Conscious Choice: The Eco-Doctor is In

July 2004

The Eco-Doctor is In

This healer cures the diseases that ravage our planet’s landscapes

by Brian Leaf

The banks of Taylor Creek in Brodhead, Wis., burned two years ago, but today there’s little sign of the ash that blackened the ground like death.

The land has healed. Bird and bee and flower and tree conduct nature’s ancient business on the grassy stream bank, as if no one has intervened. But human healers are 100 yards away, working in offices and in the field, conducting nature’s modern business for Applied Ecological Services (AES).

The land that man wrecks, AES fixes.

Over the past 25-odd years, thousands of acres of habitat have been reclaimed, healed, restored and protected by AES, a 60-employee private company, 120 miles northwest of Chicago. For a planet that seems in need of environmental triage, AES takes a “one project at a time” approach, creating healthy, functioning ecosystems where none previously existed, while “resolving conflicts between natural and human systems.”

“I try to remain really hopeful and positive and do have a great deal of confidence in human beings rising to do what is right,” says Steve Apfelbaum, president of AES and a nationally known expert in ecosystem restoration.

“They might be ambivalent to the 11th hour, but you have to have some sort of confidence and trust that, when given the choice between right and wrong, regardless what the business outcomes will be, the right alternative will be chosen to benefit the people who have the greatest interest.”

As long as people have roamed the planet, nature has been shaped to meet human economic needs. From that perspective, AES is no different. It makes money manipulating the land, recreating the earth to suit the needs of its customers. But that’s where most similarities end.

Instead of squeezing houses into subdivisions or helping Home Depot cover thousands of acres with asphalt and blaze orange buildings for the sake of shareholder glory, Steve Apfelbaum’s business applies a complex salve of science, education, native plants, economics and ecosystem evangelism to damaged land. The formula has been applied throughout the Chicago area where AES has built and restored some 200 acres of wetlands, improved streams and watersheds and planted prairies. The company also has worked with developers to create subdivisions that integrate “social needs and economic imperatives with healthy ecological systems.”

Examples abound:

Prairie Crossing, Grayslake, Ill. The subdivision, a nationally studied model of conservation development, clustered the home sites in order to keep open space. To treat storm water runoff, AES used prairie plants and wetlands to filter the water and a man-made lake to reduce pollution and flooding.

Otter Creek, Wetland Mitigation Bank, St. Charles, Ill. This was the nation’s first private wetland mitigation bank. Mitigation banks are large wetlands built or restored to offset developments in smaller wetland fragments.

Nike Missile Site Restoration, Vernon Hills, Ill. AES, using prairie seed from its restoration nurseries, restored 21 acres to prairie.

Chicago Department of Environment Urban Heat Island Initiative. The project’s goal is to reduce ambient heat in the city by replacing asphalt with green space. AES restored sections of prairie, woodland and savannah at three schools, a medical center and a vacant lot.

From 9/11 Debris to Toxic Metals

AES’s profile certainly has risen with the restoration of the Fresh Kills Landfill on New York City’s Staten Island. AES was part of an international team that won a competition to redevelop the world’s largest landfill — incidentally, the same site where the World Trade Towers’ debris was hauled after 9/11. AES will restore some 2,200 acres of open space, much of it in native vegetation communities — woodlands, prairies and wetlands.

A job of such magnitude was unheard of 25 years ago, when Apfelbaum was a pioneer in the ecological restoration movement. “When we first started doing this work, nobody else was doing it,” says Apfelbaum, who founded AES in 1978. “We talked to people about restoration and they wouldn’t have a clue what we were talking about.

“Just the definition had so many embedded thoughts, concepts, philosophies, deviations from normal. ‘Restore what?’ is the first thing we heard. ‘What are you trying to do, bring the buffalo back like it was 400 years ago?’”

One of Apfelbaum’s first jobs was to explore ways to revitalize land that had been crushed by tracked military vehicles. He got the gig as a University of Illinois graduate student studying plant and animal ecology. “The military was trying to understand the ecological impacts of their training activities,” says Apfelbaum. “For me that led to a decade’s worth of work, research primarily, and ways for the military to rest and rotate their training activities so the land is stable and not damaged as severely.”

