Overview:
- Friends of the Detroit River board member says “what if” restoration projects became reality with Great Lakes Restoration Initiative funds.
- Celeron and Sugar Islands, two of the restoration projects, are publicly owned and managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
- Federal cutbacks are “slowing things down,” but do not change the Detroit River nonprofit’s priorities, says executive director.
Aboard a boat traveling down the Detroit River, riverkeeper Bob Burns recalls a time when it was more convenient to live on one of the river’s uninhabited islands than to rent an apartment on the mainland.
“Once I got out of college, my parents moved to another location, and I needed a place to live,” said Burns, Detroit riverkeeper for the nonprofit Friends of the Detroit River, who grew up on the island of Grosse Ile in the 1960s and 1970s.
“There was a spot on Stony Island, so I lived there year round for three years, and I actually was still going to school, taking some graduate classes, so I had to get on my snowmobile in the winter to go across to where we parked on Grosse Ile to get my car and then go to school from there.”…