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michiganconservation.net

About this website and its author:
This website is a project of Robert Liebermann. I felt that this was important because of my great admiration and affection for the Michigan Conservation/Natural Resources magazine, and the dearth of information on the subject. I think that the things that the magazine said were important in their time and still are.

I began collecting these magazines seriously in 2004 as a way to keep learning about my native Michigan while in 'exile' in Alaska, though of course I have read them since childhood, and even have a few years of issues that I bought back in the '80s... somewhere. I was never fortunate enough to have had a subscription.

Nonprofit, independent, not fancy:
This website is intended as an educational, non-profit resource only. It is independent of any entity other than Robert Liebermann, and is solely supported by myself. There is no profit or promotion motive other than to tell the story of the Magazine and what it showed in its articles.

All opinions on the site (other than the magazine copy) thus far are my own. I invite your opinions, agreement, observations, debate, or rebuttal of same -- I will ask to add any good stuff to the site, and welcome and sort of contributions.

The State of Michigan is not involved in any way other than having produced this brilliant magazine and developed the careers of the people who worked on it; some of which, I hope, will be willing to tell me (as private citizens), a few stories about 'the old days'.

The website is decidedly low-budget. Most scans were made, for example, on a cheap HP 3400 flatbed scanner that I bought for $6 at a local second-hand shop. All the writing and code was done by myself on a text editor, and I intend it to remain simple and clean; sort of like a plain old reading table. All issues of the magazine shown on this website are from my own collection, and were bought via second-hand bookshops locally or over the web, or on ebay. I have paid all of the expenses myself, including acquisition of the magazines, domain registration and server space, and the $6 scanner.

The content:
The website, of course, is under my editorship, and the content that I pass on to you from the Magazine will thus tend to be what I thought was most relevant, important, attractive, representative, enjoyable, or just interesting to me as I developed the site... The initial scanning took place in March and April 2010 shortly before I returned to Alaska (and the magazines stayed in storage in Michigan), so some 'triage' of priority had to be made at that time, and that reflects my biases.

Thus you're more likely to see articles on plants or photography or the Northwoods than trapping and southern Michigan trout streams, since I'm a botanist and photographer who doesn't trap and is more often in the UP (or Alaska) than southern Michigan. There's very, very little in the Magazine that appeared over the years, however, that I don't find worthwhile (save for the advertising and some of the cheapened content of the final privatized years).

At some future point it may be possible for me to add content as requested. Better yet, track down some issues yourself and read them complete!

Of course the 'star' here's not the website but the Michigan Conservation/Michigan Natural Resources Magazine itself, and I remind you again that I played no part in that at all, I am just a fan. I'd like people to take a new, or first look at it, and think about what it stood for - we need that sort of thinking now more than ever.

Disclaimers, ownership, privacy:
I dislike disclaimers and legalese, but it is important to me that nobody mistakes this website for anything other than what it is - a nonprofit independent source of State Government-developed information - and that it remains available to all so that they can learn from the information that was published so many years ago.

If you look through the scanned pages, you might notice the original mailing labels on many of the back pages. This is one of the neatest things, I think, about collecting these from a hodge-podge of sources - I get all sorts of interesting names, plain and elaborate; big city and small town addresses; Michigan and outstate; and so on. People who read the magazine when it was new, all those years ago. It's the equivalent of buying old books with interesting inscriptions to people you've never met, or exlibris labels with the elaborate name of the former owner. Of course nowadays you see people making all sorts of effort to remove any actual address labels off of everything, as if some terrorist is going to find a magazine in a dentist's office (or on a website) and decide to go after that person, since it's so hard to find an actual address to target using any other method... Anyway, that's nuts. If you are someone who's name's on a label, or know/knew someone who's label shows up here, contact me. You might convince me to 'blackstripe' the label on the scans, but more likely I'll offer to reunite you with some of the old magazines and ask you about what it was like to get them in the mail every couple of months, back in the good old days.

On copyrights:
As of this writing I do not know the exact restrictions on copyrights for the images, text, or layout of the magazine presented here, though believe them to be reproducible for non-profit educational use; not unlike their original purpose.

The presentation on this website (actual scans, design, and original content) is, however the property of Robert Liebermann. It is freely reproducible for educational, personal, and historical purposes (provided content is unaltered and credited and links to the website remain), but for any commercial use (including ebay ads!) written permission is required.

What's planned:
It is my hope (and plan) to enhance this website with information, recollections, or interviews with people who were involved with the magazine, in order to add something entirely new about Michigan's history to those who care about such things. Most of those people who made it are gone from us now, but many of those who were involved in the final decades are still working on other projects or retired.

(The background is old knotty pine at the excellent, friendly, cheap, and fairly original Birchwood Motel in St. Ignace. Recommended.)