A: I'm the director of the conservation department for Five Rivers, and there are two big elements to it. One is habitat management of all the natural areas of the agency, about 15,000 acres. The other is land protection — purchasing land, establishing conservation easements. So one is taking care of the land you have, and the other is getting new land to take care of. Inside all that, there's writing grants to buy the land, all the aspects of land management — deer population management, wetland restoration, reforestation, planting prairies. We have a small staff of 14 people who are paid to do the work, and then we have the help of hundreds of volunteers as well we really depend on. They're great. And they're not just helping get things done, they're becoming actively involved in the work of conservation.
Q: Talk about the ways people can become involved.
A: For one thing, it takes a lot of work to make sure volunteers are well-used, and we hired a volunteer coordinator three years ago to do that — making sure they have the right tools and so forth. You put a lot of energy in, but you get a lot more out. One really neat thing they've been key to is our reforestation program. It's called "Go Nuts," where volunteers collect seeds in the fall — acorns, hickory seeds and such. They clean and store them, and then plant them at Cox Arboretum and grow them into seedlings. When they get to a certain size, the seedlings are farmed out for the summer "Forest Foster Tree Program," which has been a big success — people even take their trees on vacation with them, so they can be cared for. We've produced about 12,000 to 14,000 trees a year. And most of them of have lived, even with the drought a few summers ago, and us having to outsmart animals that try to eat the young trees. There's art and science to it.
Q: You have to love volunteers.
A: They even help with our land acquisition. For instance, we have a number of conservation areas that aren't developed in terms of having parking lots or facilities — but volunteers will help us monitor the areas, walking the boundaries, reporting problems. They help with prairie burns, too. The biggest thing is the deer management — we have more than 300 bowhunters who have to pass a rigorous exam and shooting test to get in. There's sort of a lottery, where they get a certain spot at a certain time. It's not a recreational program.
Q: Do people have strong feelings about the deer?
A: We do it because we have to. If the population gets up to about 20 per square mile, they can cause tremendous damage to the woods. We monitor it to make sure we don't harvest more deer than we should.
Q: You’re really talking about maintaining a kind of natural balance.
A: Right. MetroParks' strategic plan has protecting biodiversity as one of our main priorities. Another priority is connecting people with nature. And so you have to find that balance between protection and use, we can't just have one or the other. We mostly do a pretty good job at it, I think.
Q: A big change in the system has been adding the land in the urban core, such as RiverScape. Did that affect the work you do?
A: I've been here since 1982, and I've seen all the changes over that time — that was probably the biggest one. In 1994 we were basically a suburban system of eight parks — Possum Creek, Sugarcreek, Carriage Hill, Cox Arboretum, and the dam areas of Englewood, Taylorsville, Germantown and Huffman. So the vision was conceived by Marvin Olinsky, our director at that time, to connect them all by using the rivers. The region's biggest asset is the rivers that come together at downtown Dayton, but they were polluted and people weren't using them. But by the late 1990s, they were clean again thanks to the Clean Water Act and all the improvements to sewer systems. People just didn't realize it yet.
So the vision was, here are these old parks along the river in Dayton that were gems in their day — Island Park, Van Cleve downtown where RiverScape is now, Deeds, Wesleyan. We worked with the city and the Miami Conservancy District to bring them back to life and make it easy again for people to get to the rivers. That did add complexities to what we do. Island Park, for instance, added 30 acres of urban space, and we had to learn how to take care of that. But part of Marvin’s philosophy was that if you invest in center-city parks, and bring up the city, that could slow down the sprawl and consumption of land in the suburbs.
Q: How do things like sprawl and larger environmental issues like climate change affect the kind of work you do?
A: You try to keep in mind the Serenity Prayer, about being content to only affect the things you have the power to influence. And you keep in mind that you are the steward of tax money, and so you want to use it in a wise manner. But your question goes to a real conversation in the conservation community in general. The conservation movement was started with a desire to set aside things like Yellowstone and Yosemite, and it trickled down to states and communities like ours. Our own system is sort of an outgrowth of that movement. But the idea was based on a sense that you could take something and protect it and it would always stay the same. Well, that turns out to be a rather naive notion, especially in a fragmented place like Ohio. You have to deal with things like invasive species and climate change, and you have to set realistic goals. There's a young woman named Emma Marris who's written a book called "The Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World," that is getting a lot of attention. Her message is that the world has changed, and there's no going back — nothing is pristine anymore, and yet we still have to be stewards of the land and take care of it. It's more like a rambunctious garden than a framed painting that never changes.
Q: Interesting.
A: It's a strange and even difficult idea for some people, but it's ultimately hopeful, I think — this is still the world we live in, and there is still a great deal of beauty in it, and a lot that we can and should value. And I should say that a lot of our parks still maintain some pristineness, but most of the land anymore is not like that. We have some pretty special places, though.
Q: What are some of your favorites?
A: Well, Twin Creek MetroPark near Germantown is probably the closest we have to pristine. But one that I really like a lot is Woodman Fen.
Q: Never heard of that one.
A: It's fairly new and kind of hidden away — but it's in Dayton, actually, near the Kettering line. It's an old fen, a bog that was too marshy to ever be developed. We got a grant to buy and restore it, and it's neat to see a kind of ruined piece of land come roaring back to life. Now it has a small parking area and a boardwalk all through it, more than 30 acres in the middle of a neighborhood where the residents help take care of it, take pride in it. It's beautiful. It shows how people really can be good stewards, and how nature really is like a rambunctious garden.
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