6 JULY 2018 • FOGHORN FOGHORNFOCUS: ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES I f you fly east from Duluth, over the south shore of Lake Superior, it won’t take long to see a peninsula that juts north deep into the heart of the largest of the Great Lakes. On that peninsula, facing southeast, is the harbor town of Bayfield WI. What was once a regional fishing and lumbering center is now a lively community of shops and restaurants serving a town defined by lovingly preserved 19th century architecture and seasonal visitors. Bayfield is one terminus for the services of the Madeline Island Ferry Line (MIFL). The other is two miles and a world away, Madeline Island. Madeline Island is separated from Bayfield and the mainland b y the North Channel of Chequamegon Bay. Madeline is the only populated island among theApostle Islands National Lake Shore. It was once the ancient spiritual home of the Ojibwe Nation. Later, it became a French fur trading capital and, in just the past 300 years, the home of an ever-changing population of year-round residents. Today, a collection of small business- es, imaginative entrepreneurs, skilled trades people, retirees and artists shape a community of about 320 people in January, which rises sharply to 3,000 in July. While Bayfield and Madeline Island frame the service area of the MIFL, I suggest that they are also a revealing lens through which to see our planet in re- markable transition. The words “climate change” have become trigger noises for partisan debates. Arms are waved. Slurs hurled back and forth. Those two words, in our current political ‘climate’, have become one reason to miss a huge, critically important point: the climate is changing. Right before our eyes, our part of the world is demonstrably warmer. Right before our eyes, the natural environment, the climate between Bayfield WI and Madeline Island is exerting powerful new forces…forces that are changing our customers’ and passengers’ needs, our local economy, business practices, employment, home values and, for purposes of this short article, a 100-year old business model. I submit that our experience is not, cannot be unique. For as long as anyone here can remember, the cycle of our year is marked by the following three events: • Thinning ice initiates MIFL service in the spring; • Seven to nine inches of ice shuts down ferry service in winter and introduces first the windsled; and • An ice road (two to three lanes of sturdy ice) opens car and light truck travel between Bayfield and Madeline across the lake. Then, the cycle begins again in the spring when warmer temperatures arrive and the ice thaws. From a ferry operator’s business perspective, this cycle builds in a rational relationship between supply and demand. Ferry line operations in spring, summer and autumn coincide with tourist demand for ferry service. Close of ferry opera- tions in winter, fits with an absence of demand that attends the long-awaited arrival of the ice road. That frozen highway liberates Islanders from the physical and financial require- ments of ferry travel. It liberates MIFL from the burden of costly, lower demand winter opera- tions…except when it doesn’t. Since 1998 – the year of a major El Niño event – MIFL has repeatedly witnessed what was once considered a rare weather anomaly. Lake ice is increasingly hesitant to form into the lauded ice road. The uncontested reality we face is a new climate. The trajectory of our climate trends since 1965 is leading in only one direction. (See chart “First and Last”) Over the past 53 years, the length of the ice road season has decreased 40 percent. Whereas a year without ice road travel to Madeline once bordered on the inconceivable, we’ve seen four such years (two more years with less than two weeks shutdown) just since 1998! Across the Great Lakes a new climate has begun to reveal itself. In the 20 years between 1973 and 1992, Lake Superior saw an average 26 percent ice cover each winter. Between 1993 and 2012, that average has dropped to 13 percent (see “Great Lakes Ice Cover”). Lakes Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario have all seen precipitous declines in annual ice cover. Operating in the New Climate By Robin Trinko Russell, Madeline Island Ferry Line with Michael Collins, Madeline Island Resident Dates of last and first Madeline Island Ferry Boat each year. Average Great Lakes Ice Cover two 20-year periods.