Tom Vanderpoel - Make Something Better

The Chicago Wilderness community was rocked on August 8, 2017 by the sudden death of Tom Vanderpoel. We yet continue to be inspired by and learn from Tom and people like him. 

Tom spent more than three decades working intensively and nearly full time on just a few small prairies, savannas, and wetlands. He was better at the details than most anyone else, because he focused so tightly and took it so seriously.

His greatest joy was discovering (or learning that someone else was discovering) recovery techniques for some gentian, or butterfly, or turtle, or puccoon, or fish.

This is a detail from the program distributed at Tom's memorial service on August 28th.

Tom grew up with four brothers who have stayed close (and vacationed together) throughout his life. His dad, Waid, during work hours, was Senior Vice President and Chief Investment Officer of the First National Bank of Chicago. Professionally, Waid was recognized for his work with (later Presidential candidate) George Romney on tax policy. I knew him as Chair of the Board of the Illinois Nature Conservancy, where I worked. I found him a wise mentor who somehow had time to care about me personally. At home he was a rock gardener, who co-wrote a book on rock gardening.

Waid took his boys seining for fish. Many parents want to acquaint their kids with nature. Waid’s boys developed a passion for it. Rare Illinois clean streams have diverse and colorful fish that Tom has compared to the birds of the rain forest. Boys being boys, they loved the challenges of water, mud, and slippery little beauties that could be caught in nets, studied, and released back into freedom. One of Tom’s brothers is the John Vanderpoel who, as a world-class birder, was “sort of the model for” and an advisor to the film “Big Year” (starring Jack Black, Owen Wilson, and Steve Martin). Imagine! A successful and funny film on nature and birders!

Like their dad, Tom (right) and his brother Jim (left) took kids seining for rare fish. 

Tom described the strange transition that took place as dad and the boys started to realize that a clean stream also had other rare nature around it. They discovered that the bright wildflowers along the edges were prairie flowers. As Tom’s brother Jim later said, “We wouldn’t do this now, I promise! But, back then, we dug some of them up.” They started restoring a prairie in their Barrington back yard. (Later they wisely used only seed – and plugs from areas being destroyed by development.)

When he retired, Waid volunteered as a leader of Citizens for Conservation, a Barrington land trust. He raised money and bought natural remnants - and areas with strong restoration potential.

I met Tom in an odd way. Nature Conservancy scientists and planners had realized that we’d nearly missed the boat on what should have been one of the Midwest’s conservation priorities. Although we were progressing rapidly on prairie conservation, we were doing nothing on the rich-soil oak savannas and oak woodlands that had long covered much of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. We had found and protected many prairie remnants and sand savannas, but we had not even “developed a search image” and thus not even tried to find any significant black-soil remnant savannas. People had thought they were either gone – or perhaps they’d never been all that special, and the savanna’s components would be conserved within our prairie and forest reserves. Gradually we realized that these fire-dependent communities had many animals and plants that our current strategy would lose utterly. We tried to figure out what to look for and where we might find them. Railroad rights-of-way seemed one possible place. We spread the word and asked people to search Illinois for these phantoms.

Tom called one day, introduced himself, and told me what he’d been finding. I was thrilled that someone was actually doing it. It turns out that Tom had bought two-way tickets on the railroads that ran through Lake and McHenry Counties. He’s sit by the window with a notebook in his lap and watch for hints and clues and landmarks. Then he’d return by car and foot and study all the candidate sites.

His best find was in McHenry County. The site had such rarities as the small white lady-slipper and queen-of-the-prairie. It had thousands of rare (and classic savanna indicator) cream gentians, yellow pimpernels, and pale Indian plantains.

Tom started a little business called Savanna Landscaping. It worked mostly for homeowners who wanted relatively natural yards. But Tom’s passion became savanna, prairie, and wetland restoration. He made little money on that, and didn’t much pursue it as a business. (My impression was that he supported himself more by wise investments than by Savanna Landscaping. And he spent very little on himself.) Citizens for Conservation owned remnants that needed restoration. Soon he was leading restoration volunteers and supervising the interns.      

He worked with an attention to detail that few professionals can match. No landowner or institution at that time would pay for the the experimental creativity and hours it took. He discovered, for example, the importance of the “Ten Warriors” – sedges that make up the heart of certain wetlands. These “Warriors” (for a list, see End Notes) are robust enough to largely exclude the invasive pest, reed canary grass. But previous restoration attempts with these species had mostly failed. In nature, warrior sedges establish new plants rarely; reproduction requires rare conditions. Prior to Tom, the restoration work tended to rely on the wimpy sedges that could be restored easily by throwing some seed around or by standard plug planting. Relying on these, we were regularly losing the battle against reed-canary grass, no matter how much herbicide we threw at it. When reed-canary won, the rest of biodiversity died.

