A Tale of Two Eco-Advocates

And two approaches to saving nature

One approach may lead to the best of times. Another may lead to the worst.

Tale the First 

 

Now comes Donna McCluskey. She protects the Somme preserves. For context, at their best they look like this:

And this:

But sometimes they look like this:

The heavy equipment operators apparently hadn’t noticed the large sign that reads “Somme Prairie Nature Preserve – Restoring original prairie habitat for native plants and animals” and also giving Forest Preserve contact info.

And like this, as they did on May 26, 2024:

Stuff gets dumped along the service road to the northeast. (See Endnote 1, if you have a strong stomach, for a litany of past sufferings.) 

 

Not as much is dumped as was, decades ago. Still, some people with little sense continue, from time to time. And Donna keeps an eye out. She cleans up minor trash but found these chunks of concrete, too big to lift without heavy equipment. Dumps, if not cleaned up, attract more dumping. She found it on May 26. It was gone that day.

 

I’m in awe of Donna. She assumes the best of people and has endless energy for addressing evil with simple, straightforward approaches. At the end of the service road is an assembly of entrepreneurial companies – construction, landscaping, processing junk of various kinds. Many  of those companies are protected by cyclone fences and have the appearance that a junk-yard dog provides security. Donna found a phone number and made a call. One of the companies down that service road is Northbrook Materials, a recycling company that handles, among much else, concrete. Jessica answered and gave Donna the phone number for staffer Mike Frenzel. At his number she left a message. I called him the next day, for this post. He said, "Sure, if there's a problem in our neighborhood, we try to clean it up." 

 

What a fine result! The secret was, she talked to them. 

 

Donna could have flamed evil-doers on the internet. She could have appealed to the police. She could have started a petition drive. But she talked to folks on the basis of what’s right. It’s the best first step, and it’s heartening how often it works.

 

Three great neighbors and Friends of Northbrook Forest Preserves, spreading the word at a Village event. Donna McCluskey, Pat Johns, and Carol Konvalinka.

 

Tale the Second

 

But wait a minute. As the bad example, in this second case I want to be careful not to unfairly offend.

 

So I won’t name either the person or the site. Indeed, Tale the Second could reference many sites and many people. 

The problem in question might be dumping, or poaching, or off-road-vehicle damage. In some cases it is damage to the preserve caused by staff of the agency that owns it. Should we speak up? 

 

Let’s face it, we’re mostly introverts. We tend not to speak up. Some of us become cynical and unhappy. 

 

So we express our outrage to those who agree, but we don’t go down the street and have a friendly conversation with the people who could make the difference. 

 

I asked one such person, and they said, “Oh, I don’t want to be confrontational.” Another said, “I’m nobody. I don’t think they’d listen to me.” I’ve heard a great many such reasonable responses. But they add up to, “No, I didn’t say anything.” 

 

The strength of the Illinois Nature Preserves System is its many partners. But that’s also its weakness. Yes, it engages scores of landowners in this quest of the highest and most permanent protection of nature. But many of them, local park districts for example, have no scientific staff, and the people who do the work change from time to time. How to provide good care is not common sense for untrained folks. 

 

Nature Preserve staff try to keep up with the owners, but the 600+ preserves have only ten regional staff spread across a big state. They need our help. 

 

What’s more, you as a citizen have a different kind of credibility than they do, as government officials from far away. Park district staff are responsible to the local people who vote and pay the bills. If local people don’t care, a Nature Preserve won’t rank very high on an agency’s priority list.

 

Nature Preserves have the highest protection laws can provide. But laws don’t work if people don’t support them. The conservation community is a powerful force, but it could be more powerful. Let’s face it, most of the wonderful, generous, gentle people who care about nature are introverts. A community does not thrive on introverts alone. “It takes all kinds,” as the saying goes, including extroverts. 

 

As a serious introvert, I too find it hard. But I try, and sometimes it's rewarding. I remember the good advice I once got. Spoken with an edge, that advice was, “Talk with them. Maybe they’d like you.” The assumption at the time was that probably they wouldn’t. I was too intense, too inflexible, too impatient. But the words “maybe they’d like you” had the connotation: “Maybe you could get along with them, if you listened to their perspective, and then perhaps they’d listen too.” It has worked. It’s worked for others too, who are much better at it than I. Let us honor, encourage, and support successful advocates and peacemakers. Let's all try, ourselves, when it seems needed. 

