Native Americans and the Land

Did you know that native people, for perhaps thousands of years before Europeans arrived on this continent, managed the land to make it more conducive to hunting? They lit fires to keep the brush down in the woods, and to keep the landscape around their encampments open for visibility, and safe from wildfires.

This painting by Frederic Remington, noted painter of the American west in the 1800s, shows Native people watching a grass fire that they set. This would be an image that Remington actually witnessed -- he wasn't one for painting from his imagination -- he liked to depict real people and real situations that he witnessed first hand. Kind of like an early newspaper photographer, but with a canvas and paint brushes.

An early settler's journal describes this place we live in today as looking like "apple orchards planted by the hand of God for the pleasure of man." The oak woods that early settlers found were open, easy to walk or ride a horse through. Today, one might say they were "park like."

This open and inviting scene was part natural (through spread of wildfires), but also partly human-made, through the use of controlled fires by Native peoples.

After European settlement of the region, wildfires were eliminated as were human-made fires. This permitted brush and less hardy trees (like maples and ash) to grow unhindered by fire.

The lesson I wanted to pass along is this thing we call "ecological fire" is not exactly new, and the landscape that our forefathers and mothers inherited when they moved to McHenry County was hardly untouched by human hands.

So, once again, the old becomes new, as we relearn the ways that many generations of Native people took for granted. Careful management of the land was good for game, safety and ultimately survival of those peoples.

Relearning these ancient lessons of how to tend the land in ways that promote sustainability for us and for nature can only benefit every member of the community.

Disc Golf versus a Wetland

I read - with a groan - another rant in the newspaper from someone about those "special interest" people in McHenry trying to stop progress because it would mean kids throwing frisbees in their backyards.

I thought: Can't we all learn to get along? Isn't this world big enough for the frisbee-golfers too?

After a call from one of the anti-disc golf neighbors, I realized it wasn't just a case of some folks wanting to keep other folks out of their backyards. The proposed disc golf site is located on a wetland listed on the County's natural area inventory.

There are only about 170 such natural features remaining in the entire county. These natural areas took millenia to evolve, yet the only take hours to destroy through thoughtlessness -- or malice. There are lady slipper orchids growing out there. These flowers are typically only found in natural areas that have survived the onslaught of human beings.

The soil at the park is wet, mucky, not suitable for building anything, and certainly not appropriate for a bunch of people to be running around in, tossing hard discs into metal cages.

When most parks develop amenities in wet areas, things like boardwalks are built to allow people to move across the wetlands without damaging them. Think of Volo Bog or the Bog at Glacial Park near Ringwood. The wetland isn't usually planned for intensive use best suited to a mowed lawn.

Now I will rephrase my early question: "Can't we learn to get along with nature?"

People have destroyed or dramatically altered at least 99% of the landscape somoehow to the detriment of the natural communities that were once here. There are so few remnants of these unique combinations of plants, animals, soils and insects remaining, and yet we still find ways to trample on what little is left.

Call me a savage, but I think nature deserves some places to play too.

Have you Hugged Your Salamander Today?

Meet the Tiger Salamander Ambystoma tigrinum, one of the few salamader species found in McHenry County. Our local Tigers can be as large as 14 inches, but are more likely to be 6-8 inches long. You are most likely to find one of these guys in a moist woodland under leaf litter - they tend to be very private, probably to avoid predators!

There are about 500 species of salamader worldwide, with the largest type found in China, and weighing in at 140 pounds and nearly 6 feet long!

In Illinois, the largest salamander is called a Hellbender, and can be two and a half feet long. They are found in fast moving streams in the southern part of the state, so don't expect to see one in McHenry County!

The Great Smoky Mountain National Park in North Carolina is considered the salamander capital of the World, boasting 30 different species ranging from the inch and a half long pygmy salamander to the 30 inch hellbender!

Salamanders are amphibians, meaning they spend part of their life on the land and part in the water. They are most closely related to frogs and toads, although they may visually resemble lizards (or snakes with little feet). Their skin must be kept moist or they dry up and die.

Many, but not all, salamanders breathe through their skin, making them highly susceptible to pollutants like pesticides or other chemicals, as these things are absorbed directly through the skin and into the organs.

Salamanders fill an important niche in the overall food chain. They are carnivores, meaning they eat other animals like insects, eggs, small fish, and even small rodents or young frogs. In turn, they are eaten by raccoons, possums, large birds like herons and hawks, snakes, turtles and other medium-sized carnivores.

Following the first big rain in the spring, when temporary pools of water flood, salamanders emerge from hibernation, and head out in search of something to eat and a place where they can meet salamanders of the opposite gender! This drive to reproduce often results in so-called "breeding events" in the temporary pools, where several salamanders gather to lay and fertilize eggs. (Kind of a salamander orgy.)

However, because the salamander is a small, reclusive critter, any given salamander is unlikely to have the opportunity to breed more than once in its lifeime! So, if you happen to chance upon a salamander breeding event in your local vernal pool one spring, just look away, and let them enjoy the party -- it might be the only party any of them ever attend!

