USC Belser Book Club Oct 2024: "Reconciliation in a Michigan Watershed"

Welcome all nature lovers to the Belser Arboretum Book Club! Please join us, and share this announcement with your fellow readers.

Meet Sunday, October 13, 2024, at 3 p.m. in the Arboretum's Outdoor Classroom.

PLEASE REGISTER in case we must change venue due to weather.

Bailey Slice Parker, Executive Director, Gills Creek Watershed Association, leads our discussion of .

Like many American urban waterways, Ken-O-Sha has been in decline for nearly two hundred years. Once life-supporting, the waterway now known as Plaster Creek is life-threatening. In this provocative book, scholars and environmentalists Gail Gunst Heffner and David P. Warners explore the watershed’s ecological, social, spiritual, and economic history to determine what caused the damage, and describe more recent efforts to repair it. Heffner and Warners provide insight into the concept of reconciliation ecology, as enacted through their group, Plaster Creek Stewards,who together with community partners refuse to accept the status quo of a contaminated creek unfit for children’s play, severely reduced biological diversity, and environmental injustices. Their work reveals that reconciliation ecology needs to focus not only on repairing damaged human–nature relationships, but also on the relationships between people groups, including Indigenous North Americans and the descendants of European colonizers.

Bailey Slice Parker is a Midlands Master Naturalist, an active member of the Columbia Audubon Society, and serves on the boards of Friends of Congaree Swamp and Canoeing for Kids. Her interest in the natural world led her to leave a 17-year career as a church music director to become the Executive Director of the Gills Creek Watershed Association (Jan., 2023).
Whether working or volunteering, she spends as much time as possible outdoors, birding, biking, botanizing, studying water quality, and engaging others to do the same. She is passionate about conservation and making the world a better place for wildlife and humans.

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The Bloomwood gate opens at 2:30, so please enjoy a walk before we begin.

We'll have snacks and beverages, and you're welcome to bring your own.

Note that trails are natural and hilly, and restrooms are not available.

Please leave pets at home.

Host or Publisher W. Gordon Belser Arboretum