Friends Group
Friends of Indiana Dunes
A friends group for Indiana Dunes National Park.
Stand · Find your defenders
Who’s defending Indiana Dunes?
4 groups have it in their care
National park in Indiana, 16,268 acres, managed by the National Park Service, designated in 2019.
The defenders
The groups doing the most work here
4 groups are on the record for Indiana Dunes, each tied to it by a source our editors read, in the order they carry the weight. Give directly; nothing routes through us.
Leading the fight
On the ground
Advocacy · Gaithersburg, MD
Izaak Walton League of America
Served for decades alongside the Save the Dunes Council as a watchdog against industrial encroachment on the dunes after the national lakeshore was established in 1966.
64¢ to the workFounded 1922
Advocacy · Washington, DC
National Parks Conservation Association
Documented the park’s industrial air pollution in its Polluted Parks analysis and pressed EPA in 2024 to force a stronger Indiana regional haze plan cutting emissions from park-harming facilities.
217 staff + 900 volunteers78¢ to the workFounded 1919
Grassroots · San Clemente, CA
Surfrider Foundation
Sued U.S. Steel over the 2017 hexavalent chromium spill at Portage and intervened in the government enforcement case, whose consent decree includes three years of public Lake Michigan water quality monitoring.
95 staff + 50,000 volunteers81¢ to the workFounded 1984
The situation
What’s happening to Indiana Dunes
Fifteen miles of Lake Michigan shoreline squeezed between steel mills and subdivisions, proof that wildness can persist in the most unlikely places. One of the most biodiverse parks in the entire system. Industrial pollution from adjacent facilities keeps contaminating its soils and waters, and nobody is held accountable.
- 2019Upgraded from national lakeshore to national park
Industrial contamination from adjacent facilities
Source: The Statehouse File
No public comment window is open on Indiana Dunes right now. A call script is ready on the Public Lands Action Network, and the groups above are how the fight gets funded and argued in the meantime.
Your move
How to stand for Indiana Dunes
GiveGive to Friends of Indiana Dunes
Their own site; they take gifts directly. Your dollar never passes through us.
Their site ↗SpeakCall your representativesA ready call script on Indiana Dunes, plus any comment window as it opens.
Public Lands Action NetworkFollowWatch the mapEvery threatened place in the country, tracked, with who stands for each.
Threatened Lands MapBuild my lineup around Indiana Dunes: the leading group here opens it, and the other seats fill from this record.
Indiana Dunes has defenders. It needs more.
The work is theirs. The backing is yours.