McHenry County Environmental Alliance

On August 29th, the newly formed (or perhaps I should say "forming") McHenry County Environmental Alliance met for the third time.

The group includes representatives from 23 environmental organizations that are working in McHenry County on a wide diversity of issues.

The Mission Statement is:
Within 10 years, McHenry County will be recognized nationally among counties its size for implementing successfully a sustinable environmental strategy for enhancing quality of life.

The initial projects that the group chose to focus on are:

1. Develop a Communication Strategy for getting more and better environmental news into the local media and develop a website for the public.

2. Develop and implement a "Scorecard"rating program for local municipalities to help publicize those who are doing things well (from a green standpoint), and those who are not.

3. Compile ordinance examples and have them available on the website for local officials and citizens to access for ideas for updating local ordinances to be stronger from an environmental standpoint.

Imagine McHenry County: Talking about Walking

Imagine a place where people can walk to the neighborhood store to get a carton of milk. A place where many kids can walk to school, walk to the pool, walk to the library. A place where folks walk to the bank, walk to the train, and even walk to work.

Okay, all this thinking about walking everywhere is making me tired! But, in a way, that's the point. Walking is exercise - and I know just one person who doesn't need more exercise! In other words, we can all do with a bit more walking in our daily lives.

Well, one of the interesting things that emerged from the Imagine McHenry County survey and public forum last year was that people want walkable communities. Sixty-three percent of people who attended the public forum thought it was very important to give people more transportations options, including to make communities more "walkable."

This notion actually correlates with another item that was identified as important to local residents: the ease of getting around by car, with 67% of survey respondents saying that this is important to them. Additionally, 82% of survey respondents thought it was going to be a big challenge in the future to have a county where it is easy to get around by car.

While some folks in some places seem to think that the answer to traffic problems is more and wider roads, it seems to me that more people are realizing that this old-fashioned idea of walking might be part of the answer. Again, 63% of the people at the IMC public forum thought it was important to create more options for moving around the county, including designing more walkable communities.

It is a fact that there will never be enough money - local, state, and/or federal - to build the roads that people want. There isn't even enough funding to maintain the roads we have today! We need to find new ways of solving the traffic problem - we can't expect to just throw more money at it.

I'm working from home today while new windows are being installed upstairs. Mid-morning, I took a break to walk to the bank. Our bank is 5 blocks away, and on my way there, I passed a grammar school, the high school, a rental shop, and a gas station with a convenience store. It occurred to me that I actually live in a walkable part of Harvard.

Thinking a bit beyond my walk to the bank, it occurs to me that a drug store, a hardware store, a pizza parlor, a diner, an ice cream shop, our auto service station, as well as assorted other small businesses are all within eight blocks if I walk in the other direction. I don't have to get in the car to visit any of these places.

The sad fact is that I rarely walk to any of those places. I hop in the car. It is much quicker. And, on a different day, I might have driven the five blocks to the bank. But not today. Today, I noticed that the weather was beautiful (70s, low humidity), plus I wasn't in a hurry to go somewhere. So, today I walked.

And I'm glad I did. I learned something. Or remembered something that I knew once upon a time.

When I was a kid, I walked to and from school - grammar school and then high school. I walked to the corner drug store for candy (or sometimes to buy cigarettes for my parents, but that's another story). I walked to my friends' houses. I could even walk to the beach - it was about a mile away, but it was an easy walk. My brother walked to the local barber. There was even a toy store near the drug store, and we walked there. We walked to the train station to meet Dad when he came home from work. And he walked to the station in the morning to catch the train into the City.

I know what you are thinking, and I'm just not that old!

This walking was a part of life in many "inner ring" suburbs of Chicago just 30 years ago.

Maybe it's time we remember how to build our communities like that again?

Imagine & McEnvironmental Summit

I just realized why I haven't posted anything in two weeks. Every time I would open up the blog to start a new post, I would see the cute picture of the tiny toad, and think "how cute!" - then whatever I was going to write about would mysteriously evaporate from my brain!

We had a committee meeting outside on a picnic bench last night - it was very pleasant. We heard a couple of different frogs in the pond, or maybe it was a toad and a frog. The mosquitoes weren't bad until the sun set - which was when we promptly ended the meeting!

The committee - our Outreach Committee - had a couple of important issues to discuss:
1. what is the status of the Imagine McHenry County project, and
2. what is the purpose of our Outreach Committee! (The second item was resolved quickly, while the first prompted quite a bit of discussion!)

Imagine McHenry County, for those who do not already know, is a project that was started about four years ago by the McHenry County Economic Development Corporation (MCEDC) to bring stakeholders together from the many interest groups in the county for the purpose of developing a shared vision for the county's future. Imagine conducted a communitywide survey in March 2006, followed by a community workshop in May 2006. The results were compiled and circulated, presentations were given to community groups like the County Board and the Council of Governments, and then on May 8, 2007, the Imagine board held a strategic planning session to determine where we go from here.

