Author: Tom Springer

Prairie Plants Rescued in Farm’s Twilight

There were millions of acres of prairie in the Midwest when white settlers arrived in the early 1800s. Today, only a tiny fraction of these native grasslands remain. In recent years, there’s been renewed interest in restoring old prairies and creating new ones. But when financial realities conflict with land protection efforts, even the most devoted prairie lovers must make a difficult choice. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tom Springer reports:

Transcript

There were millions of acres of prairie in the Midwest when white settlers arrived in the early
1800s. Today, only a tiny fraction of these native grasslands remain. In recent years, there’s
been renewed interest in restoring old prairies and creating new ones. But when financial realities
conflict with land protection efforts, even the most devoted prairie lovers must make a difficult
choice. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tom Springer reports:


This is not a sight that Bev Villareal ever wanted to see. On her restored prairie near Plainwell,
Michigan, there’s a dozen men and women armed with shovels and buckets. They’re digging up
native plants by the hundreds and carting them off in a pick-up truck.


Bev Villareal settles into her favorite chair and lights up a Capri Super-Slim cigarette. The scene
from her back window would look familiar to a 19th century pioneer. It’s a real prairie, with
plenty of rare flowers and enough tall grass to fatten a buffalo. But with her chronic lung disease,
Villareal can’t get out much to enjoy it.


“Well, my health has been going down, and I do have some bad habits, health-wise. So I know
that it’s in my will that’s the kids are to sell the farm, so, yeah, because I know this place will be
developed and that’s it.”


Villareal says she bought the farm “for a steal” in the early 1960s. Back then, she spent her days
cooped up in a meat-packing plant. And this was her country retreat. She loved outdoor work.
She built a fieldstone wall with her own hands. And she especially loved to raise flowers. She’d
sell cut daffodils, iris and zinnias from a little table in her driveway.


“I belong to gardening club here in Plainwell, and I always tell them I’m not a gardener, I’m a
flower grower.”


Then in 1990, Villareal’s daughter introduced her to Bob Pleznac. At first, they weren’t exactly
kindred spirits. Bev Villareal’s a blue-collar type. She likes flowers because they’re pretty. Bob
Pleznac’s a bankruptcy attorney. He calls plants by their Latin names. And he knows more than
you’ll ever want to hear about prairies. Yet when Pleznac visited Villareal’s land, he saw the
potential for a new kind of natural garden.


“Just looking at the property and seeing what it looked like, and knowing Bev’s love for flowers,
I knew that the prairie plants would love this land and that Bev would love the prairie plants.”


And he was right – Bev loved the idea. When Bev and Bob first planted their prairie, it covered
an area the size of a small house. Today, it spreads across about seven acres of rolling hillside.
On this fall afternoon, clumps of native grass the color of buckskin tremble in the breeze. Dried
stalks of purple, yellow and orange wildflowers linger on as reminders of summer’s glory.


And now, autumn has come for Bev Villareal and her prairie. Neither she nor anyone else she
knows can afford to save it. Once the property’s sold, it will probably sprout quarter-million-
dollar houses instead of black-eyed susans.


But the volunteers out in her backyard are working to see that this prairie survives. Christy
Chapman is with the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy. She’s pulling out clumps of
wildflowers and stuffing them into a plastic trash bag.


“Yeah, It’s like prairie in a box, we box up something and we might have three or four good
plants all living together and we dig up the plug, put in a bag, cart it down the street and plop it
back in. So it should do real well.”


The volunteers are excited by their work. Yet Bob Pleznac just can’t bring himself to pick up a
shovel. For him, it’s a necessary, but bittersweet undertaking.


“I hate to think about this beauty being paved over, but we’ve got a terrific opportunity now.
This is harvest time. It’s time to get the seed off this prairie, as much as we can, with all the
volunteers that have come in here from the Wild Ones Club and from the Southwest Michigan
Land Conservancy, and we’re going to be able to do with these plants what we set out to do.”


