Thanks for the information. One of the things I’d have liked to know more about was what other land conservation efforts might have influenced Charles Eliot. Not a lot was going on either in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world, and his idea was a big step beyond anything else, but learning what was going on, based on his knowledge would be valuable. So, of course, would be his own view of the development of the Trustees, to supplement his father’s version.

Please do tell me more about the scapbook. Your link didn’t work for me, so please send more information via another comment. If something could be better transmitted through the mail, anything sent to me at Dept. of Biological Sciences, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo MI 49008 would reach me.

Thanks for your comments about Asylum Lake and the Colony Farm Orchard. The bill that would remove the open space/public use restrictions on the Orchard property (HB 5207) has now made its way to the governor’s desk. She will either sign it or veto it in the next few days. A phone call, letter, or email (or all of them) to the governor could help convince her that a veto is the answer. My newest post here (done 24 Dec) addresses the question of how credible WMU’s claims about needing the land to bring jobs to Kalamazoo are. A bigger piece of unrestricted land, such as several that WMU already owns or a good-sized remediated brownfield would be better. The 24 Dec post also contain contact information for the governor.

Thanks for your thoughts. I agree it’s disheartening that WMU wants to remove the open space/public use restriction so that they can sell the Colony Farm Orchard for development. They hope to do the same thing with the TB hospital grounds, though that has gotten less publicity. But it is included in the same legislation (HB 5207) as the Orchard. The land has also has a public use (but not open space) restriction on it that says that if WMU sells it for private use, the proceeds go to the general fund of the state (for education and things like that). HB 5207 says WMU will pay the state one dollar and the state will give up its interest; WMU will be able to keep all the money from a sale to a private developer. Except for needing to demolish the asbestos-containing building, the site is perhaps the most desirable large piece of real estate left in the city. WMU will make a bundale off it.

The fact that nothing but trees, shrubs, grasses, and walking paths were present on one property was cited as reason for it being converted from parkland to another use.

Though I feel as if there were two different and separate arguments at play in your piece:

I. Academic institutions and conservation lands, and
II. A societal viewpoint that sees no value in land unless it is built.

Thanks for letting me see your video. It looks to be well done and brings up serious issues.

Watch the video by clicking here.

Thanks for your comment. Rep. Jones has been a long-time local Democrat and is getting the benefit of the doubt from many. I don’t know whether he was aware of the history of any of the land dealt with in the three bills he introduced (now rolled into one bill in the House), and I do not know if he understood the effect the Colony Farm Orchard bill would have in reducing the conservation value of the Asylum Lake Preserve. No question that it was a mistake on the part of Rep. Jones, the WMU administration, and others involved in not notifying Oshtemo Township of their designs on Oshtemo open space. The question is, will these mistakes have consequences?

Thanks for your thoughts.

There were 14,000+ visits to this website in the month of July, but I think you’re right that few were people promoting use of the Colony Farm Orchard for expansion of the WMU Business Park.

However, please feel free to use or encourage the use of the website for such pro and con (or simply educational) discussion. Additional comments would be welcome at this post of Mark Hoffman’s essay, and I expect that I’ll have a new post or two on the topic in the next few days, where the discussion could also occur.

It’s an important issue but not a new one. In many ways, the whole thing is a remarkably close re-run of the attempt by WMU in the 1990s to locate the Business Park on the Asylum Lake property–and later on to locate an extension of the Business Park there, and later still to turn it into a golf course. Additional information on the subject, current and historic, is in some earlier posts (and links within them), for 15 July and 23 July (at the end).

Verities are eternal, but politics change. The attacks of the 1990s were beaten back, with a fairly satisfactory outcome from a conservation standpoint. But there is no assurance that conservation will win out over commerce in 2009.

