Spirit in Action

Ecological Restoration: Partnership with Nature

Mark Leach has been teaching and living out the substance of his recent E-Book, Positive Participation with Nature: Ecological Restoration in Wisconsin. Engaging deeply with the the geography, history, flora, & fauna of a place, Mark shares lessons and insights into really meeting nature on respectful grounds and healing some of the scars of thoughtless human habitation of our land.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 23 Feb 2014
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world alone And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives Of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, Creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them In their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you To sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. [music] Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world alone A key feature of the Spirit in Action program Is that we bring you inspirational voices doing good in the world It's all too easy to find naysayers and doomsday prophets But it's harder to find those who see the troubles in the world And who are providing solutions and hope But we've got another one here today His name is Mark Leach and he's founder of Econimo Ebooks And author of a recent e-book called positive participation with nature Ecological restoration in Wisconsin Mark makes the learning relatively painless As he walks us through several different projects That are restoring the balance of nature In this state where both he and I live And he assures me that what is learned in the journey Is applicable anywhere in the world In a day and age when the talk is all too often Of ecological collapse and impending climate disaster I'm pleased to go to the phone now To find a reason for hope As Mark Leach joins us from Menominee, Wisconsin Mark, it's great to have you here today For Spirit in Action Hi Mark, I'm glad to be here Positive participation with nature Why positive? Hmm, I often get asked Are you an optimist or a pessimist And, you know, I have to say that intellectually I'm probably pessimistic about their environmental future But emotionally I'm optimistic I've seen what people can do and they want to And so, you know, it would have been easy to write a book about environmental problems I wanted to really focus on positive things that people are doing You know, so I had the opportunity to talk to a number of people And check out various projects, you know, and it's a third thing That makes me optimistic And I hope it helps some of the readers be optimistic I'm glad you chose a positive emphasis Which is why I wanted to have you here today For Spirit in Action, I try and find people doing inspirational work As opposed to There's so many things we could complain about in this world But that only leads us into depression and cynicism Your book is a very helpful, hopeful sign of good things happening So, I'm really glad you took the positive approach Ecological restoration in Wisconsin How long have you lived in Wisconsin, Mark? Oh, gosh, I've lived in Wisconsin in about 30 years Maybe it's longer than that, who can remember a long time? You're old enough that you forget now, huh? Where were you beforehand? I lived in Illinois briefly that I grew up in more Michigan So, upper Midwest, it's still kind of your home I'm thinking environmentally Wisconsin is a lot different than Laura Michigan Well, there's still a lot of similarities You know, what we do have in common is that the landscape changed considerably When the white settlers moved in, where I grew up in Laura Michigan It was an expensive white pine forest And they were all flicked down You know, it's not much different than where we live in Wisconsin now It was white pine that we got lumbered off at one point Also, near where I grew up in Laura Michigan, there was a large area That's now called the Prairie Farm that was told to ask Prairie Not much different from around here, and most of that got plowed up And not very much of it left So, you know, Michigan and Wisconsin might be a little bit different But almost every place on the planet today, the natural ecology has changed considerably Because of human impacts As I read the book, I was trying to figure out Which of my friends and acquaintances needed to read this book I think there's a lot of them who will be dramatically enriched by it Now, you've taught in biological sciences You've done that up at Northland, you're at UW Stout How much of this book is textbook? How much of it is just for the casual enthusiast? How did you try and balance that? Well, I'm chuckling here because I tried hard to disguise a textbook as something more readable And you did a good job of it, actually? Yeah, there's an awful lot of ecological background The kinds of things you might get in an advanced conservation biology course But it's all put in the context of what people are doing in a real project I think that makes it more interesting and more likely that the reader is going to absorb the science content If it's not just dry textbook, you're supposed to try to memorize this Here's what people need to know If they're going to have successful ecological restoration projects If they're going to protect and improve biological diversity in and near the places where they live But yeah, there's quite a bit of science in the book And there's a lot of vocabulary that I didn't know I've considered myself environmentally aware, environmentally active When I was, I guess, a sophomore in high school I was part of the very first Earth Day, including doing a presentation for the school that day So, I've been involved with it a long time, but still, I didn't know what the name was On the floor of a woods of forest, all that stuff that's fallen that's built up It's got a special name, right? Sometimes we call it "gok" And how different is the duff that you'd find