The plants are being moved to the Chipman Preserve. It’s a rolling, 180-acre parcel near
Kalamazoo. It’s owned by the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy. It doesn’t look like a
prairie yet, but Bev Villareal’s plants will help change that. Nate Fuller is a Conservancy staff
member. In his mind’s eye he can see a prairie here. He also envisions an oak savanna, a wild
grassland dotted with trees.


“Well, here we’re standing on the edge of what is going to be the boundary between our savanna
and prairie. You can see there’s some oaks up here, you might hear the wind going through those
leaves there, there’s some staghorn sumac around, there’s also quite a bit of scotch pine hanging
on, a bunch of black cherries. But mostly it’s pretty open, you can see some rolling landscape,
and we’re gonna keep this pretty open.”


Survey records from the 1800s show that this site was once a prairie. With careful management,
that age-old landscape will return. For Nate Fuller and his transplant crew, the hard part is
knowing when to stop.


“It’s kind of like being a kid in a candy store, with free rein, I tell ya (laughs) there’s so many
neat plants. It’s ‘Oh, we gotta get that one, we gotta get that one, we can’t stop now!’ and
watching all the volunteers go, I’m trying to tell them, ‘The trucks loaded, we gotta go,’ and they
say ‘No, we can’t leave any behind! And it’s ‘will be back, will be back, don’t worry.'”


Some prairie plants can live to be 100 years old. And the lands protected by the Southwest
Michigan Land Conservancy are permanently restricted from development. So the flowers and
grasses from Bev Villareal’s property will be safe here. And at this new address, her prairie
legacy will bloom for generations yet to come.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tom Springer.

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War’s Lasting Harvest

President Bush has declared that the war in Iraq is over. But from the vantage point of his garden, recent National Guard retiree and Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator, Tom Springer, wonders what the lasting harvest of this conflict will be:

Transcript

President Bush has declared that the war in Iraq is over. But from the vantage point of his
garden, recent National Guard retiree and Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator, Tom
Springer, wonders what the lasting harvest of this conflict will be:


When I retired from the Army National Guard last December, I was looking forward to having
more free time. To commemorate my 22 years of service, I decided to plant my biggest vegetable
garden ever.


But even with more leisure time, I still hate to pull weeds. So I’ve covered my garden with
newspapers and straw. After the fall rains, I’ll till this organic matter back into the soil to prepare
for another growing season.


However, my usually peaceful garden conceals a litany of troubles. That’s because the
newspapers I’m using for a weed barrier read like an almanac of the recent war. Beneath my
cherry tomatoes, there’s breaking news of the early fights for Umm Qasr and Basra. Under the
green peppers, I can follow the 7th Marines on their river campaign up the Tigris and Euphrates.
Near my Spanish onions – and I’m sure the Spanish prime minister would approve – Saddam’s
statue falls to a cheering crowd in Baghdad.


Yet this guns-and-butter irony is a bit unsettling. Like many Americans, I am still ambivalent
about the war. Initially, I was against it. Then once it began, I believed the best course was to
win decisively. And as a veteran, I deeply respect the American men and women who so ably
proved themselves in Iraq.


Regardless of your viewpoint, on this much we can agree: Those who fought the war have seen
horrors and faced dangers that we civilians can scarcely imagine. Here, at home, the war may
already be old news. But for our returning veterans, its impact will last a lifetime.


I think about that as I read my garden newspapers. I think about how the sun and rain will
transform this violent news into food for the plants and nourishment for my body. And I think
about the life-changing nature of war – how it leaves some people broken, but gives others a new
sense of purpose and vocation.


Without question, our veterans deserve all the parades, yellow ribbons and happy homecomings
we can give them. But after the brass bands die down, I hope our newest heroes find something
equally valuable. I hope they find quiet, blissful places where they can heal their jangled nerves.
I hope they find a peaceful garden, where the fears and angers of war will melt away beneath the
cloudless skies of summer.