I wish we had a forum where more folks who had the say-so on this could have a conversation with others who have concerns about it. As it is, I doubt many of them are reading this blog, excellent as it is. :>

At that time, numerous sites were tossed around (some still viable), including various brownfields, the Fort Custer Industrial Park, Schippers Crossing, even the property known then as WMU’s “Arboretum” which was also being examined for a large-scale P.U.D., and others. The Asylum Lake Preservation Association held its position that it would prefer the development (based on the H.S.G.A. and William Johnson consultants’ scenarios) to occur on the unrestricted farmland south of Parkview Avenue. This is, in fact, what we ended up with several years later.

Now, to answer your first question, WMU is stating that the present location of the BTR Park is filling — a sign of its success. Officials are looking for room to expand for new businesses interested in locating there. First, according to Western, the remaining parcels will eventually be sold off and developed. Then the soccer field along Parkview Avenue. But after that — where? They look to the Colony Farm Orchard as the most likely location, being adjacent to the present BTR Park. This may answer part of your second question, too. The University has enabled development within the boundaries of the BTR Park (south of Parkview Avenue), and it is reaching capacity.

Third, certainly there are alternatives to building on the Orchard, and probably on land NOT set aside for “public park, recreation, or open space purposes,” as would be the case with the adjacent Asylum Lake Preserve. During a recent Oshtemo Township Trustee meeting, there was mention of a large tract nearby the BTR Park, located at 11th Street and Parkview Avenue. Apparently planners once discussed future land uses for this tract that would be comparable to the BTR Park. Certainly there are other sites readily available for sale and begging for development, as was noted from 1990-93. (In fact, just a few short weeks ago, the Kalamazoo Gazette featured a great and lengthy story on the Davis Creek Business Park — land in the City of Kalamazoo reclaimed and ready for building.) Alternatives should always be discussed when addressing complex issues such as this one, and your question is the perfect way to begin to the process.

The answer to your final question is “no.”

I guess I need some more background to judge:
1) Why is WMU expanding the BTR park? Is the available space used up?
2) Could BTR facilities be expanded within the existing footprint of the campus, or is more land required?
3) If more land is required, is there any good alternative to expanding into the orchard?

Do you know anywhere where these issues are discussed (online) from WMU’s perspective?

I was making a couple of points in saying that if the land owner refuses to protect what ought to be protected, the land trust should walk away. First, being ready to walk away is always the strongest negotiating position. It doesn’t necessarily mean going away mad or closing the door. It does mean not wasting more time. Almost no land trust is likely to have enough land protection staff and volunteers and money to conserve as many pieces of land as they ought to be protecting this month or this year. In the absence of unlimited resources, time spent on a deal that’s headed toward a second-rate result is going to be time unavailable to spend on a better deal.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of saying to one’s self that since we’ve already spent months on this deal, we can’t give up now. But those are sunk costs; the aphorism of throwing good money after bad applies.

@Harry White:
Thanks for your thoughts. It’s my impression that a lot of land trusts have begun to take a more perfunctory approach (insofar as conservation values) to their easement deals than in earlier times. It’s good to hear that Neantinoge Heritage is employing a comprehensive conservation approach.

@Steven Brewer:
Thanks for checking out your dad’s revamped website. I suspect that the whole family agrees on the many benefits of locally grown food.

Maynard Kaufman has always contended that not as much farmland has been lost as is claimed. Maynard has a long history of sound thought on food production: he and others incorporated one of the earliest farmland trusts in 1976–four years earlier than the Marin Agricultural Land Trust. His reasoning on the loss of farmland issue is that much of the land contained in suburban ranchettes of 5 or 10 acres could readily be turned back to food production if the need arose. When I look at the small size of the many of the organic garden plots that are supplying lots of produce to
farmer’s markets these days, I’m inclined to think he’s right. I know of one person raising organic poultry on less than 10 acres using a paddock approach. Of course, he can’t raise as many chickens as he could sell and hopes to buy more land.