in a forest these days? A one that's been clear-cut before grown back How would the duff in that kind of forest be different from what might have been there 200-plus years ago? Well, it depends on forest type, but in northern Wisconsin, where basically sugar meples and basswood, elm, a number of other trees dominated You had a forest floor that remained moist most of the time, so some people are now calling that the asbestos forest And it just was resistant to fire High humidity, shady, with not much wind, stayed moist, grew a lot of moss And that's changed considerably because almost all of that forest was cut down The existing bungee layer dried up, dried up, blew away, or was burned away And so even though, you know, the trees are coming back, we don't have the complete ecosystem that we had previously And so the maple forests are much more susceptible to wildfires than they used to be It's just going to be a matter of time to leave large enough areas alone for a long enough period of time That they can redevelop the kind of structure that they had in the past In the book, you are talking about ecological restoration in Wisconsin There's a lot of different things people think about when they say restoration Why don't you give us a little bit of an idea of the span of thought on this? Well, it's a little bit of a trouble for more, we had come up with something different for this Because, you know, when you're restoring your King Louis IV chair, or your 1962 Corvette, or, you know, that Renaissance painting You're trying to return it to as much as possible to the exact condition that it was in the past But with ecosystems, ecosystems are always changing, and so the idea of returning something to a previous point in time Doesn't really make sense, and so when we're talking about restoring ecosystems, we need to be thinking about What aspects of the ecosystems are important to bring back? So we are nationally, globally, in a period of time where we're losing a lot of species At the local level, we're losing a lot of interesting, the more specialist species And ones that aren't very picky about where they grow are taking over earlier And so, one aspect of ecological restoration is just to create conditions So that those species that are declining over large areas are actually doing just fine, and at least some places So, in Wisconsin, where both of us live, are we winning the battle? Is there a balance point that we've reached? Because my picture is that for a long time, the amount of natural habitat had been decreasing Is that still continuing? Is it coming back? Is there enough restoration going on, or enough protection That maybe we are actually making progress? Well, this is one of the, I think, classic optimism, pessimism type of question And maybe I should answer this by just saying, well, it depends on how you look at it We are making progress in the sense that both of state agencies, federal agencies Have been buying land, coming up with management plans for them In one of the chapters of the book, I talk about the area along the Lower Chippewa River Where the DNR has got some ambitious goals There's also a lot of nonprofit organizations, the one I write about the most in the book Is the prairie enthusiasts, and they are a kind of land trust Well, they will buy natural area quality places and protect them in management And also work with private landowners So, this is building a foundation It's identifying lots of relatively small areas in the state Bringing back their natural area quality Even though these agencies and nonprofits are doing a fantastic job You have to wonder whether it's fast enough Just for an example, in the Driftless area in Wisconsin, I am convinced There is tens of thousands of acres of highly-restorable oak savannah This could be just a national, international gem If we had the resources and the willingness to do some very large-scale restoration there But every decade that we do nothing, we're losing species We're losing the opportunity to have a large area of natural land So, on the one hand, I'm optimistic that we're doing as we can And getting better at it, and it's just not fast enough We've got to look at the evidence, which is the declining species Something like 25% of the plants that compose our prairie flora Are on the statewide decline Most of the grassland birds are over the last 10, 20 years The data shows are undergoing serious rapid decline And if we don't do something to improve habitat for those plants and animals, we're going to lose them I want to remind our listeners, this book is in a special format Depending on what kind of books you're used to Economoebooks.com is the website where you'll find Mark Leach in this book This is an ebook, you've got text and pictures, you've got some slideshow in there And you've got video, so it's interactive, it's a bit more lively than your usual text book Maybe not as ponderous Why did you choose to go that direction? Well, I wanted to take advantage of the new technology and since today Almost everybody has a computer or at least access to a computer I thought this would be a good way to go And lowers my investment in getting this out But also these fun things, including video clips There's one interactive graph in there that helps people understand ecological concept You know, I love books and I love holding a book in my hand But, you know, I also think that I do a lot more reading on the computer screen now than I used to as well On other devices So, just give us the overview, how much of Wisconsin is like it was 200 years ago In terms of species, areas, prairie, wood, savannah? Well, as far as vegetation, far as relatively good quality examples of what once was here Well, under 1%, some people say under 1/10th of 1% of what was here before is here now If we talk about animal species, we've lost many of the big animals Most are extremely rare, they probably don't reproduce in the state, they just wander