Now, a little background: I tried for two years to get appointed to the Imagine board. The former director of the MCEDC fought my appointment as the representative for the "Environment" special interest group. She wouldn't even return my phone calls - not even when I offered to take her to lunch to get to know her, and to talk with her about Imagine! Well, in November 2004, I was finally appointed.

So, once the board positions were fille, we had to figure out what we were going to do. We had some meetings with Ron Thomas, former director of NIPC (Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission), who talked with us about a similar effort he had been involved in up in Racine Wisconsin before coming to NIPC. He also had information on other similar programs around the country.

The gist of all the programs was that they included diverse stakeholders in a project to promote quality of life in the community - in terms of affordable housing, environmental quality, open government, good schools, traffic congestion, air quality, etc. A common theme was that the projects sought to involve many people from the community in crafting a vision for where the community wanted to go, and then kept them engaged in working on figuring out how to get the community there. They were all grassroots in that they did not look to the powers that be for approval - rather they sought to reflect the community will, and to engage the community.

Well, this is where Imagine has had a hard time getting traction. While we gathered information through a survey, and held a community workshop, we did a horrible job of following up with the participants to share the results with them, and to keep them engaged. It has been a year since the community workshop, and I feel like the board is no closer to having a shared vision, or in knowing how to move forward.

In the meantime, while Imagine has been spinning its wheels, the McHenry County Environmental Summit has emerged to bring all of the county's environmental groups together. We met in March and May, and came up with an agenda. We even started a blog to help us share information with each other, and have created three subcommittees to work on an environmental scorecard, conservation ordinance development, and communication.

And it isn't like the people working on the Enviro Summit don't have other jobs - it isn't like we aren't squeezing this "one more thing" into already full lives. The big difference is that we have a shared passion - a shared commitment - reflected in the mission and principles that we are developing together. And we all genuinely believe that we can make a difference by working together - that rising waters float all boats, and that the community of enviro organizations is stronger when we unite around the things we can agree on.

Maybe that helps explain why Imagine has had such a hard time. What unites us? Why do we all sit at the table other than because we were asked (or in my case, pushed our way on)? The mission was written before anyone was asked to join the board. The composition of the board was determined by the MCEDC who then sought to control the board membership - to the point where some early appointees actually dropped off before they even had all of the positions (23 spots) filled.

I think there is a lesson to learn here.

McHenry Co Enviro Summit a Success

What do you get when you put 40 local environmentalists in a room together for 6 hours?

That may sound like the punchline to a joke, but it was serious business for the people who gathered at McHenry College on March 17th for the inaugural McHenry County Environmental Summit.

Excellent facilitator, Peter Lopatin (who declared himself to be "Switzerland" since he did not have allegiances to any specific organizations), guided the group through several exercises to create a priority agenda for projects that the group of organizations could pursue to advance a stronger environmental agenda in the county.

Peter Benkendorf, Catalyst at Involvement Advocacy, was the event's instigator, working with Maia Tipton from the McHenry County Schools Environmental Education Program, Bill Donato from the McHenry County Defenders, Janet Trafelet from the Alliance for Land, Agriculture and Water, and myself, to organize the event.

About 20 environmental organizations - some non-profit, some government - were identified in McHenry County. Each group was asked to have 1 or 2 representatives at the event. The spirit of the event was to try and build a community of organizations that work together on certain projects in order to help make McHenry County a leader in environmental sustainability within 10 years.

After giving each organization 3-5 minutes to describe their mission, strengths & challenges, the group dove into a traditional SWOT analysis, calling out Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats that the community of enviro organizations faces. The SWOT analysis then led to small group work identifying specific actions that the group could take to advance a common agenda.

Actions Identified included:

- Create an Annual Scorecard for the environment. This could look at air quality, water quality, land protection, development regulations, enforcement of ordinances, and myriad other topics. The idea would be to move the county towards sustainability by recognizing the good things that are happening, and challenging the bad.

- Setting up a local list serve and webforum for environmentalists to share information with each other. Right now there is a lot of information & experience in the community of people and organizations, but no effective way to share that information.

- Working with communities to change ordinances to make conservation design the standard rather than the exception.

Next steps will be to develop a working group around each of the action items, and to start moving the agenda forward - together!

Participating Organizations:

Alliance for Land, Agriculture & Water

Barrington Hills Conservation Trust

Boone Creek Watershed Alliance

Cary Park District

Crystal Lake Park District

Friends of the Fox (Invited)

Fox River Ecosystem Partnership

Illinois Dept of Natural Resources - Private lands program

Kishwaukee River Ecosystem Partnership

McHenry County Conservation District

MC Conservation Foundation

MC Defenders

MC Schools Environmental Education Program

MC Soil & Water Conservation District

Nippersink Creek Planning Committee (Invited)

PACE

Sierra Club, Illinois Chapter, River Sentinels

The Land Conservancy of McHenry County

The Wildflower Preservation & Propagation Committee

USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service