Severson Dells

An Ode to Parents

Don penned this poem for the Spring of 1990. With Mother’s Day and Father’s Day drawing near, this is an ode to his parents for raising him with an environmental ethic. His hope was then, as it is now, that it had meaning to someone else.

I was fortunate in life.
I was very young when my senses were made aware of Nature’s beauty.
I have seen the mountains reaching for the heavens.
I have felt the fine, cool mist of the ocean.
I have heard the geese on their southerly flight.
I was able to touch quiet rivers as we paddled and dreamed of days long ago.
I was taught of dependence and interactions in the natural world.I was inspired! I live with an admiration and a respect.
I owe my life to those people who allowed me those inspirations.
Those inspirations did not come from Leopold or Muir, but someone nearer.
Some day I hope my children will be able to say these words to me.

by Don Miller

Click the Brick

We keep honey bees in a demonstration hive at the Nature Center (see picture) so we’re always interested in bee news. The commercial industry is in upheaval from mysterious colony collapses, disease, parasites and fewer beekeepers. But there’s hope in in bee world and it’s coming from people whose hobby is raising bees in the backyard.

The New York Times says backyard beekeepers haven’t succumbed to the market forces that have limited genetic diversity among honey bees. See Backyard Beekeepers as Warriors Against a Plague

Reporter Leslie Land writes:

In the United States, most of the heirloom strains were wiped out, along with most of the feral honeybees, by the tracheal mites and Varroa mites that arrived in the 1980s. Many beekeepers simply quit, roughly halving the number of hives in this country, to about 2.5 million. Twenty-two years ago there were 9,000 beekeepers in Ohio. Now there are 3,100, and that trend is mirrored everywhere, he said.

As honey prices dropped and demand for pollination services rose, the market for bees became a market for good pollinators, Mr. Flottum explained. The gene pool narrowed as breeders concentrated on that one trait. Any weakness in the bees was masked by an efficient arsenal of pesticides and antibiotics.

But the chemicals and medicine aren’t working anymore and the bee industry is promoting genetic diversity as salvation. And they’re finding that diversity — and disease resistance — in backyard hives.
Genetic Diversity. Amen!

Genetic diversity is vital in our monoculture world. And much of that genetic diversity is in our remaining natural areas — the forests, grasslands, oceans and ecosystems that are increasingly pressured by poor land use decisions, pollution, climate change and a blissful ignorance about the incredible importance of preserving these genetic havens.

What can you do? Use your backyard as a genetic refuge. Next spring, when The Wild Ones, Sinnissippi Audubon Society and other groups have the native plant sales, add some of the plants that grew here before settlement to your garden of cultivars or yard of blue grass. Our visit a reputable grower that uses local genotypes, such as Red Buffalo Nursery in Hebron, or Taylor Creek Nurseries in Brodhead, Wis.

And support local honey producers like Raines Honey Farm (Phil Raines maintains our demonstration hive) and our neighbors Ross and Janice Thompson (Ross maintains our Website) at Bee Boppin’ Honey. Their products are delicious and you’ll be helping them keep genetic diversity alive in their hives.

This from Canada: Global trends indicate a looming environmental catastrophe, and engaging high school students through Internet social networks around the world may be the only hope.

High schoolers changing the world with Facebook, something most adults would have to ask, “What is Facebook?”

Social networking sites are powerful forces that are shaping students, our future leaders. Online communities are tying together millions of ordinary people, who will have to mobilize to lead government and industry down the paths of sustainability if it is to happen.

As trends show global consumption of seafood, steel, aluminum and other resources continuing to break records, the only real hope for a sustainable planet is for a grassroots global citizens’ movement unlike anything ever seen on the face of the Earth, according to a story by Stephen Leahy — Can Networking Teenagers Save the World?

Steve Chase, director of the Environmental Advocacy Program at Antioch University in New Hampshire, trains activists. Chase tells Leahy that students were a major force in civil rights and social justice movements. They will be a major force in creating a sustainable planet.

“High school students are my hope. They could save the world — after all they will inherit this world,” Chase said.

Governments at all levels along with individuals need to attack this problem with energy and determination, Chase says. But little will change without a global citizens’ movement, sparked in large part by teenagers deeply worried about the world they will inherit.

“We have just a few years left to do something about this,” he said.