through Woodland Caribou, which probably were never abundant anyway, but they're gone The elk, we're gone, there was a reintroduction program Many wildlife biologists will tell you that they weren't put in the appropriate place But we do have an ongoing herd of elk back in the state How well they do is, in the long run, is a good question The most recent controversies had been over the wolf, which came back on its own Partly because, well, they were still doing well in northern Minnesota And we just have a deer herd that is much larger than it was in the past And wolf liked to eat deer, so we got plenty for them to eat here So it's not really surprising that they moved back into Wisconsin and have established a relatively healthy population Yeah, I think it was in a later chapter I read where you pointed out that having these carnivores at the tops One of the three seas, you have the carnivores, and they control things like deer And controlling the deer allows certain species of trees to grow And whether those trees do or don't grow controls, whether other plants grow There's a lot of dominoes that happen here, and I guess wolves are one of those dominoes That you need to have in the series where it's all to work together Well, ecologists talk about top-down and bottom-up processes An example of a top-down process is having a carnivore that eats the ungulates, in this case, like tailed deer And chasing the deer around the fewer deer in an area, the better a certain plant species do After it was just a couple of scientific studies published that were done in Wisconsin by Tom Roney and his colleagues He's a former colleague of mine in Madison, he's now at Brake State University in Dayton, Ohio But, you know, there's certain kinds of plants that deer just love to eat Particularly orcas and some of the members of the Willie family I did a study in Wisconsin in areas where there were wolves and areas where there were not wolves And these particular orcas and members of the Willie family were actually doing better where there were wolves Yeah, competition, the balancing game, which is ecology, this affects that, affects the other thing It does take some scientific analysis, or maybe it takes hands-off But you point out in the book that just the hands-off form of restoration doesn't work very well in this state Are there more trees in Wisconsin now than there were 200 years ago? How does that compare? Do you have a sense? Well, let's divide Wisconsin in half and just talk about, you know, if we drew a line from basically from the Indianapolis, St. Paul area down to Milwaukee Generally speaking, we can say above that line was mostly forested in the past, and that's where most of the asbestos forests would have been That didn't really burn very often But below that line, we had a very fire-prone landscape dominated by open-grown oak trees A lot of burr oak and white oak, some broad areas with essentially no trees, which we called very areas Those areas burned frequently And so with white settlers in the 19th century, the frequency of fire decreased considerably You know, now we have cloud fields and roads and fire trucks and all that kind of stuff So that, you know, fires just don't burn over large areas like they once did Now, those particular ecosystems, the complex of prairies and oak savannas, those are fire-prone The species in them were fire adapted Without the fires, you really get a good example here of where many of the species, probably most of the species, decline And a few do very well, and some of those few that do very well are the trees that move in So just for example, in Wisconsin, we have a tree called "Backs Elder" And I just learned from a linguist that, in one of the Native American languages, "Backs Elder" translates to "The tree we can't figure out a use for" It's no good in your fireplace, you can't eat it But anyway, this was a tree that 200 years ago was really quite uncommon The fires basically would take it out, so it was constrained to living near pre, you know, close to water, river bottoms, those kind of places That tree has probably gone from being relatively rare being in, you know, every acre in the state Also in the southern part of the state, Aspen has become more common and is a problem, a management problem in some of these trees and oaks of anise, and it's partly due to the absence of fire But just to talk about the complexity here a little bit, it's also because there aren't nearly as many beavers as there used to be, and there's no elk So between the beaver and elk that were relatively common 300 years ago in what's now southern Wisconsin, they're just not there The beaver are there in very big numbers, and the elk aren't there at all So as you go out to Yellowstone, before they introduced the wolves there, Aspen was not regenerating Because all the Aspen was, I should say, all the Aspen in fairly large areas were getting mopped down by the elk This elk didn't get them in the beaver day So we've changed these systems, and our oaks of anise have gotten choked with trees And so what groups like the purian twosies do, or Tom and Kathy Brock that I write up in one of the chapters They may use chainsaws, they may use herbicide to reduce the coverage, the amount of shade that's produced by undesirable trees and shrubs And then initiate an aggressive fire program Again, the book is Positive Participation with Nature, Ecological Restoration in Wisconsin I've got a lot of listeners, Mark, who are in other states as well Is this information valuable for them? I mean some of it's tailored, I mean projects that are here in Wisconsin How widely applicable is the information that's in this book? I think this book can be possibly read by people, basically anywhere in the world Because the principles of trying to figure out how to interact responsibly and with nature They're rather general principles, and so even though these are specific stories about specific places in