Mennonite Weekly Review

GOSHEN, Ind. — What was once turf and a collection of recycling bins is becoming a rolling prairie.

Alana Kenagy, Goshen College junior from Albany, Ore., and other students help plant a mix of prairie grasses and flowers in the south corner of campus last October. — Photo by Jodi H. Beyeler/Goshen College

The area is now the first view of the Goshen College campus coming from the south on Main Street. Those maintaining the area added plants in June to what they seeded in October.

“Once a prairie is established, it needs periodic mowing or burning, but it doesn’t require much maintenance in the long run,” said Ryan Sensenig, assistant professor of biology. “And a prairie will never look the same from one year to the next over the coming 20 years. It’s a dynamic, changing process.”

The idea of creating a campus prairie began several years ago in Jerrell Ross Richer’s economics class as a group of students wrote a proposal for the college to save money and energy by developing more native prairie areas on campus. The college’s Environmental Stewardship Committee approved moving forward with changes on the plot behind Newcomer Center.

Student leaders and Sensenig spearheaded the project; EcoPAX club members and ecology class students helped prepare the soil and plant the seed.

“The neat part about this is the way it has connected student initiative, physical plant management and the curriculum,” Sensenig said.

The prairie project was expanded to include a detention pond as well, which was added after grant funding from the Elkhart River Alliance became available and got Glenn Gilbert, utility manager and sustainability coordinator, involved. The detention pond will reduce excess water coming off surrounding parking lots from going into the nearby Elkhart River as quickly, thus cutting down on flooding.

Rather than removing soil from the area when digging out the detention pond, a berm was built to hide the recycling bins.

“Our intention is to make it look intentional, not neglected,” Gilbert said.

The group used three prairie mixes that all included grasses and flowering plants, including a tallgrass prairie seed mix for the banks in the back, a swale mix for the wettest areas and a mix of 30 flowering plants and shorter grasses, which will cover the majority of the area.

“I am just really excited to see the land so transformed — shaping the land and planting a diversity of plants — to explore how it affects soil quality and other biological qualities of the area,” said Alana Kenagy, a junior from Albany, Ore., one of the student leaders of the project.

Sensenig sees the project as an experiment in interdisciplinary learning.

“How can we help students connect with the people and place around them?” he said. “To the degree that environmental problems are due to the disconnect we have in our lives, the solution has to do with how we reconnect. Restoration of our place becomes not just a biological or technical pursuit, but a commitment to socially work in ways that are also restorative.”