Chase argues that social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace could be the vehicles that drive society away from consumerism, that it can help them overcome the $600 billion influence of advertising and its effect on popular culture that equates more and more stuff with good.

We hope Chase is right. We agree that today’s students will have to live the greenest lives of any modern generation as global economies compete for for limited resources.

And we hope that part of their coping is learning about nature to understand the plants, animals and ecosystems that sustain life on the planet.

How do we do that? Sengalese environmentalist and poet Baba Dioum gave us the formula in 1968, when he said:

“In the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand what we are taught.”

We’re teachers at Severson Dells. Nature is both the subject that the most pressing issue of the 21st century.

Learn about it.

Teach someone else what you know.

Share the love.

Get active.

Click here to become a Severson Dells Facebook friend. 

This is a wonderful essay by Don Miller that appeared in the fall Notes From The Dells.

The Inner Eye, by Don Miller

“There is another world, but it is in this one.”
W.B. Yeats

There is a group of senior nature folks located in northern Illinois that call themselves, “The Whale Watchers.” They hike along this regions’ river banks, through forest and prairie, and in all of their 50 years of existence have never seen a whale. I was told by one of the veteran whale watchers, “If we see one we have to disband.” It is a good thing they have not found the Midwest pod. I suppose that coming up with a goose egg in the whale column is no surprise, but what they have seen while seeking the large cetaceans would fill 1,000 journals. So it is that when we are looking for one thing many other things can come into focus.

For instance, green flashes are a real phenomenon, not just a Hollywood stunt or something out of a novel. It can be seen at sunset usually over a large body of water, at the instant the sun slips into the liquid horizon line. If atmospheric conditions are just right, one can behold it. Many try but live a life time without viewing it. But what is the downside of coming up empty in the green flash? Watching a sunset and witnessing a great variety of sea or shore birds during that time? Much like the “seekers of whales” we don’t know what is out there unless we are looking with eyes wide open.

There are some phenomena that need no patience of a green flash detection. They are truly in your face, like this summer’s cicada invasion. Several billions of cicada nymphs suck sap from tree roots. However as adults they are like rock stars; they live fast and die young. They rise from the ground, buzz about for awhile, mate, lays eggs, and after three or four weeks there bodies litter the forest floor. The females lay 400-600 eggs in as many as 40-50 different nests before they die. Those billions of young crawl down the trees and go to their root cellars for another 17 years. All that miracle and mystery there even for the non-observer.

While rounding a bend during a float on the Sugar River, a friend and I startled off a great blue heron from its perch in the skeletal remains of a cottonwood tree. As we watched its ancient flight I thought of a fellow paddler’s comment from a previous similar sighting, “Are we not lucky to live in a time to see this awesome bird alive and not in a book of extinct animals.” I hardly had time to finish my thought when my canoe partner and I saw that a primary wing feather had some how released itself from the great blue. We watched as it glided effortlessly in a suspended spiral patiently down to the water surface. It landed as soft as one lays a baby in a crib. We caught up with it in our canoe and glided parallel for a while, observing how it just rode the rivers surface much the same as we were. We pulled it into the canoe to examine the perfect feather more closely. Not a mark, fold or bend, speck of dirt or dust, nothing but a beautiful shine of blue-grey, held together by a bone-white shaft. After the final examination we asked each other what we would do with it. I ask you, what would you do?

Several years ago while canoeing during the evening hours on the Kishwaukee River with author/ butterfly expert Bob Pyle, we came upon a large group of fireflies or lightning bugs. There were hundreds of the flash dancers all around. They escorted us down the river, growing brighter as the darkness of the night grew thicker. Bob being from the Northwest where this phenomenon doesn’t occur asked, “You don’t ever take this for granted do you?” I answered, “No”, but now that I am writing it makes me think…
I wonder why some people can lay with their backs to the land at midnight and stare endlessly at the immense sky, while others never even look up. And I wonder why some only look at the moon, while others see the stars, planets, galaxies, and universes beyond? Nonob-servers, observers and seekers.