Wisconsin I think there's an awful lot to be learned, and we were joking before about the textbook part of this The underlying science is just generalizable, it's going to apply everywhere So we haven't mentioned the fish passage chapter where I wrote about the Bad River Watershed Association program To help fish cross under the road by making sure that the culverts are properly seeded So the fish can swim upstream, they can swim downstream, and the circle culvert under the road is in a barrier to them There are roads in every state, there are fish in every state, the same problem exists everywhere I think that reading about this successful program in the far north of Wisconsin, where hardly anybody lives They can apply to just about anywhere, so I think people would enjoy reading this from any state and country Well, I certainly learned a lot in it The first major project you talk about is Pleasant Valley Conservancy Then you start talking about wild rice, manomen, and then you talk about watershed association, the culverts You then talk about the Lower Chippewa River Valley, and a large-scale effort at restoration At making a resource for many species to flourish on And then you talk about the prairie enthusiasts And upfront, you're a member of the prairie enthusiasts So does that mean that I should counterbalance your opinion by getting in here a forest enthusiast? Well, okay, here's something that got left out of the book I had intentions of writing a chapter about restoring forests And I asked one of the top biologists involved in forestry issues in the state What was her project she was most proud of? And so I went to this place, and you know what, I just couldn't write about it Because there was so much sign of deer eating everything That it just was not an example of something that was working Maybe in a couple hundred more years, it'll be working But it had a serious problem with overabundant deer, which your listeners are all across At least the eastern part of North America will recognize that we have a lot of flight tail deer And they need to eat things, and so this is a problem of They're not being large enough blocks of forest in northern Wisconsin Deer are not really a forest species, they're more of us abandoned species Or what some people say is a forest edge species So as much as I had wanted to write a chapter about a successful restoring our northern forest I don't think we're doing a very good job with that So what you're saying is you're not opposed to forests That even though you're a prairie enthusiast, you're also a forest enthusiast But you just haven't seen the same positive participation with nature that's been effective with the forest You know, it's a better scale, and prairie enthusiasts, a lot of our projects are 30 acres or less And a forest of 30 acres or less is very doomed And that's a lot of what we have today As you said, a lot of the prairie enthusiast projects are small, relatively small I mean a couple hundred acres is still small, right? And so the first one you talk about, and it introduces us to a lot of the concepts, which are important In terms of how you do ecological restoration, is the Pleasant Valley Conservancy A couple, they're microbiologists, they get an idea that they're interested in species and diversity And what the land really could do, should do Do they still own that property, or is that one been transferred to prairie enthusiasts or something yet? They're still all that, they're still very active My understanding is that at some point they're going to transfer the property over to the prairie enthusiasts But they're just remarkable people, and there's anybody who's taken a microbiology in English languages Probably use Tom Brock's textbook And two microbiologists do, when they're retired, they start a whole new field of research Trying to understand what it takes to restore a prairie, oak savannah, oak woodland complex On a piece of property they own near black earth, Wisconsin I would suggest to the listeners that if they're interested in this study, well of course they should read my chapter But they could also go to Tom and Kathy Brock's website, Pleasant Valley Conservancy.org And Tom and Kathy, particularly Tom, keep a lot of very interesting information They've photo-dacking land, almost all their steps and procedures they do It's a really good site for the entangling restoration project And if you get a chance, they should just visit the place I wanted to include it in the book just because it's the kind of project that I have wanted to do my whole life And they did it And it's pretty beautiful, the transformation they've brought about and a glimpse of potential past That was missing, that they've reclaimed I want to remind our listeners that we are speaking with Mark Leach He's author of Positive Participation with Nature, Ecological Restoration in Wisconsin It's a $17 e-book, you can find him at his website EconimoeBooks.com or just come via the NortonSpiritRadio.org website This is NortonSpiritRadio, Spirit in Action And you find us on the web at NortonSpiritRadio.org Where you can find more than eight and a half years of our programs for free listening and download You can find links to our guests, you can find place to post comments We love to weigh communication Please speak up, share your voice and help us do better programming There's also a place to make donations to NortonSpiritRadio We appreciate your donations, they make a immense difference in terms of what we can bring to you And I also want to remind you to support your local community radio station They provide you a slice of news and music that you get just nowhere else from public media So please support your local community radio station Again, Mark Leach is my guest today, I'm Mark Helpsmeet So we're talking about ecological restoration We talk about one particular instance of it, Pleasant Valley Conservancy is one of them How does this dovetail with