Tom Springer is a freelance writer from Three Rivers, Michigan.

Winter: An Old Friend Returned

As the heart of winter approaches, it’s tempting to withdraw from the outdoor world and wait till spring. But Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer thinks the forgotten benefits of winter far outweigh the hardships:

Transcript

As the heart of winter approaches, it’s tempting to withdraw from the outdoor world and wait till
spring. But as Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer thinks, the forgotten
benefits of winter far outweigh the hardships.


Outside my window there’s an old sugar maple, grey and bare against the late autumn sky. I’ve
raked up most of its leaves and spread them as mulch on my vegetable garden. It seems like the
tree and me have nothing better to do than wait for spring.


But for a tree, the real work of winter has just begun. To prepare for frigid weather, trees undergo
a process known as hardening off. Their sap withdraws from the twigs and branches and returns
to the roots. And the tree’s roots will continue to grow until the ground freezes solid.


When it comes to surviving winter, I think trees have the right idea. It’s in their nature to slow
down and focus on interior growth. Unfortunately, most of us don’t do that. Instead of adapting to
winter, we try to escape it. We dash from our heated house into a semi-heated garage. We drive in
heated cars – which often have heated seats and even heated steering wheels – and we work in a
heated … Well, you get the idea.


But what would happen if we tried harder to accept winter on its own terms? Might we be happier
and healthier?


Researchers say that people can get surprisingly acclimatized to winter weather. As our bodies
get accustomed to cold, we shiver less and our skin retains more heat. In Australia, scientists have
studied aborigines who sleep outside naked in cold weather. They don’t get hypothermia. In
Japan, shellfish divers have been known to spend hours in the ice-cold ocean, wearing nothing
more than a cotton swimsuit.


Spending more time outside in winter can even make you happier. That’s good news for the 10
million Americans who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. SAD is a form of depression
that’s triggered by the short winter days. Some people take anti-depressants to fight SAD. Yet
researchers find that many people can overcome it without using pills. They just need to get
outdoors and absorb some authentic daylight.


Do you suppose Mother Nature is trying to tell us something? For 50,000 years of human
history, winter was a time of rest and rejuvenation woven between the cycle of seasons. And I
doubt that 75 years of electric indoor heat has changed that. For instance, our bodies still crave
good food in winter – not just fudge and party mix, but homemade soup or a juicy pot roast. And
there’s still something about the solemn purity of winter that calls us to focus inward. To boost
the spirits, there’s nothing like a quiet walk on a snowy Sunday afternoon. It’s also the best time
to read the uplifting books that have languished on the nightstand since summer.


This is, without question, the most trying of seasons. It gets depressingly dark by 6 o’clock, and
the wind howls at the door like a hungry wolf. But the frozen solitude of winter is not a thing to
be feared. Winter is simply an old friend returned, who waits in unspoken silence to wish us well.


Tom Springer is a free lance writer from Three Rivers, Michigan.

Car Enthusiast Struggles to Change

With another Mideastern conflict looming, many Americans are worried about the possibility of rising gas prices. But as Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer points out, using less gas may be difficult for a generation that grew up admiring gas-guzzlers:

Transcript

With another Mideastern conflict looming, many Americans are worried about the
possibility of rising gas prices. But as Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom
Springer points out, using less gas may be difficult for a generation that grew up admiring
gas-guzzlers:


It’s been 20 years since I rumbled through town in a fast car with wide tires and a big
hood scoop. But there, parked in front of me, was the mag-wheeled embodiment of a
teenage fantasy. Its electric blue paint job was flashing in the sun. It was more temptation
then a recovering car freak could resist.


The object of my affection was a 1970 Plymouth GTX. For two years, my brother-in-law
had worked nights and weekends to restore the old muscle car. Under the hood was a
gleaming V-8 engine, with enough horsepower to pull out tree stumps. And now, on a flat stretch
of country road, he casually asked the question: “Do you want to see what it can do?”