There is an inner eye that interconnects us with the greater things that are going on. We all enter into nature through different doors, some birding, others hiking, some canoeing and so forth. There is so much sensual depth to what we can experience and perceive. We need to open our “lenses” to see all that is there. I thought of this while enjoying a baseball game on TV between the Cubs and the Giants. I was watching Barry Bonds bat, when I saw in the stands behind home plate what I thought was one of our Severson Dells board members. The camera was straight on Bonds, but I was observing the action behind the main character. I watched the proceedings going on beyond the focus of camera lens that was pointed at the batter. Two cell phone users were busily chatting with unknown listeners; there was one messy cotton-candy eater, and some clown with glaring red nose from too much sun that actually was wearing a Giant’s hat in Wrigley Field. Others were talking, some laughing, and a few had an eye on Bonds at bat. All that interaction and activity beyond the attention of the camera. Sometimes the real mystery and story is going on outside the spotlight.

My epiphany of “behind the scenes” came not through the background of a baseball game, but through plants. Soil types never excited me and I didn’t pay much attention to the geology of the land. Being a “plant guy” I didn’t look much further than the secret life of plants. I finally realized that where plants grew depended on the soil and its moisture and its make-up and all the other physical characters of the area. And plants determine what insects may survive in that habitat, and what birds feed there on that insect, and so on. It takes an inner eye and more than a causal look-see to interconnect to see the whole, to look further than the obvious.

We see and hear through our two eyes and ears, whether it is a green flash, the buzz of insects, or a heron feather floating from the heavens. However to perceive these, to appreciate and understand them, one has to have an inner eye. One that recognizes the mysteries and miracles that are found within them when these observations are made. Is this inner eye a result of genetics, a learned skill, prior experiences or some unknown quality? No matter, the eye rests on a pivot post on an internal gate that opens one way for one to see the frenzy of self-destructive behavior towards the Earth and its’ inhabitants. Then when all that darkness feels to be completely enveloping oneself, the gate swings to show one the blue on a bluebirds back that the midday light is holding captive. Or it takes you to the woods and the smiles and laughter of grandparents with grandkids on a walk.

So great are the everyday mysteries and miracles of nature.

Is this the world Yeats writes of?

By Don Miller

Peter, Paul and Mary once sang that, “dragons live forever, but not so little boys.” We add; nor do Bur Oaks.

Two spectacular Bur Oak trees have grown on the south side of the Severson Dells Forest Preserve near the shelter house for perhaps 200 years. Both trees have bark too thick to be scorched by prairie fires over the years, and branches stretching outward from their trunks that provide for a majestic silhouette. Fully leafed out this year and looking healthy, the big oak in the front went during a June 18. The cause: A rotted base.

Related story: What did the Witness Tree Witness?

Aldo Leopold states in his Sand County Almanac, “When school children vote on a state bird, flower or tree they are not making a decision; they are merely ratifying history.” If we could communicate with this Bur Oak, think of the things it could tell us it as seen; native peoples, wolves, bison, millions of migrating birds, over 2400 full moons, some 73,000 setting and rising suns, and so much more.

The live tree will be missed and many of us are sadden, but one of the lessons we tell the kids is that there are few things more important to a habitat than a dead tree. So it is that this Bur Oak begins its second part of its life lying down. It will lie there in state for longer than any of us will be around, collecting so many more stories in the future decades. Come out and visit and pay your respects.

With the tens of thousands of school age students that have visited us, we often stop before these trees and honor them by singing the “Oak Tree Song.”

It seems fitting to sing it now.

“Know, Know Your Oaks”
Sung to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
The hand motions for the song are in parenthesis.

Know, know, know your oaks (tap your temple with your finger)
This is how they grow— (palms up, arms out to side)
Red Oaks (hands straight up in the air)
White Oaks (hands still up high, but at your sides)
Pin Oaks (hands straight out to your sides),
Bur Oaks (hands twisted around in strange, uncomfortable position),
And acorns down below, hey!

The four-seasons photo collage of the signature bur oaks (below) was create by Rockford photographer Brad Nordlof of Northern Leaf Imaging. It hangs above the wheelchair ramp near the classroom at Severson Dells Nature Center.

On a hike this morning to the pond at Severson Dells, naturalist Don Miller spotted six frogs in the pond. It was 49 degrees and overcast.

I want to believe that it’s just one of those years, that El Nino has warmed the Pacific and it’s affecting our weather.

I want to believe an Arctic blast is coming to chill me to the bone, to crack my lips, to make me crave a beach, a book and a cold umbrella drink.

I want the frogs to be asleep, buried in muck beneath a frozen pond.

Mostly, I want to feel normal.

This year I don’t.