organizations like Nature Conservancy, other folks who are working to preserve the land? Well, once upon a time, the Nature Conservancy, its chapter in Wisconsin, was very involved in Prairie and Oak Savannah projects And at some point, they made a strategic call saying that they wanted their organization to be involved in bigger, grander projects And so, in a sense, they're stepping away from taking care of little remnants of Prairie opened up the opportunity for the Prairie and Furious to step in And so, historically, there's sort of a passing of the time there from the Nature Conservancy to the Prairie and Furious Well, another thing that you talk about in the book is Manonman Wild Rice, I'm used to thinking of it in Northern Wisconsin or up in Minnesota Is it widespread well beyond those areas, or are we really the storehouse of wild rice for the U.S.? The wild, wild rice that's treasured for food really is distributed rather narrowly geographically It's most abundant in Northern Wisconsin, Northern Minnesota, a little bit in the Ontario, a little bit in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan And that's basically it. There's a couple other species of wild rice that aren't as treasured and those have wider geographic ranges, farther east, farther south But they're not the treasured wild rice, they're not the real staple of the diet of people who have lived here for hundreds of thousands of years So, let's make the distinction, you mentioned the phrase "wild wild rice" Now, there is this species of thing called wild rice which has been, I guess, kind of domesticated wild rice which doesn't quite make sense to folks But it's still, it's from that plant lineage and then there's this stuff that grows in the wild as opposed to in cultivated beds and so on How much wild rice is there? Wild wild rice, is there more or less than there was 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago? Do we have some sense of that? Well, let me just speak to the domestication for a second since you brought it up Most likely, if you buy wild rice in the grocery store, it came from California or somewhere else where it's grown in patties It's been partially domesticated and, you know, the gourmet's will tell you it just doesn't taste as good as what I call wild wild rice There's less of it today than there was 150 years ago, we've altered the hydrology of northern Wisconsin, northern Minnesota considerably You know, the Fox River in northeastern Wisconsin was difficult to navigate in once upon a time because it was so full of wild rice plants Plants kind of picky about where it will grow and so it's working the hydrology, altering the chemistry of the water and it won't do very well Or in many places, especially in the mining areas in Minnesota, it's just disappeared So there is considerably less wild rice than there was historically So there's a program of the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission This is basically the Department of Natural Resources for the GIBLA people living in what's called the seeded areas It goes back to treaties from the 19th century, but basically from parts of Michigan, northern Wisconsin and part of northern Minnesota They have a biologist working for them named Peter David, who for 20 or 30 years now has been experimenting with and gotten really quite successful at identifying places where wild rice is not growing and introducing it there So in some of these situations, they're places where wild rice probably grew in the past, but a lot of them are above dams So they're in flowerages that they're altered systems, but they're now suitable for wild rice So here's an example I spoke about at the beginning, restoration doesn't mean we're trying to make it like it was But we're trying to restore some component of this, in this case it's just the abundance of wild rice But it does sound like that project has been fairly successful at increasing the range of the number of places where you can find wild, wild rice Yes Is there some measure to that? Yes, Glickwick, the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission in cooperation with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and other agencies, they've been doing a very good job monitoring They fly over areas during the summer, documented by photographs, how well the rice is doing The tribal people traditionally have had a rice chief and a rice committee that made decisions for their communities about where they were going to go and to rice And so there's this long tradition of monitoring the rice beds Basically, because it's when it becomes time to go harvest rice, you want to know where to go And so still today, there are people going out to monitor the rice, reporting back to Glickwick And the rice looks like it's really good over here, the rice doesn't look very good over here this year And also the timing, because it's an annual plant, it may be a week early some years or a couple weeks later other years And so a lot of these areas are quite carefully monitored and then Peter David at Glickwick does what he can statistically with this information And some years the harvest is up, some years the harvest is down, never quite sure why that is But over time at least they will documented that there's more places where rice is growing So that's the success I have a question about something back in terms of controlling species You mentioned a number of times throughout the book, and again the book is positive participation with nature, ecological restoration in Wisconsin You mentioned a number of times that they spray herbicides on certain plants I just cringe when I hear about herbicides being sprayed on I mean they're essentially chemicals, is there some kind of good chemical that I shouldn't cringe at? That's sometimes a difficult question to answer because I am not a toxicologist And I think there probably is a hazard, there certainly is a hazard when these chemicals are not