Did I want to see what it could do? It was an act of hypocrisy that no self-respecting
environmentalist should ever commit. Since my drag racing days, I’ve learned the truth
about the evils of fossil fuel. I know that America’s car culture is the driving force behind
urban sprawl, acid rain and the ongoing rift with a certain mustachioed Mideastern
dictator.


But after about three seconds behind the wheel, my environmentalist notions flew out the
window. I stomped the accelerator, and the tires squealed. The engine roared. The
carburetors gulped down an ocean of high-octane racing fuel. Then, for a glorious
moment, the long-forgotten thrill of intense acceleration. The hormone rush was almost
enough to bring my adolescent acne out of remission.


We later drove the GTX to a car show. The hot rods on display were mainly pre-1971
gas-guzzlers. They get about 12 miles per gallon in city driving. Oddly enough, that’s
about the same mileage as a monster sports utility vehicle. The difference is, most
collector cars are driven only on sunny weekends.


And 35 years from now, we may be doing the same thing with SUVs. I can picture the
scene on a fall day in 2037. I’m with my grandchildren at an SUV collectors meet. The
kids are staring in disbelief at these mammoth, 8-passenger vehicles, which rarely carried
more than two or three passengers. And the only thing they can think to say is… “Why?”
The world’s not making any more oil, so our day of reckoning is coming. Some
Americans may think that dollar-fifty per gallon gasoline is their birthright. Yet it won’t
last forever. Fuel cells, electric cars and hybrids are the future of human mobility.
Americans like me, who neither car pool nor take the train, will have to change.


But change may be difficult. Because for my generation, the rich exhaust of an untamed
V-8 will always be like a rare perfume. And our memories of cheap gasoline, and the
freedom of an open road, will only grow fonder with age.


Tom Springer is a freelance writer from Three Rivers, Michigan.

Marketing Wild Food

With passage of the 2002 farm bill, billions of dollars will be spent on conventional agriculture. Yet when it comes to food security, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer believes that native species hold untapped potential as a healthy and natural commercial food source:

Transcript

With passage of the 2002 farm bill, billions of dollars will be spent on conventional agriculture. Yet when it comes to food security, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer believes that native species hold untapped potential as a healthy and natural commercial food source:


If you live in rural America long enough, you will eventually meet a back-to-nature zealot like my old scoutmaster. On camping trips, he’d wait till we were really hungry, and then offer a hot helping of cleverly disguised food. After you wolfed it down, he would inevitably ask: “Hey! You wanna know what that was? Heh, heh, heh.” What it usually turned out to be was filet of carp, brisket of snapping turtle, or boiled cattail stalks. To this day, I’m suspicious of anything that’s wrapped in bacon strips.


I thought of my old scoutmaster the other day when I was wandering the produce aisle of a mega-supermarket. The coolers were filled with bizarre fruit, whose continent of origin – much less country – I could barely guess. There were star fruit, blood oranges and finger-sized bananas, and a type of citrus that was appropriately named Ugli fruit. Yet business was good. There must be plenty of people who like to sneak this stuff into salads and then announce, “Hey! You wanna know what that was?”


This exotic produce may be affordable, yet it comes to us at a considerable environmental cost. Imagine how much fossil fuel it takes to transport a mango from Indonesia to Chicago. And even though commercial produce is sprayed with pesticides, every load of fruit and vegetables we import could be host to an exotic insect or microbe that could wreak havoc on our environment. Foreign pests such as the Mediterranean fruit fly, Japanese beetle and zebra mussel were all brought to America by ships and cargo planes.


But for me, the larger truth is this: we don’t have to import strange fruits and vegetables from faraway jungles and rainforests. As any naturalist knows, the wilds of North America contain an abundance of interesting and edible native species. Consider the Juneberry. It’s a native fruit that tastes like a blueberry, only sweeter, and with a lovely hint of almond. Or how about the paw paw? It has a custardy flavor that’s a cross between strawberry and banana. Then there’s the chinkapin oak, whose sweet acorns can be roasted and eaten like almonds.


