Michigan

More than 20 square miles of vacant land lie within Detroit city limits. The legacy of decades of depopulation and disinvestment, the vacant land drains the city’s resources and poses threats to neighborhood safety—but it also holds potential for outdoor recreation, job creation, affordable housing, food security, small businesses, clean air and water, and climate change resiliency.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Hiawatha included Native American legends about Lake Superior's Grand Island, which boasts a 150-year-old cedar swamp, as well as Echo Lake, believed to be the world's largest beaver-formed lake.

The Community Green Mapping Project shows that almost 7,000 children
within Kalamazoo City and more than 28,000 outside the city limits do
not live within a 10-minute walk of publicly accessible play areas.

For several years, we have been building on earlier efforts to protect this key recreation destination in the Ottawa National Forest. In 2014 we helped protect an additional 175 acres to complete the conservation effort in the watershed, ensuring access to the river, lake, and the North Country National Scenic Trail, t