Tom discovered that his most-desired species would do well when he grew them in pots and planted mature plants on created hummocks out in wetland muck. He noticed that if he planted the warrior species in shallow water, they would die of drought during the summer, and if he planted them in as deep water as they needed, they would drown before summer. The leaves needed air, and roots needed permanent wet.

Since the warriors needed to grow in tall hummocks that rise out of the muck, Tom developed the technique of planting the rare seed in tall pots, babying the seedlings for a year or two, and then planting the whole pot (with the bottom cut off), not buried, but sticking up out of the muck. After a year or so the plant would be securely established on its hummock, and he’d cut the pot away. Then the other associated animals and plants would have proper hummocks or tussocks to deal with, and nature would proceed.  

Tom's restoration of the former cornfields (foreground here) of Flint Creek Savanna seamlessly blended diverse pond, sedge meadow, prairie and savanna. It is a masterpiece of restoration. Tom (on the right here, comparing notes with Rob Sulski) was happy to teach what he'd learned. And he continued to thoughtfully consider and re-consider options and sequencing. He taught and learned more every day. 

Healy Road Prairie was a different kind of challenge. It called to Tom, as it did to many of us. We “saved” many threatened prairies, and we lost some. Healy was one of the best. Waid had tried to raise money and convince the owner to wait, and sell. Steve Byers of the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission thought he had a commitment from the owner. But one day in July 1990, Steve drove by and saw the bulldozer starting to gouge it. He called the owner and got a reprieve until the weekend. We decided to try to move the prairie. Steve Apfelbaum somehow rounded up volunteer tree-spade operators, and front-end loaders, and semi-trucks. He and I negotiated and arranged for a bulldozer to pile up a new gravel hill on the edge of an abandoned gravel quarry at Bluff Spring Fen Nature Preserve. We appealed for volunteers. 400 people showed up and worked all day all weekend. News Anchor Walter Jacobsen called it “the story of the year.”  The Chicago Tribune would do a page on it, in its 1997 book, “Chicago Days – 150 Defining Moments in the life of a Great City.”

Tom was the expert, glue, inspiration, and mentor who supervised the transplant of Healy Road Prairie to the fen. He had the strength, patience, and assurance to teach those 400 people how and where to plant the torn pieces of ancient turf. Our culture should have done better. It was an atrocity to destroy the original Healy Road Prairie. All the plant species survived the move. Most of the animal species were lost. This hill prairie is making a new life for itself with two other nearby hill prairies at Bluff Sprig Fen.

 

Tom (in Cubs shirt, above) discusses more details of sedge restoration with Sulski.
Every photo captures the focus and intensity that made him great.

Tom’s most recent initiative is “The Sought After Sixty.” He worked it up with his brother, Jim. We met to discuss it on June 28^th. He wrote me more about one species on August 2^nd. To understand Tom’s passion, you have to step back for a minute and think about the extinction spasm enveloping the Earth. Most people have some sense of the species being lost in the tropics. In the temperate world, it’s not so much species we’re losing. In the tropics, one hilltop or valley may have species found nowhere else. Some of our Chicago Wilderness species may also be found in Florida, or Canada, or Mexico. Such species, as species, are likely to survive global warming and the rest of what’s still seen by most as “progress.”

But the genetics of a bur oak in a southern river valley are not the same as the genetics of that species in a Barrington savanna, nor the ones of that species on a Dakota hilltop. People in the future may well need the genes from that oak, or some wheatgrass, or some nitrogen-fixing bacterium, or a key pollinator from disparate parts of all their ranges. That’s why we work to set aside diverse healthy ecosystems – and restore health to others. For the future of humanity – and because it seems ugly and stupid to just let millions of years of evolution get wiped out, for no reason.

The Sought After Sixty are sixty plant species that once grew in the Citizens for Conservation area but are no longer found there. People would accept the challenge to have the adventure of going out, like Tom did with the savannas, and finding them. Many plant populations are slowly vanishing. We need their genes, from somewhere nearby, for inclusion in restored ecosystems. Tom helped conceive and promote the Barrington Greenways Initiative (BGI) - 14,000 acres in McHenry, Lake, and Cook Counties. Volunteers from the North Branch Restoration Project and Habitat 2030 got wind of the idea and have expressed interest in doing something similar in their own areas. It could be fun. Conservationists learn from and inspire each other.

CFC seed pickers at Grigsby Prairie. Volunteer stewardship is the heart and soul of local conservation.

In a note, Justin Pepper of the Bobolink Foundation goes into more detail about Tom and the BGI: "He was as generous as he was knowledgeable. While he attended to painstaking stewardship details at each  CFC preserve, his focus went far beyond. For years, under Tom’s leadership, CFC has been a major seed donor for other restorations in NW Cook and SW Lake counties. He saw his work as stair-stepping to bigger and better. Tom developed the concept of a Barrington Greenways Initiative and has been organizing it with others from CFC, Friends of the Forest Preserves, Audubon Great Lakes, the Bobolink Foundation and the Lake and Cook Forest Preserve Districts. The new collaborative plan will scale up what CFC has accomplished; it aims to include land acquisition and creative restoration of animals—a particular passion in recent years—all from a foundation of community engagement and volunteer leadership. CFC and its partners are committed to continuing this work at the same high standard and with the same generosity of spirit as a way to honor our friend." 