That work led him all across the country. Then in 1982, Apfelbaum and his life partner, Susan Lehnhardt, moved to southern Wisconsin. They started a native plant nursery and launched a business doing small restoration projects. They didn’t stay small for long. “The first big project we did after moving here was probably in 1984,” says Apfelbaum. “Inspiration Mining out of Arizona had five zinc-lead mines in southwestern Wisconsin. They retained us, at the suggestion of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, to help close the mines and reclaim the land.”

The land was like a moonscape, he recalls — hills of dry, ground-up rock ranging in size from gravel to fine silt that would blow off the hilltops onto neighboring farms. There was no organic matter, but plenty of heavy metals in the mining spoils. Apfelbaum’s task was to turn the mess into something resembling a Wisconsin landscape.

The first step was to contain the toxic, heavy metals being blown and washed away from the site. Apfelbaum took a very Wisconsin approach to solving the problem: cow poop. “We bought all the manure we could get our hands on from local dairy farms and put truckload upon truckload of manure on the site,” says Apfelbaum. “There were significant heavy metal problems on the site. The best way to bind heavy metals is in the soil column.”

But instead of soil, he used cow patties. “Manure was the cheapest way,” he says. “We contributed to the financial well-being of farmers in the area, buying their manure and involving them in trucking it to the site. It was a win for the mining company, a win for farmers and a win for the environment.” AES then covered the property with native prairie plants that could tolerate dry conditions with little soil nutrition. Today, the site blends into the land around it.

More big projects came AES’s way. And as the company grew, Apfelbaum the ecologist became Apfelbaum the businessman. AES’s revenues were doubling annually. After five years of trying to manage growth, Apfelbaum gave up. He hired a business manager and returned to his passions — research and restoration. “I learned early that letting go of many pieces of an operation like this are essential,” he says. “There’s no reason pretending I can be a business person, a scientist, an entrepreneur, a writer, you name it. What we’ve tried to do here is put the most talented employees in place, and I consistently let go. The only thing I do as an owner is to provide leadership, try to check in on the big picture issues, try to trouble shoot problems that come up.”

Besides, he says, taking a tip from Mother Nature — it doesn’t pay to be a control freak. “What I’ve learned in ecological systems training is that it’s not about control,” he says. “It’s about interdependencies and inter relationships and whenever an organism attempts to control a system — like a human being attempting to control an ecosystem — there is a series of unpredictable changes, catastrophic events that show the human being that control isn’t the way to interact.”

The philosophy that nature, and not man, is in control has helped AES win jobs. When the Natural Land Institute (NLI) reviewed bids to restore the 720 acre Nygren Wetland near Rockton, Ill., it chose AES from six bidders. “Almost all of them could have done it,” says Jerry Paulson, executive director of NLI, one of Illinois’ oldest private land conservation organizations. “We did like AES because they had more of an organic approach. They didn’t engineer things. They look at the land, the soils, the hydrology and the landscape and tried to work with it. And they were interested in using plants with local genotypes.

“There are a lot of big engineering firms that have ecosystem restoration divisions now,” adds Paulson. “They just don’t have the knowledge, depth or experience that AES has.” That’s because AES has been around longer than anyone else and has retained staff.

“The culture is the key,” says General Manager Carl Korfmacher. “Most of the people are here, including the top management, because we want to do this work. If you see a ratio in the private sector of 500 to 1 in what the top person makes versus the lowest paid worker, here it’s closer to 5-to-1.” Also, the company shares 20 percent of its profits with employees through a 401k profit-sharing plan, an employer match and a cash bonus.

Community education and communication also is a central component of AES’s work. Rather than take an adversarial stance, Apfelbaum says he prefers to use science, education and reason in matters of the environment. “We do a lot of front-end work to protect and restore areas,” Apfelbaum says. “We recognized years ago that the change-agents are the developers and the regulators — the policy people. We have put together policy information to help teach, train and educate them about alternative ways to think.”

Such efforts can and do result in neighborhoods, communities and companies rallying around a project.

“When those three things are there, we feel we’ve succeeded as a company,” Apfelbaum says. And when that happens, the economy, ecology and human culture all benefit. A semblance of harmony is restored to the planet. And the man who helped re-create it is pleased.

Brian Leaf, a free-lance writer in Rockford, Ill., pursues his passion for the environment as president of Severson Dells Nature Center in Rockford.

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Applied Ecological Services
Otter Creek Wetland Mitigation Bank
Natural Land Institute Nygren Wetlands

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