 

Sometimes we need warriors. But most of the time we need peacemakers and communicators. Think about it.

 

Endnotes

 

Endnote one: Indeed, Endnote the Last, in this case.

A litany of abuses at Somme Prairie Grove:

 

Dumping from the service road to the northeast was massive for decades. Long stretches are lined with two or three-foot-deep piles of asphalt, metal, construction materials, landscape waste, barrels with nasty-reading ingredient lists (now removed), black plastic bags with dead dogs and other animals, it was unbelievable. It still is. 

 

Some people, possibly thinking it would be less offensive, drove their junk deeper into the preserve. When we appealed to the police, they tried to help, but they never caught a soul. 

How could they? No staff person can wait around on site all day waiting for a waste dumper. I'm there way more often. Sometimes I see someone pull up with bags. Sometimes I say to myself, "I'm here to be happy and relax. Not to deal with a possibly difficult person." More often I say, "I'd be happy if I could head this off in a positive way." I've trained myself to approach people in a positive way. I might say, "Hi. Beautiful day isn't it?" And their response may help me start a friendly conversation. Or I might say, "Hi. My name is Steve Packard. I'm a volunteer steward at this preserve. Can I answer any questions about it?" You'd be surprised how quickly the conversation can develop in a positive direction. Many, many times as we've parted the person has thanked me for the helpful information, and I get the sense that they would no longer think of dumping. 

 

That sometimes works. But the more comprehensive solution may surprise you. Buckthorn. We let a narrow strip of it grow dense along that road. For a while some heavy vehicles plowed right through it. But the trunks got big, and there’s been no vehicle access for years. 

 

Our goal along those edges has been a thicket of native plum trees, grape vines, hawthorns, and many other shrubs (which we plant) that are so appreciated by many nesting birds (and are depleted in the interior by the controlled burns). We’ve made great progress, but in early stages we've relied on buckthorn, which grew faster. We cut out the berry-bearing ones, so it doesn’t spread. Native nature is taking over gradually. Check back in a few decades, and we’ll let you know how it’s going. 

 

The site was once massively scarred by vehicle tracks. Mostly kids having fun, bless them, but this was the wrong place. Policing didn’t do much good. Talking to some individuals seemed to help. And now the “thicket fence” that excludes the trucks excludes them too. 

Decades-old photo shows vehicle damage in an area that now looks like the photo below. 

We remember poachers hunting deer there. Ladders against trees led to platforms from which to shoot. Over-populated deer are such a problem that we wondered what to do. We did clean up the beer cans under their shooting spots. 

 

There were also poachers who dug up plants and stole seeds. That seems to have ended in part because the culture now condemns it, and perhaps in part because there are so many conservation-caring eyes, keeping lookout.

 

Kids dug holes for forts or to pile up jumps for bicycle recreation. 

One day we arrived to work and our parking area had "No Parking" signs. We explained to Village officials that we were authorized to work as stewards, and there was no other place to park. They took the signs down, but two years later they were up again. Our informal parking lot, it seemed, invited trouble: dumping, abandoned vehicles, truckers living in their cabs and depositing pee bottles and miscellaneous trash. We re-routed the trail system and moved parking across the street to Somme Woods. Less convenient, but more protective for the preserve.

People ran dogs, sometimes packs of dogs, off leash. Bad stress on ground-nesting birds and some other wildlife. The loss of convenient parking mostly ended that.

One day, early on, we noticed especially deep tracks of a large vehicle leading to a pile of dirt. Later, after rains settled that dirt, a horse's hoof and a bit of frilly fabric emerged out of it, like something from a horror movie. Someone had buried a horse there. We reported on it. Next time we came there were yet deeper tracks, and the pile of dirt was higher. We never found out what had happened and, as fledgling stewards, did not want to make enemies by asking questions about something that was obviously wrong, but over and done, and would obviously never happen again. And there the story ends.  

 

People cut down trees to make campfires around which they left moldy car seats, milk crates, piles of broken glass, etc.  

 

One time we watched a Mosquito Abatement District truck spraying chemical fog with a south wind, so that thick clouds of poison rolled into the preserve.

 

The above are just a sampling. There were so many more.

Most of these problems were solved in part by public education and in part by talking with folks, the majority of whom were willing to listen, and some of whom thanked us for our friendly approach. A few people were nasty. Our failure? But perhaps they thought better later.

It’s wonderful that all this stuff is pretty much in the past, except around the edges and, bless her, Donna is on the case.