Wendy Paulson has been board chair of many conservation organizations and initiatives, local and international. She credits Tom as being a major inspiration. She wrote: "He was ever looking forward, always upbeat, always figuring out the next steps, whether it was for a more ambitious conservation vision or the specific tasks for the next workday.  He never focused on the negative but exemplified a can-do spirit.  If there was an especially knotty conservation challenge, he faced it squarely and figured out a solution.  He never wasted time, either his own or others’. Workdays started and ended promptly, usually with participants wanting to do more.  But Tom understood the importance and effectiveness of focused, well structured activity and there was no workday that ended without a strong feeling, all around, of that day’s mission accomplished."

She continued: "With all the qualities he expressed – vision, determination, inspired and inspiring leadership, warmth, humor, vigor, patience – there’s another that I have long admired about Tom.  That is fidelity.  Fidelity to place, to people, to mission.  In a world in which change, often cataclysmic change, seems to be the common order, Tom was a solid rock.  He worked where he could make a real difference.  Barrington is the obvious beneficiary of his vision, in sites like Grigsby Prairie, Flint Creek Savanna, Baker’s Lake Savanna, and forest preserves in Lake and Cook Counties.  Because of the excellent work done locally, his influence extends far beyond the Barrington area, as the quality of the work done here attracted attention from around the state, the nation, and even the world." 

Tom, wife Gail, and son Cooper

Years ago, Tom was felled for a while when his heart turned out to be clogged with cholestrol. He was angry. I think it was the only time I’ve seen him really mad. “I did everything right!” he said, through gritted teeth. He ate healthy foods. He exercised. He didn’t drink or smoke. He carefully applied sun screen, grrrrrrr. After the first attack, he was even more religious, health-wise. But his body had a predisposition. This year, he turned 66. A person who survived to 100 years old could easily have lived, loved, and done a lot less than he.

Tom had seemed gloriously robust and healthy, through nearly all of his last day. That morning and afternoon he’d worked in prairie and savanna. His was a good life, as all should be, that we conservationists were privileged to share. 

Justin Pepper and Don Parker interviewed Tom as a major part of compiling A Healthy Nature Handbook.

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End Notes

1. The photo collage is from a momento passed out at the tribute to Tom held at Citizens Park in Barrington, August 28, 2017. Other photos courtesy of Gail Vanderpoel. 

2. The “Ten Warriors” – Recommendations from Tom Vanderpoel:

These are the ten species of sedges (most of which generally need to be planted by plugs rather than seed) that do best at sealing up a wetland so that diversity can flourish and invasives (reed canary, cat-tail, river bulrush etc.) don’t take over and wipe out all else:

Carex stricta

C. haydenii

C. buxbaumii

C. pellita

C. lacustris

C. trichocarpa

C. atheroedes

C. utriculata 

C. sartwellii

C. tetanica 

Alternates:

Carex emoryi

Carex aquatilus

(In other lists, Tom seemed to include these and omit bauxbaumii and haydenii or tetanica)

When Tom saw the way Carex vesicaria was working with the other warriors at the Somme Prairie Grove's  Swale Pond, he said that Vesicaria perhaps should be on the list too.

ALSO good to plant with the warriors - for biodiversity and sustainability:

Iris

Sparganium (wettest)

Acorus

Soft stem bulrush (deep water, just before lily pads)

Scirpus acutus (grows with pelita)

Eleocharis

“Of course, you have to pour in the diversity once you’ve planted the plugs, because they’re probably like big bluestem: they’ll keep everything else out if they’re too dense,” Tom said

3. I heard the stunning news of Tom's passing while vacationing on a nature-y island in northern Lake Michigan. As I walked the trail through this island state park, overwhelmed, I came to a boulder with a bronze plaque commemorating a fellow who lived to be 26 years old, and who must have loved nature. The words on that plaque touched me at that moment. When later I searched for them on the internet, I found that the untitled poem was by an American housewife and florist, Mary Fry, who is said to have penned it on a brown paper bag to console a grieving friend. The version on the plaque had been edited a bit, and indeed I edited, for Tom, as I copied it down. The poem has been translated into more than twelve languages and edited by many.

Make Something Better

By Mary Elizabeth Fry – with some editing

Do not stand at my grave and weep.

I am not there.

I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I’m bluestem, glinting in the snow.

I am sun on ripening seed.

I show you sweet clover.

I call you to a need.

When you awake in the morning hush,

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of birds, circling in flight. 

I‘m in the stars when you look up at night.

In woods, in prairies, I’m in all,

When fires crackle and rains fall,

On the gravel hill, in the boggy seep.

Do not stand by my grave and weep. 

Help someone.

Heal something.

Yes: make the world better.