A weather report graphic tracked the average temperature in Rockford for December. I don’t remember the numbers, but I do remember that the average temperature for the month was what you’d expect in Indianapolis and Kansas City — places hundreds of miles south of here.

Canoe junkies are still getting their fixes on area rivers. On Dec. 19, we floated the south branch of the Kishwaukee River. Maple trees were trying to flower as is the magnolia in my backyard. Belted kingfishers and great blue heron were still working the shallows here instead of water in Lousiana, Arkansas or where ever.

Bluebirds and robins are around. Crocus are trying to bloom. And skunk cabbages are awakening.

Last night at the Burpee Museum of Natural History, geologist Anders Carlson talked about the Greenland ice sheet’s retreat, hasty as an ice cube left too long on a warm kitchen counter.

This morning, six frogs were in the pond at Severson Dells.

I hope they go back to sleep.

This article appeared Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006, in the Opinion section of the Rockford Register Star.

By Brian Leaf
Special to the Register Star

One of the goals of Severson Dells Nature Center is to help people develop a sense of place, to know about where they live, to have a connection to this region.

Many people think that to experience nature they have to travel to Wisconsin, a national park or a rainforest. Some place exotic.

A couple of years ago I was speaking with a teacher from Spectrum School, Sally Wonder. Mrs. Wonder. Could there be a better name for a teacher? She’s been bringing classes to the nature center for many years and knows the value of outdoor education.

Mrs. Wonder told me about a 7-year-old student. He’d just returned from a family trip to California, and while there, he walked among the redwoods in Muir Woods, a national monument near San Francisco. It’s one of the most revered forests on Earth. Imagine for a moment a 7-year-old walking through these strange, beautiful, humungous trees like an ant among giants. Mrs. Wonder asked him whether Muir Woods was nice. He responded, “Yes, almost as nice as Severson Dells.”

It made me chuckle, but it makes perfect sense. This child didn’t have to travel 2,000 miles to experience natural beauty. He found it here, under his nose, in Winnebago County, a place many of us fail to look. He’s connected.

And when this kid grows up, I hope he lives here and runs for mayor. I hope he is still as attached to what we have here as he was as a second-grader. We need people like him who don’t see all property as 40 acres zoned for ag or commercial or residential. We need people who see land that should be zoned for birds or deer or frogs, where people can reconnect with nature, to get outside and explore.

Don’t get me wrong. Growth is important. It is part of what makes a healthy economy.

But it’s not the only measure of a healthy community’s quality of life. Quality of life means different things to people. Great health care, low crime, proximity to a Gap store.

But great places to live also have nature.

This region has been a doormat for Money Magazine’s annual places to live survey.

Over the years it’s said that crime is too high, job creation too slow, we’re not close to mountains and ski resorts, we don’t have beaches or an ocean. We can take measures to fight crime and create jobs.

And although we can’t move mountains or create an ocean, we are in a position to make this community more like top places in the 2006 Money survey — places that had “big city opportunities and amenities with a lot more green space and a lot less stress.”

We have 3,000 kindergarten to sixth-grade students who visit Severson Dells each year. Most come from cities, not near the woods where there are “lions and tigers and bears.” They’ve never walked in a forest, hiked through a prairie or sloshed in a stream. It’s crazy, but this natural world is far scarier than the asphalt world where they live.

By the time a child who visits our center has hiked for an hour, gone on a scavenger hunt for fungus, feathers and lichens, the change is complete.

Fear has melted into a smile, and because the child had a chance to experience nature here, there’s a great chance they’ll go home and look for nature in their yard, trees or vacant lot.

We live in a fearful world. We no longer turn in to the weather forecast. We tune into the “storm team.” Terrorists are gunning for us. Bird flu is going to kill us if West Nile virus doesn’t get us first. There’s Stranger Danger, pedophiles, robbers, gangs. Some days it seems a lot easier to stay inside.

That’s what I truly fear. There’s a disconnect with nature. Kids don’t get outside to play and explore.

And we’ve lost our vacant lots. There is less green space in the urban areas, where eight of 10 Americans live.

And although kidnapping statistically is less common than it was a generation ago, people fear it more because such incidents have become so highly publicized that the perception is it’s dangerous to let your kids play outside.

Severson Dells finds itself as the last strong player standing in nature education in our area. And we’re planning to remain standing and to fill the gap.

Let me share some of our dreams.