used properly But I would say consumption, we were not in the restoration process, we used them sparingly Usually with the objective of getting an outbreak of an undesirable species, often one that's not needed to the system to get that under control so that the less invasive processes will take over, what's inherent in the vegetation itself will take over So the idea is not to use it continuously, like round up gets used in corn or gets used every year The idea is to use it sparingly, tactically, for short of a period of time as you can But in defense of using it, for a number of the problems that restoration has faced, it seems like the best alternative You know, I work with a lot of people who won't work with us on the days that we're using herbicide And that's fine, I don't have any problem with that If we didn't use any herbicide, there's some situations where I don't know how we could actually do what we think we need to do to save the target species that we're trying to improve their habitat Well, let me talk about another aspect of this, and that is which constituency you're serving Now obviously, there's great concern here about the number of species that we're losing And those are species of animals that we don't have around, the large ones that many people have noticed But also a lot of the individual plants that were here were common You talk about the relative number of species per area and how much higher it was in the past And how much higher it is around, like, oak savannas Give folks some idea of the relative dimensions of this variety of species that we would see If we were, I guess, ecologically restored Well, each place is going to be a little bit different, but generally speaking, places that are of natural area quality What our goal is with ecological restoration in most cases We're talking 14, 20 different plant species per square meter We're talking 200 or more plant species per a couple acres, and then on up from there And then with every native plant species, the general rule of foam is that there's five or six specialist insects That are on that plant species So if we're talking 200 plant species, we may be talking about a thousand different invertebrate species That are there just because those plants are still there We can go up from invertebrates to frogs, turtles, snakes, salamanders, birds, and mammals Each one of these is going to have a little bit different requirement But it's that vegetation, kind of that vegetational base for many of them is just essential So, I mentioned top-down processes before There's also these bottom-up processes that are so important for conservation You need to maintain the system so that the plant species, a large number of different kinds of plant species Can survive and thrive and reproduce And the insects that live on them basically form the food base for many animals that are there And so it builds on itself like that So when you're increasing number of species, right now we have what really amounts to a whitetail deer problem Just last night as I was driving through city of Eau Claire I had to slam on my brakes as three deer crossed in a residential area street What are they doing there? Well, probably somebody is feeding them Intentionally or unintentionally Well, they will go to bird feeders But, you know, it's part of the problem with overbundered feeders We have so many people to keep them over their time so that the winter die off isn't what it used to be So the presence of all of these deer, for some people it's considered a problem I mean, I think in agriculture they eat a lot of corn fields, etc So I think there's some folks who have some interest in not seeing so many deer I think hunters would like maybe a larger share of the herd called each year Or maybe they're glad to have lots of deer so they can go hunting When you talk about ecological restoration, how easy or difficult or to what degree are you able to pull together This diverse group of interests, those of the hunters and farmers, governmental How well does that work? Well, my recent experience with some projects through the purion pathway is it works very well Hunting groups, groups of people who like to fish, most of them understand that you need quality habitat And, you know, even though suburbia and corn fields might be good habitat for white-tailed deer It's not going to be that great habitat for wild turkeys and grouse and other things So I think there's, you know, amongst those groups there's an appreciation and amongst municipalities and county governments I think there's a lot of people who really want to do the right thing for natural communities that are in their care And so I think everybody's just looking for, you know, it's a time of scarce resources There's not a lot of money coming from the state level or for the federal level for the kind of projects that local people would like to do I think there's a, you know, there's quite a bit of coming together and trying to figure out locally Here's a piece of property that, you know, maybe somebody's going to develop it Maybe they're going to turn it into a frack sand mine Maybe something will happen to it, but there are conservation of breedons for protecting it And so, you know, the hunters and the people who fish and other people, like the bran enthusiasts, can get together and see what they can do to protect and then restore those places You know, most of the people who hunt, they're not just interested in one or two species You know, they like to be outside, they like to understand, and they have a deep appreciation for the wild things around them Yeah, they probably get outdoors than a lot more of the ivory tower, folks, which maybe is me Although I live in the country, I watch deer and wild turkeys in my backyard all the time Well, another thing that you talk about, and this really hits Chapter 5 of your book About large areas of restoration and that having a large contiguous body where