Granville Land Lab helps retain green-space as development moves across Licking County

Honeybees danced last year between thousands of goldenrod flowers in a 100-acre plot in Granville.

This place is the Ohio that once was. It’s land thick with native grasses, young maples, and cattail-rimmed wetlands. The native prairie immediately stands apart from central Ohio’s corn and soybean fields, many of which are giving way to housing, commercial, and industrial development.

If not for Granville Intermediate School sitting at the edge of the plot, the space would look entirely wild. Quite the opposite is true. From a flooded cornfield to a construction site, the land spent more than a century being torn apart before returning to its natural state — thanks to Granville students and a creative teacher.

This circularity was not without effort. It’s easy to drive by the Granville Land Lab without realizing that high school seniors brainstormed the project, fourth graders planted the hickories, and, nearly a decade later, one of the first students involved in the project married her husband among the wildflowers she persuaded the school board to allow.

This conservation area, research field, community park and classroom is the largest K-12 outdoor education center in Ohio, according to its website. The Land Lab has grown to almost 100 acres since the first 43 acres were restored in 2014.

In the last decade, the space has drawn bird watchers from across the country, as well as biologists, nearby Denison University students, and a variety of Granville school district classes. From providing inspiration for poetry classes to being the ultimate hands-on ecology lab, and even a collection site for the school district cafeterias' maple syrup, the Land Lab has changed the landscape of Granville.

Brent Sodergren, the Ohio state coordinator for the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife, sets Granville’s project far above others he’s been involved with.

"The Land Lab in Granville is probably the marquee example of [schoolyard habitats providing such high value for students] in the country. I doubt that you would find a project that is more diverse – more inclusive – anywhere," Sodergren said.

Home to thousands of wildlife species, meticulously mowed hiking trails, and a steady stream of families on morning walks, the Land Lab emerged from the very corn fields from which it stands apart today.

While farmland is hardly considered a boost for biodiversity, even green space steeped in pesticides and herbicides is changing rapidly as commercial development grows in central Ohio.

Among the latest is one of the most significant. Intel, the computer chip manufacturer, is converting corn and soybean fields into a campus that it said will become the largest complex of its kind in the world. The factory site is 10 miles west of the Land Lab.

Intel expects to employ at least 3,000 people on the site that once was woodlands and prairie that settlers turned into farmland.

Jim Reding, Granville High School science teacher and the mentor of students who started the land lab, believes that the project is now more important than ever.

"As we lose areas that are natural and they become more industrialized, the protected and restored areas become even more valuable," he said.

Natural habitats are fewer and farther between. Without enough connected green spaces to move through, wildlife is threatened, Reding said. In this sense, the Land Lab is an oasis.

Reding was thrilled to begin teaching Advanced Placement environmental science in 2004. As the class began, however, he found his students more overwhelmed with a doomsday attitude within environmental science than they were excited about the subject. In the next few years, he incorporated examples of ways students could do something about climate change, but talking about it wasn't enough.

"One Friday afternoon, as we were wrapping up a unit, a young lady raised her hand and said, 'Mr. Reding, if this is such a good idea, why aren’t we doing it?'" Reding recalls. "I was taken aback and started mentioning the examples we’d talked about, and she goes, 'No, no; that’s not what I mean. I mean, why aren’t we doing it?'"

From that moment Reding’s "take action" projects were born. Every year since then, his classes come up with hands-on projects toward conservation and biodiversity efforts. The Land Lab emerged as one of these projects less than a decade later.

"Some of the projects were big, some of them were small, but they were all empowering," Reding said.

The Granville Intermediate School was built in 2002 in a field on the northwest edge of the village. The large plot of former farmland on which it sits originally was to include another school building, but a group of high-school seniors derailed that idea when they came to the school board in 2013 with plans for the Land Lab.

The proposal started as a five-acre wetland project, but early in the planning of the project Sodergren entered the conversation and offered funding to go bigger. He quickly got his hands dirty alongside the students, and his help allowed them to increase the planned acreage nearly ninefold.

"[The students utilized] the concepts from Jim Reding’s classrooms to say, 'Hey, what was historically here? What can we put here?' I challenged them with coming up with a plan, and I put together a plan as well, and the plans we came up with were really, really close," Sodergren said.

Granville native Dustin Braden, now 24, worked alongside other students during his senior year in 2017 on the grant proposal for the two most recent Land Lab phases. Years later, he said, the experiences with the Land Lab taught him and other students to put themselves out there.

"It’s like, this is something I’m going to throw myself behind; I’m going to publicly support this project, and be a leader on it, and it might not be successful. It was the first time we were told as students that, actually, failing is not bad," he said.

Now, as Reding tours the site, he can barely contain his excitement for the space and what his students accomplished. He walks quickly, and he is always pointing at something. To the casual observer, the space might look like any other restored habitat, but Reading quickly shows that it is much more.

On a scientific level, the Land Lab has every habitat component found in this part of Ohio. Building a wetland was among the first steps in the project, and within a weekend, after an excavator and bulldozer broke up the field’s tightly packed soil, water seeped into the naturally low land and a wetland took over the space it had occupied centuries before.

In late summer, the Land Lab smells sweet as warm country air weaves between wildflowers and native grasses. In recent years, students have harvested these grasses for seeds that help restore thousands of acres of land in other sites, Sodergren said.

The Land Lab is not only an environmental oasis, but it also has become one for humans, bringing people together from within the Granville school district and from across the country. Reding’s bigger "take-action projects," such as the Land Lab, have turned into legacy projects that are passed from one class to another.

"Really, the kids that started the idea never planted a seed," Reding said.

Five years after his high school graduation, Braden is pursuing a master’s degree in geography and spatial science, because of a passion fueled by the Land Lab to fight climate change.

"Every six months, I can go out to the Land Lab, and I’ll see one or two new projects popping up. That’s the most exciting thing for me, because I know that I got to be the base that these students are building on, and I also know that they’re building an even stronger base for future students to engage with it. Beyond that, I know that behind every project is a group of kids who got that same opportunity to be empowered that I had. It’s been so instrumental in my career since," he said.

Beyond its environmental and educational benefits, the Land Lab has shown that a small town in the Midwest can make an impact against climate change, connect students across generations, and put into action something Reding tells all of his classes at the beginning of the school year.

"I tell them we need you to be leaders now, not in 20 years. I think [the Land Lab] has proved to them that they can be leaders now. I think it’s also proved that to the community. We don’t have to wait for them to be at the table," Reding said.

Sophie LeMay writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of The Denison University Journalism Program, which is sponsored in part by the Mellon Foundation.

This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Granville Land Lab retains green-space as development continues