What we need, however, is more research to develop higher yielding varieties of native species. In the 1950s, it was crop experimentation that helped to create the blueberry industry. Before that, blueberries grew mainly in the wild. Since the mid 1990s, there’s been a boom in the commercial harvest of wild morel mushrooms, which are now sold internationally. So somewhere in the new $190 billion-dollar farm bill, we should make a serious investment to cultivate other wild crops that grow nowhere else but North America, and require little in the way of agrochemicals and irrigation. That’s what I call real food security.


I know there are skeptics who say that elderberries and prickly pear cactus leaves will never sell in mainstream grocery stores. But I think they’re wrong – it’s mainly a matter of marketing. A few decades ago, shoppers were introduced to a fuzzy, brown fruit known as the Chinese gooseberry. It didn’t become popular until it was reintroduced as the kiwi. We might have the same success if we come up with new names for the Saskatoon, chokecherry and other poorly branded native edibles. And if that doesn’t work? Well, we can always wrap them in bacon strips.


Tom Springer is a freelance writer from Three Rivers, Michigan.

Land Trusts Save Local Land

Winston Churchill once said, “Americans will always do the right thing – after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.” For Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer, Churchill’s wisdom could also apply to land trusts. After decades of rampant sprawl, more Americans are joining land trusts to protect what’s left of the natural areas around them:

Transcript

Winston Churchill once said, “Americans will always do the right thing — after they’ve exhausted
all the alternatives.” For Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer, Churchill’s
wisdom could also apply to land trusts. After decades of rampant sprawl, more Americans are
joining land trusts to protect what’s left of the natural areas around them:

Like many people who love nature, it’s always been my dream to save wild land from development. When I was younger, it seemed like an easy thing to do. I planned to graduate from college, earn serious money, and spend most of my income buying rural real estate. Unfortunately, the big salary never materialized. After five years, I had bought just one piece of property: a three-acre parcel of woods that can only be reached by canoe.

Since going solo didn’t work, I decided to join a national organization that’s famous for saving wild land. With my annual dues, I got a static window sticker and a gorgeous magazine that featured the group’s newest preserves. But after a few years, the vicarious thrill of sending money to save far-off places started to fade. I really wanted to protect land that was close to home. Yet for this organization, my corner of southern Michigan wasn’t even on the map.

At long last, I have found a better way to stave off the bulldozers. Along with 1,000 local citizens, I’m an active member of a land trust. Land trusts are nonprofit organizations that work with private property owners to save natural areas from development. Sometimes they buy land to create preserves. They also accept donated land, and establish conservation easements to prevent future development.

In the past decade, the land trust movement has seen phenomenal growth. There are 1,300 land trusts nationwide, a number that’s more than doubled since 1990. Together, they protect 6.4 million acres — up 220 percent since 1990.

So why are land truth trusts so successful? I believe it’s because their mission is unabashedly local. They’re not preoccupied with Chinese panda bears, or holes in the Arctic ozone layer. They’d rather rescue the 100-acre woods down the road. Or protect a suburban stream that’s the last neighborhood refuge for tadpoles and snapping turtles.

In our capitalistic system, land is a commodity. Yet land trusts use the free-market to their advantage by purchasing land to prevent development. So this business-like approach also appeals to conservatives and moderates who may not otherwise support environmental causes.

Yet another appeal of land trusts is their hands-on, dirty-fingernails approach to conservation. There’s always much more for members to do than just stick a check in the mail. Land trusts rely almost solely on volunteers to maintain trails, conduct field surveys, or stuff envelopes around the office.

A few weeks ago, my land trust hosted a workday at a five-acre preserve that’s a mile from my home. For three hours, I joined a happy band of retirees, college kids, and recovering yuppies as they uprooted Japanese honeysuckle that threatens to crowd out native wildflowers.