species can thrive I loved some of the information I got in that It made me wonder if there's anything in the US that compares to what I experienced when I was over in Kenya When I was there, I went to the Masemara area for Anasafari And Masemara, I understand, is something like 580 square miles, which is pretty immense And the animals that abound there in incredible herds What's the largest thing that might be comparable that we have here in the United States? Well, in the United States, I mean, we have some large preserves, you know, in the Rocky Mountains So, first there's Alaska, huge areas protected East of the Mississippi River, though, it's, you know, the idea of protecting large areas came a little too late So, we have smoky mountains, we have, you know, Isle Royale, we have some very nice places But we don't have much opportunity for having large preserves for large conservation areas The forest service, you know, which I was breaking about earlier, is probably the best opportunity for some large-scale areas But there are some other ones, and I mentioned the Chippewa River Valley in the book, well, the chapter on it And there's, it's an area that glacial deposits the sand, much of it, agriculturally, not very productive And there's been a long history of setting aside land there for hunting, primarily, hunting and fishing And it's kept kind of a wild character to it And there's some very interesting partnerships mentioned in the book, and one of the northern states' power company Once upon a time, was going to build a nuclear power plant in the middle of that area And for various reasons, the plant never was built, northern states' now-excel energy still owns 4,000 acres there And they, recently, in the last few years, partly because of people in the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources kind of poked them a little bit and saying, you know, we have an opportunity here to put together one of the larger preserves in the Upper Great Lakes for grassland animals And so it's very exciting that, you know, these partnerships are happening and identifying the opportunity and capitalizing on it So it's an interesting area because it's, I mentioned grasslands, but it also has the largest contiguous or continuously covered river bottom forest in the upper Midwest, and there's places further down the Mississippi There's certainly bigger, but, you know, it's a pretty substantial chunk of forest And that is something that I think, though, is it's in process, right? It's not completed There's bits and pieces here, which are pretty impressive pieces You said that the overall plan has been laid out, you mentioned that in positive participation with nature What's the timeline for this? Data Wisconsin has a budget which the current governor and some of the legislators have been trying to take away But there is a budget for buying land in these designated areas So there is some money available, it's just a matter of when there's willing sellers I mean, this is a project that's going to be there for the long haul And that's something that, you know, there's going to march in and condemn people's lands and say, if we need this for a preserve It's just money's available, if people want to sell their land, then there's an opportunity for it And I think in a lot of cases they can sell their land with one of those agreements that, you know, I get to live on it as long as I want And then the state can have it when I'm gone, the one I don't want to live there anymore So, you know, there are these projects that are of substantial scale And we should probably talk a little bit about why that's so important So why is that so important, Mark? This being participatory with nature is looking at nature from nature's own perspective You know, part of that's just looking at the data, but it's understanding the needs of the plants and animals And many of the declining reptiles and birds, they have very specific requirements in terms of area So there are rattlesnakes in that area, rattlesnakes have declined considerably across the region So there's two kinds of rattlesnakes there, but let's just talk about the timber rattler They have very particular nesting sites, they have particular places where they like the hunt They need to travel quite a bit Roads are a real hazard to them, as they are the turtles and a number of other animals that need to move around So having a place where there's very few roads, their nesting sites, often up on bluffs, are near their hunting sites Which are often down along the river, having those close to each other, and it's perfect So it's important for the snakes, for turtles, let's just take an example of the Blanding's turtle Which was once in this part of the world was a very common turtle, it's declining very quickly This is a turtle that, you know, this may sound familiar to people, it doesn't start reproducing until it's a teenager And it can live to be 70 years old or so The problem is that, about all we have left in the state are old individuals They're not reproducing successfully, partly because the places that they need to nest aren't suitable for them anymore Or if those places are suitable, there's just too many raccoons, and the raccoons get all babies or eggs And so, it's very important to have areas that have suitable nesting sites, which its lower Chippewa River has I don't know about the raccoon population, but raccoons tend to be in a kind of farm and farm edge species Being a little, you know, a little bit wilder, maybe there's some raccoons, it's a little speculative on that part But it's preserved like this, it might be the last hope for species like the Blanding's turtle We are getting near the end of our time together, Mark, so I did want to include a couple more questions I mean, this is spirit and action, so I do have to ask you about spirituality And I did notice in the book, when you were talking about Minomen, when you were talking about wild