail deer and the forests they inhabit.

This month, gray wolves went back on the endangered species list. But it wasn’t because the population suddenly plummeted. It had more to do with an ongoing fight between stakeholders who have strong, opposing feelings about protecting wolves.

There’s a long-term impact to armoring shoreline on the Great Lakes. And as it turns out, it actually exacerbates the erosion it’s meant to stop.

In the 1960s, scientists released a foreign insect to control invasive plants. But the plan backfired. The bugs are attacking a rare native plant in the sand dunes of the Upper Great Lakes.

In [Un]Natural Selection, a new season of Points North, we’ll examine our role as part of the ecosystem and explore the ethical line between mending our natural world and meddling with it.