This preserve is too small for any government agency to bother with. Yet we know it as a pocket wilderness, where cardinal flowers and bluebells bloom in the rich soil of a floodplain forest. Maybe it’s not one of the world’s last great places. But it’s our place — and it’s our land trust. And if we want to save the natural world, our own neighborhood is always a good place to start.

Host Tag: Tom Springer is a freelance writer
from Three Rivers, Michigan.

What’s Good About the Night

In our urbanized world, we tend to equate bright lights with safety. What we forget, says Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer, is that too much artificial light blurs the healthy distinction between night and day:

Biological Control Gone Awry

Many of the earth-friendly pest control methods developed by organic farmers have become popular among gardeners and homeowners. But when Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer bought guinea hens to eat troublesome insects, he ended up with a different kind of pest… and a new respect for the challenges of organic agriculture:

Commentary – Cider Rules

Roadside stands and small farms are great places to enjoy the colors and tastes of fall. Yet Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer is afraid that food safety regulations may threaten this tradition:

Transcript

Roadside stands and small farms are great places to enjoy the colors and tastes of fall. Yet Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer is afraid that food safety regulations may threaten this tradition.


Enjoying a sweet glass of fresh cider is one of the simple pleasures of autumn. Since my wife’s Uncle Dayton owns a fruit farm a few miles away, we always have a ready supply.


The cider that Dayton makes is unpasteurized. That means it hasn’t been cooked to kill off all the microorganisms. Dayton’s done it this way for 35 years and has never had any problems.


Yet for the government, that may no longer be good enough. In 1996, a one-year-old girl died from drinking unpasteurized apple juice that was contaminated with E. coli bacteria. Since then, regulations have grown tighter. In 1998, the FDA required unpasteurized cider to carry a label that warns of its health risks to children, the elderly, and people with weak immune systems.


In most states, farms that sell unpasteurized cider must have regular inspections. They can no longer make cider from apples that have fallen to the ground. Each year, Uncle Dayton says, the inspectors who visit his orchard become more aggressive. As a small operator, he fears that more regulation will force him out of the cider business.


Perhaps I should be grateful that the government’s looking out for my safety. But there’s something about their logic that escapes me. In my state of Michigan, there’s never been a single reported case of anyone becoming ill from drinking unpasteurized cider. And no matter where you live, the chances of a healthy adult getting sick from fresh cider are statistically miniscule.


Yet my biggest gripe about pasteurized cider is its taste – or lack thereof. Fresh cider is a living organism, an organic mixture of molds and yeasts. Fresh cider has a wine-like subtlety, and each blend has its own flavor and aroma. Fresh cider is gold and sparkling, like fine amber from the Baltic Sea.


By comparison, most pasteurized cider has a coarse and waxy taste. Its muddy
appearance resembles the rusty fluid that leaks from old radiators.


What I’m saying here, is “Give me a choice.” The warning labels for fresh cider are a good idea. But there’s no need to over-regulate this healthy product. In America, 450,000 people die each year from heart disease. Yet no one’s suggested that we limit the sale of cheesy fries or half-pound monster burgers.


Last week, I stopped by a new supermarket that’s 3 miles from Uncle Dayton’s farm. We bought some FDA-approved juice boxes for my 2-year-old daughter. And here, I saw a label that was truly frightening. “This carton,” the juice box read, “may contain apple juice from the U.S.A, Argentina, Chile, Germany, or Austria.” In other words, we have only the vaguest idea where your food came from. But if there’s a problem, we can narrow it down to three of the seven continents.


I’ll take my chances with Uncle Dayton’s fresh cider any day. I know it comes from 80 acres of apples that he’s planted and tended with his own hands. For me, that’s assurance enough. Because a life with zero risk is a lot like pasteurized cider – it offers little color and even less flavor.