rice, it has a spiritual place with the people And when you talk about people being outdoors, I mean, we can just say it's nice outdoors, or we like it There's beauty there, I think whenever we feel this value of something bigger than us, something that we're part of Or that we have awe at that we're touching on the spiritual So, why don't you give me your sense of where spirituality comes into such things as ecological restoration Is there some restoration of the spirit that happens then too? Well, I'm glad you brought this up because I often don't get to talk about this Or maybe it's because I often feel like I, you know, get asked to give a talk to the scientists And I don't talk about this as much as I probably should I mean, there's so many aspects to this One is, you know, it's just part of all our beings, our ancestors lived in a natural world We've only been in cities for kind of a short period of time, so it's in ourselves, it's in our DNA To be part of natural surroundings So that's the path, I think, you know, looking in the future for me, what's really important is I grew up loving the outdoors, just appreciating wild flowers and insects and birds And my appreciation of it has just increased with my understanding of it through science But to me, it's very important to allow people in the future, you know, the next several generations They shouldn't be deprived of seeing prairies and savannas and landings turtles and temper rattlesnakes And I don't want to be part of a generation that deprives future generations of these things And to me, that's just part of the spirit-speaking dream How should I say this? You know, I have this sense of lining for people who aren't even born yet So past, future, and just in being in the present, I think it's a spiritual quality of awareness We need to be aware of, you know, what's going on inside ourselves We also need to be aware of what's going on about us and, you know, to quote some of my agepla friends The plants and the animals are brothers and sisters, and I have a responsibility to them as part of the community that I live in With the community that we all belong to So, you know, it goes a bit beyond science, I think that into the realm of things that I feel very deeply And that I clearly feel a calling to be working on these sorts of things I have a Quaker, I tend to find meaning, and one of the messages that I clearly hear is It's important for me to help other people become more effective at solving environmental problems And so that's one of the reasons why I try to share what I've learned as a scientist, why we're producing these books, why I do things like tavern talks, hearing Wisconsin, I feel a calling to do these sorts of things And this doesn't feel at all unharmonious with what you perceive of your calling as a scientist as well I mean, some people think spirituality and science are two different streams Yeah, and I don't understand why they think that, except that perhaps they're confused But it's a question of how do we know what we know? And as a scientist, I look at what the authorities have to say on an issue I make my own observations about it, I collect my own data or use data from reliable sources Use my own powers of inference, my own intellectual powers to generate my own knowledge I don't see any difference in that procedure for dealing with the natural world that science deals with than dealing with my own internal world I listen to what the authorities have to say about the spiritual life I make my own observations, I use my own inter-mechanism to generate my own knowledge about my own spiritual life I don't see any contradiction between the spiritual life and the scientific life I think they reinforce each other And I would say that when it comes to values, I look to my spiritual life It's a big picture, it's a question of meaning, and it's something bigger of which I'm a part Science is my method, I use the scientific method for all of my inquiries, including my spiritual ones Yeah, well put, I was just going to add that, and the reason I choose to study the kind of topics I do as a scientist is because of the spiritual leaders So, just another way of expressing what you just said Mark, so we'll put Well, you put two marks together and you come up with some brilliance, I hope Well, maybe Well, I'm afraid our time is up Mark We have been speaking with Mark Leach He is founder of EconimoBooks.com That's the website you'll find them at Produced a number of different e-books, including one from 2013 called Positive Participation with Nature Ecological Restoration in Wisconsin There's also a recent one called "19th Century Floor of Dane County, Wisconsin" And there's another one coming up, called "Logic Models for More Effective Environmental Programs" That's just some of what you'll find out if you go to EconimoEbooks.com Mark, I appreciate so much you bringing your spirit and your intellect to focus in on the well-being of all of the beings that share this planet with us All this species and how we all have to get together as a community And I appreciated the intellectual gifts of Positive Participation with Nature And I appreciate the inspiration of really making a difference by joining together in community with those making a difference in the world So, thank you for doing that and thank you for joining me for spirit and action Well, you're welcome. Thanks so much for having me And thanks for putting this show on And a reminder that there are some bonus excerpts that didn't quite fit in this broadcast that you can find at northernspiritradio.org And we'll see you next week for "Spirit in Action" The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website northernspiritradio.org Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark Helpsmeet And I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light This is "Spirit in Action" With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing (upbeat music)