One of the problems with ordinary agriculture these days is that it’s often not local or even food. The Illinois corn may be going to high fructose corn syrup or grain for the feedlot or even for ethanol to burn in our cars. The peppers or other produce in the Salinas valley is food, but the fate of much of it is to end up thousands of miles away. It would be possible to write easements that strongly encourage cultivation of organic food for local consumption. But few land trusts are bold enough to do this. They have two pretty good reasons: They don’t want to tie the hands of the owners, and the restrictions might turn out to hard to write and time consuming to enforce.

He also makes large assumptions as to who the messenger is accusing “Steve” of being a forester and limited in thinking abilities. I guess one would expect that of a Eurocentric “white” elitist that takes the position of being more “enlightened” on natural matters than others. After all, he fails to even make any attempt to discover who this “Steve” person is to qualify his “white” assumption.

Oh, and by the way “Harry”, just so you know, I manage the Truckee River water program for the Paiute Tribe here in Nevada that runs from Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake. We manage it for habitat for endangered fish species, habitat restoration for riparian species, irrigated native farmlands and working watershed landscapes that dwarfs your anglo land trust’s holdings by several hundreds of square miles.

I also happen to be part Caddo Native American.

Sincerely,
“Steve”

As to the dark comment of “Steve”, above, who likes to play the “what is natural” game, ignore him. His baseline condition is “immediately post-glacial” … now there’s a deep thinker. We encounter this type of character all of the time – all too often it’s a forester who challenges what is natural by defending his overharvests with the myth that the Native Americans manipulated ecosystems … of course, he ignores the relative population density and the lack of technology, etc. etc.

Great column, Richard. Thanks.

While it should be the goal of every land trust to provide the most comprehensive protection possible, I’m not sure if you’re looking truly with all of its pluses and minuses. Obviously some land trusts with missions dedicated towards protecting particular natural areas shouldn’t accept any easement which degrades them, but for the most part, most land trusts accept agricultural land as land worth protecting, and which makes “walking away” so extreme.

After all, agricultural easements don’t mandate agriculture as an affirmative action, the landowner doesn’t have to destroy those natural areas. By establishing a beneficial relationship with the landowner the land trust may have positioned itself to negotiate an easement amendment for better protection later. However, what have you gained by “walking away?” You’ve probably soured the relationship with the landowner, achieved no measure of protection leaving the entirety of the property, agricultural or natural, open for development. The agricultural activities the landowner wanted to pursue in the natural areas of the property are likely going to be pursued anyways, with the added disadvantage that the property could be turned into a shopping mall later.

That, unfortunately, is the true extent of the pluses and minuses. We can’t afford to be absolute puritans with every easement deal. Every land trust should start from the strongest bargaining position, but, at the end of the day, an entirely agricultural easement is profoundly better than no easement at all.

A nice article bringing out many of the various issues land trusts face. I think the biggest difference here between agricultural protection and ‘natural’ lands protection gets more at the mission of the organization. Some land trusts were started specifically for farmland preservation, others for habitat, etc.

Since each organization is set up initially for a specific type of work, I am not sure it is fair to fault an organization who started as a farmland protection group for ignoring habitat protection. Sure, some balance would be ideal, but organizations might not have the capacity/knowledge to achieve a dual mission. Since these are grass roots organizations, whatever those peoples’ concern is should be the focus of that groups work.

Environmental issues are too intertwined to be meaningfully isolated, as you eluded to with how certain farmland can be habitat, but as an organization, choices must be made for the practical purpose of getting work done. While this will leave other important issues ignored, I think it is inevitable. It just leaves room for another organization to come in and fill in gaps. Aiming to achieve environmental nirvana on a property is an impractical goal for land trusts. The world is dynamic and habitat/species are always moving and transforming. We can do some work to help limit habitat destruction and preserve quality habitat, but for the most part natural processes will do what they will, regardless of any of our attempts (ie, New Orleans!). Species will die, “invasive” will move in…its all just part of a process. I once asked a biologist at a local university what they considered to be “native” plant and they said anything that existed pre-colonization. It all just depends on your perspective you choose to take.

Keep up the good work, these are important questions for every Board to consider to ensure their organization is accomplishing what they hope to in the best possible way.