We would like to partner with area schools in programs rooted in hands-on nature experiences.

We want to increase nature programming at the Pecatonica River Forest Preserve (the nature center there closed last year) and other county sites.

We would like to begin a preschool next fall that focuses on the lost art of unstructured play in the outdoors.

We would hope to offer scholarships to the economically challenged families in our communities, so no child is left without a nature experience.

Severson Dells is building its endowment to solidify our future so that we can provide these valuable services to the next generation and the one after that.

We’re teaching vital lessons to students whose schools can no longer deliver in the era of No Child Left Behind. We must ensure that nature isn’t left behind, either.

Brian Leaf is executive development director at Severson Dells Nature Center. This is excerpted from a speech he gave Friday to Rockford Masonic Hi-12 at the Stockholm Inn.

Interesting story on switch grass in today’s Chicago Tribune - A grass worth getting high on; Prairie plant seen as promising fuel option.
Switch grass, once a dominant component of the ocean of prairie that covered the Plain States in tall tangles, is being being touted by a Canadian researcher as a “living solar battery.”

Ethanol giant Archers Daniels Midland Co. is ramping up switch grass as another biofuel source. The U.S. Agriculture Department says it may be the most valuable native grass.

While corn is the current ethanol darling, the story says a prominent researcher contends it takes more fossil fuel to grow and turn corn starch into energy that it yields.

Switch grass takes little care once it is established. It is widely adaptable to climate. It needs no herbicides or fertilizer. It can grow on poor soil, it fights erosion and it’s a perennial that doesn’t need annual planting, like corn.

The story rightly points out that there is a downside to switch grass. While switch grass is native, its ability to adapt and resistance to insects and disease sounds a lot like the traits of invasive alien species. A little switch grass is good; a lot of switch grass could create just another monoculture crop.

I hope researchers begin looking for energy-landen prairie plants that compliment switch grass plantings to create diverse fields that can be both an energy source and great habitat for wildlife.

Hats off to environmentalist Wangari Maathai, United Nations and Africa’s Nobel laureate. She proposed planting a billion trees to help fight climate change and poverty.

While planting a billion trees seems impossible, Maathai says that if one-sixth of the world’s population planted just one tree, the job could be accomplished in a year.

Using that math, the Rockford area is good for a quarter-million trees alone. Wouldn’t that be impressive. That’s what’s possible when work is done at the (no pun intended) grassroots level, when a dreamer’s dream calls for people to take action.
Don Miller, executive education director at Severson Dells, summed up nicely in a Nov. 1 speech at our annual breakfast. He said:

“I read recently in the Orion magazine that stated a pessimist thinks things will never work out no matter what action he or she takes, so they do nothing, an optimist thinks things will work no matter what action they take, so they do nothing.

“But an activist, an activist believes that he or she can make a difference, so they take action. So please be an activist for Severson Dells, the community, the Earth, your actions do count.”

Plenty of regular American’s don’t believe in global warming. Maybe it’s because we’ve come to define problems as those that affect our pocket books.

Well if the British government is right, we’re likely to become a nation of believers. A report out today says global warming could shrink the world’s economy by 20 percent.

The report’s author, British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, says tackling the problem now would cost about 1 percent of global gross domestic product.

Gordon Brown, Great Britain’s chancellor of the treasury and heir apparent to Prime Minister Tony Blair, says in today’s Guardian newspaper that Britain — the home of the industrial revolution, where coal smoke was known as London Fog — must convince the rest of the world that the future must be low carbon.

He said: “Now it is time to move towards a global system - as Stern challenges us to do - so we propose a long-term framework, a worldwide carbon market; not the old way of rigid regulation, but the modern way: working with the market, harnessing its power to set a global price for carbon, incentivising the most efficient and innovative ways of tackling climate change.”

Brown announced that Great Britain was entering a partnership with Brazil, Paupua New Guinea and Costa Rica to protect rain forests, which soak up carbon dioxide. And the Brits are working with China and India on clean coal burning technologies.

No mention of working with the U.S. government, although former U.S. veep and presidential candidate Al Gore has been hired as an advisor on environmental issues. Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, sounded the alarm throughout the globe, especially in this country where we’ve had a disconnect with nature in recent years. I’m glad Gore figured out that the way to a Modern American’s mind is through a DVD and surround sound.

For more, Global Warming ‘Threat to Growth’