Mayor's Sustainability Summitt speech

Well, now that the prairie is installed and winter is on us we are in waiting mode until spring when the temperatures rise and the plants emerge. Can't wait to see what comes up and how it looks. The prairie plants we planted should grow quickly and flower in 2014. Some of the seeds we planted will come up and a few of those may bloom as well. Other seeds will sprout over the next 2-5 years. Some of the plants we put in will eventually die or be out-competed by more vigorous species. The prairie is going to be an evolving landscape as new species emerge and others disappear.

The final action we took was to attend the Mayor's Sustainability Summit on November 9th and present our project to the mayor and to the city. The following is the text of my presentation. Once again, thanks so much to everyone who came out and lent a hand. This experience has been fantastic!

Speech at Mayor’s Sustainability Showcase
Good Morning! In the next five minutes I will give you some background on the Thurman Gateway Prairie Restoration Project, tell you why we chose the site, explain what we did and what we learned, and end with a brief view to the future.

Hwy 44 creates a physical barrier between the Shaw and Botanical Heights neighborhoods. Walking or biking between the neighborhoods is difficult and involves jockeying with cars on Grand Avenue, Tower Grove or Spring Avenue. Thurman Avenue is the other connecting street but it has been closed to automobiles for thirty years. This would be an ideal route for pedestrians and bicyclists but, until this summer, the street entrances were a tangled mass of trees, brush, vines and debris. The area looked dangerous and was avoided by many neighbors. The appearance of this area created a social barrier between the neighborhoods.

Last year a group of neighbors began a discussion about beautifying the area. Plans to repave the street, install new lighting and paint a bike lane on the pavement were discussed and approved. The underpass will be transformed into a pedestrian and bike friendly pocket park but no attention was given to the natural habitat potential of the site’s four sloping grassy sections of highway right-of-way.

This is not surprising. We often think of cities as human and domestic places, areas given to industrial activities, lost to nature. We think of countryside as the proper place for nature, wildlife, and wilderness. One result of this viewpoint is that we live with mile after mile of urban highway right-of-way cordoned off, planted with non-native grasses, and mowed intensively as if it were an enormous lawn. Native birds, butterflies and pollinators have no home in this landscape and neither do we!

Those of us who garden know this old viewpoint is nonsense! We know that cities are managed landscapes but nature is here! As cities grow larger and larger, where else will nature survive? We have to make room for wilderness all around us, not just in our nature reserve and parks, but also in our front yards, back yards, empty lots, parking lots, and highway right-of-ways.

So, knowing our neighborhood history, we already knew that Shaw was once a prairie called the Prairie des Noyers. Local conditions favor the prairie ecosystem and this is the kind of native landscape that makes sense in Shaw. We decided to landscape the new pocket park at the Thurman underpass with a beautiful prairie restoration project.

Thanks to 208 neighbors and friends who volunteered at least 624 hours of their time we cleared the site of debris, removed non-native vegetation, planted ¼ acre of prairie and mulched the entire area.

Thanks to funding from the Mayor’s Office and Brightside St. Louis we purchased and planted 1,150 live prairie grasses and flowering perennials. Just to make sure, we also broadcasted nine pounds of prairie and cover crop seeds. Our restoration project returns 78 species of native prairie plants to Shaw. These plants will in turn attract and feed native bees, butterflies and song birds.

We were assisted by the City Streets Department, the City Forestry Department, the Water Department, and the Missouri Department of Transportation. Volunteers came from the Shaw and Botanical Heights neighborhoods, The Word at Shaw, Faith in Action, the Lutheran Elders of the St. Louis district, Epworth Children and Family Services and from St. Louis University.

Along the way we decided to make the project relevant to every participating group. We developed a short introductory presentation that I delivered at every work day. This presentation included the passing of visual aids (pass these around now) demonstrating the flowers, the birds, the bees and butterflies that would be brought back through our volunteers’ hard work. The volunteers told us this approach got them excited to be a part of the project and made the work worthwhile. They could see the future outcome of their work and felt like they were a part of something important!

We also discovered that many neighbors do not understand the importance of prairie. Many have never seen a prairie. Others think prairies are ugly and weedy. In response, we decided to create a new non-profit organization, Sustainable in St. Louis (SiSL), to take the project to the next level: from a landscaping project to an educational project.

Through SiSL we have begun to gather a network of ecology professionals and skilled volunteers from across the Midwest to help us maintain and expand the prairie.

We have partnered with the North American Butterfly Association and the Audubon Society to track the return of pollinators and song birds to the site. We are developing educational opportunities for the neighborhood and the city including signs that identify native species, web pages to present the primary habitat data we collect and additional web pages to make available practical information about how you can create native habitat in your own space. Finally, we are partnering with local schools to develop curriculum and internship opportunities that will bring university, high school and elementary school students into the prairie.

Now! This is not where we started! We began with a landscaping project but we are on the way to something larger and richer. Thank you to the Mayor’s Office and Brightside St. Louis for funding the project. I hope each of you has the opportunity to walk or bike through the Thurman gateway in the years ahead to see it evolve.

This is a collaborative project and it will remain so. I invite each of you to not only visit us but to contact us with your suggestions and ideas for making the project bigger, better and more useful to everyone. Thank you!