Tom Van Zoeren, environmental activist

By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor

Retirement is an interpretive experience. For one guy it might mean a pastured life. For another, there’s the Tom Van Zoeren School of Retirement: Not! A former ranger with the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (SBDNL), Van Zoeren’s post-professional life is a blueprint of engaged, purposeful work.

From 1978 until 2006 the 63-year-old Van Zoeren was employed as a naturalist and ranger by the National Park Service. The Leelanau County resident came to Sleeping Bear in 1984, and worked here for 22 years. For all practical purposes, he still works in the park. Through a range of cultural, historical and ecological activities, Van Zoeren’s focus on the Sleeping Bear remains sharp.

Glen Abor Sun: When did you begin working for SBDNL?

Tom Van Zoeren: I had been working as a park naturalist at Saint Croix National Riverway in Wisconsin and Minnesota for five years when there was an opening here at Sleeping Bear Dunes for a park ranger in 1984. I was totally sick of being cooped up in the visitor center, so a job where I would actually get to go outside sounded wonderful.

Sun: Why did you want to come to SBDNL?

Van Zoeren: I spent all my summers as a kid here in Burdickville (Van Zoeren grew up north of Birmingham, Mich.), along with hordes of cousins, second cousins, et cetera. Alice (his wife of 39 years) and I had two small children then, so we thought it would be great to live close to their grandparents and other relatives.

Sun: What was your role at SBDNL?

Van Zoeren: I was a regular park ranger. Many NPS people refer to them as “Law Enforcement Rangers” to distinguish them from naturalists and other employees; but I never did. Law enforcement is just one part of the job, along with EMS, firefighting, search and rescue, “resource management” (dealing with threats to the plants, animals), and just helping visitors in any way possible.

Sun: How many years did you work for SBDNL?

Van Zoeren: Federal law enforcement and fire-fighting personnel have a special retirement program set up to move us out as we age and make room for young people who are more fit for that type of work. As I reached my mid-50s, I started having some health issues and felt that I was no longer in my prime — so I retired in 2006 to make room for younger blood. So now I get to continue working for the park, but mostly just do the stuff I think is important — and some fun stuff.

A short list of Van Zoeren’s “important/fun” work includes:

• Taking care of the recycling station at the SBDNL Empire headquarters.
• Conducting annual frog and toad surveys.
• Conducting oral history interviews and scanning historic photographs in relation to the Port Oneida area.
• Adopting the Pyramid Point Trail.
• Historian for Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear.
• Member of the SBDNL volunteer search and rescue team.
• Helping plan new park hiking trails, creating maps for these projects.
• Caring for the Sleeping Bear Dunes Air Monitoring Station at Esch Road.
• “Sewage stuff.”

“Sewage stuff” is a shorthand descriptor for a long story. Beginning in 1993 NPS Ranger Van Zoeren began monitoring The Homestead resort’s sewage spray system, an activity he continues as a private citizen. He receives moral support from a range of environmental and grassroots organizations including The Drifters, “an informal group who confer, strategize, and rally support for the effort to resolve the Homestead sewage drift problem in the National Lakeshore. The group includes liaisons from environmental groups, Homestead residents, neighbors and other concerned citizens. “We operate on the basis of consensus. I serve as spokesperson,” Van Zoeren said.

His voice, however, is clearly heard on the website he created, www.HomesteadSewage.com. The Homestead is permitted by the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to dispose of treated sewage — a pending permit allows for 233,707 gallons per day, 20 million-plus gallons per year — by spraying it on a 13-acre parcel of land adjacent to the local national park. The resort must reapply for a new permit every five years. Van Zoeren has used his website to post updates, the results of monitoring tests, as a place to record the history of this issue as he understands it, and a place to issue calls for public action.

He finds fault with a system of spraying treated sewage — it drifts onto surrounding parklands and contaminates them, he said. The resort’s spray fields are surrounded by the warning signs. These were installed in 1993 by SBDNL volunteers. Van Zoeren also contends the treatment methods don’t neutralize the waste. In a September email Van Zoeren expressed his concern that the DEQ’s new draft five-year Groundwater Discharge Permit “will not solve the essential problem.”

Sun: You’ve proposed a low-impact alternative to the current practice of disposing the resort’s sewage. Have you been able to share these ideas with the DEQ? The Homestead? The SBDNL?

Van Zoeren: Initially this problem was somewhat out of sight and mind (to the NPS). However, in recent years Park management has gotten on board and made it very clear to The Homestead and the DEQ that this is a serious problem that needs to get fixed. No one at the DEQ has directly addressed the trickle irrigation option (Van Zoeren’s proposed alternative solution) with me in any detail, but proven systems that are designed specifically for this purpose of sewage effluent discharge do exist. I’ve sent many notes to The Homestead over the years advising them of our ideas and desire to work together. I don’t recall ever having gotten anything back, but would certainly welcome dialogue.

Sun: Is this issue a rock? And are you Sisyphus?

Van Zoeren: I just seem to be positioned as the person who’s quite familiar with the history and other details of this issue, who has nothing much to lose in taking it on — so I guess it’s just my calling. I was lucky to earn a living working for Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, and now I’m lucky to have a beautiful place to live and many enjoyable things to do in my life — so this one way of giving back seems the least I can do. So I carry on, with faith that reason will prevail.

Sun: What is it about the natural world — especially the world of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore — that speaks to you?

Van Zoeren: I can’t say anything that hasn’t been said before, and more eloquently. I think we all need places where we can get away from civilization occasionally to reconnect with ourselves, our earth, our god. Places like Sleeping Bear Dunes, which has been set aside to preserve our natural world as purely as possible, are extremely precious in today’s human-dominated world.

This is the 11th in a series of articles prompted by the National Park Service’s centennial celebration of its founding in 1916. One of the NPS’s birthday initiatives is Find Your Park, a multi-pronged program that invites people to discover the National Park in their backyard. Throughout 2015, the Sun has published stories about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and some of the people in our community who have developed a relationship with it.