PELLSTON — Indira Sankaran wades knee-high in a northern Michigan river looking for an endangered water beetle, living the legacy of students half a century ago at one of the nation’s largest and longest continuously operating scientific field stations.
“There’s so many facets to protecting our nature and the first one is making sure that people have the right relationship with it,” said Sankaran, who will be a senior at the University of Michigan in the fall, “understanding what they’re living on.”
Sankaran is the 2023 CLEAR Fellow at the University of Michigan Biological Station, the more than 10,000-acre research and teaching campus in operation since 1909 along Douglas Lake just south of the Mackinac Bridge in Pellston.
The fellowship is an opportunity founded and funded in 2014 by former UMBS students with a passion for water quality. It provides tuition support, room, board, research fees and supplies at UMBS to students doing applied aquatic research along with public outreach and education — directly involving students in the community.
“We’re creating a sort of drum beat and a continuing cadence of developing young people into the sorts of environmental scientists and advocates that we know that we need in order to impact the change that now has become that much more urgent,” said Dr. Linda Greer, an environmental scientist and impact advisor based in Washington, D.C.
Greer was one of the UMBS students in 1977 who started Project CLEAR, which grew over time into the environmental nonprofit known as the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council.
CLEAR stands for Community and Lakes Environmental Awareness and Research.
After five summers at UMBS, Greer pursued a career in advocacy, applying science as a lobbyist to environmental decision makers. She became famous as an international sustainability scientist for her work fighting pollution and waste in the fashion and clothing industry.
Today, following in Greer’s science and advocacy footsteps, Sankaran lives and takes a summer class at UMBS as part of the CLEAR Fellowship while simultaneously interning with the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council, the nonprofit based in Petoskey.
“Going back to our start back in 1979, a lot of our founding members at the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council were people who worked at or went to University of Michigan Biological Station,” said Eli Baker, education manager for Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council.
“It’s hard to believe that this is almost 50 years ago that Project CLEAR was started,” Greer said, “and to do not just the science but also the community outreach so that we could take the knowledge and use it to leverage change.”
Greer said Mark Paddock, who was associate director of UMBS at the time, provided direction as the eight students worked together to apply for a grant to directly address water quality problems of some of the inland lakes in northern Michigan, such as encouraging local homeowners to maintain septic systems.
“But we were a flash in the pan, we were a summer project in 1977, we were students going off to continue to educate ourselves. This needed to continue. Tip of the Mitt became the permanent, year-round, professional organization that embodied Project CLEAR.”
The Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council is dedicated to protecting lakes, streams, wetlands and groundwater in the Great Lakes basin through advocacy, innovative education, water quality monitoring, research and restoration actions.
“From the very beginning we’ve worked with UMBS very closely in not only the formation of the organization and what we’re about, but also we’ve sent a lot of water samples to the Bio Station over the years,” Baker said. “We’ve worked with students to do things like we’re doing today.”
The team is searching the Maple River for an endangered beetle.
“It’s the Hungerford’s Crawling Water Beetle,” said Sankaran, who studies in U-M’s Program in the Environment (PitE) and is expected to graduate in 2024 with a bachelor’s degree in ecology, evolution and biodiversity. “We’re doing a survey here because last year Tip of the Mitt did a survey. They recently removed a dam. We’re looking at post-dam removal — if the beetle is still here. It’s an endangered species. It’s really small. It’s hard to find.”
“They are kind of a glacial holdover,” Baker said. “When we had streams coming off from glaciers, these beetles made their homes in those areas and then the theory is that they were very present here in northern Michigan and then as we came up and logged our streams and changed this landscape drastically, they lost a lot of their habitat.”
Calla Beers, a U-M and UMBS alumna, works at Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council and collaborates with Sankaran on field work, public education and community engagement.
“She’s fantastic,” Beers said. “We were so lucky to find her and that she found this internship too. I think working at a nonprofit, she’s found a great way to mix in with everybody — to have to do every type of job. She goes out in the field. She’s also working on some different communication projects with us and doing a lot of outreach.”
About 10 years ago the alumni of the original CLEAR Project group decided to fund a CLEAR Fellow to perpetuate and keep strong the relationship the Biological Station and the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council.
“Every year we get a fellow who is based here at UMBS, working there at Tip of the Mitt and hopefully replicating the sort of experience that we had as the original Project CLEAR,” Greer said.
Greer is amazed and thrilled with the ongoing success of both the fellowship and the nonprofit.
“The Watershed Council is so next level on so many fronts,” Greer said. “They built such an incredible organization that way, way exceeded my expectations.”
“I think the Watershed Council has offered me a lot of different projects that that I can dip my toes in and understand what it means to advocate for the waters here,” Sankaran said.
To learn more about or apply for the CLEAR Fellowship, go to the UMBS website.
Watch the video of Indira's story on the UMBS YouTube page.
