Corporate Wetlands

If you'd asked Chris Lehr what he intended to do with his biology degree after graduating from Eastern Michigan University, the last thing he would have answered is rebuilding the Detroit River shoreline along the city's industrialized Downriver area. If you asked him about creating a "rain garden" on the grounds of a power plant he’d probably think you were crazy.

Nurtured in the woods of rural Manchester, Michigan, a hunter and a naturalist, Lehr knew plenty about flora and fauna but little about turning that knowledge into a career. General biology degrees aren't very marketable. After stints with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, United States Department of Agriculture, an environmental consulting firm providing wetland monitoring and mediation, as well as some landscaping, Lehr found his calling as a "restoration" biologist and entrepreneur whose specialty is "ecosystem recovery."

Establishing Nativescape out of his Manchester home in 1998, Lehr quickly developed his business into one of Southeast Michigan’s leading industrial naturalization contractors. Using fauna and land features indigenous to pre-settled Michigan, Lehr creates and restores landscapes so that they work with, rather than against, nature. Using native seeds and plants, his company specializes in storm water management, ecosystem installation (wetlands to dry prairie) and greenway development. Nativescape also provides ecological consultation (environmental risk and impact assessments, endangered species analysis, etc.) and wetland analysis. The company is particularly known for its trademarked "Green Wall," a natural bioengineering alternative for noise abatement and visual barriers.

Power replanting

Last fall, together with a volunteer workforce of about 50 employees from DTE Energy’s "Green Team," restored a portion of the company’s riverbed to its native state, before it was built up with concrete, fill dirt, and asphalt pavement. The 200-foot length of Detroit River shoreline isn’t visible to many people, but is becoming awfully popular among turtles, black crown heron and other wildlife. Natural landscape barriers were created to redirect storm water into retention swales, where it's naturally filtered by vegetation and slowly makes its way back into the water table (rather than rushing into the river with whatever it collects along the way).

On a balmy, humid late summer day, Lehr points out the wide bank of native Michigan plants such as yellow cone flower, bergamot, heath aster, cardinal flower, black-eyed Susans, mountain mint, blue lobelia as well as Michigan holly and red osier dogwood trees. Planted alongside are rye and oats, which provide quick-growth erosion control in a soil mixture more than a foot deep. The new riverside landscape gradually cascades down from the power plant grounds to the water’s edge, including a swale near the river's edge to contain storm water. It’s as if Lehr were conducting a tour of a botanical garden as he delights in his restoration work, mindful to point out its practical application.

"Shrub swamp," is what Lehr calls the area that surrounds DTE Energy’s power plant --from the Rouge River south past the U.S. Steel plant. "This whole thing is fill," he continues, referring to dirt and refuge used to fill in wetlands. "If you look at historical maps of the Detroit River, in some areas it was about a half mile of wetland on each side, mostly at the river mouths."

DTE Energy field safety specialist Jason Cousino, who shares Lehr’s love of the outdoors, coordinated the project. "To me, this is a beautiful thing the company is doing – I get to leave the plant and come out here and see green. This is one of the main flyways along the Detroit River for migratory birds." Environmental efforts at industrial plants and other land along the river are creating a "curtain of diversity," of short grass, shrubs, trees, where birds will stop to rest as they’re passing through, he says.

"It only seems like a couple hundred feet but Great Blue Herons and turtles weren’t here before," says Cousino. "They walk up and down the shoreline. Earlier this spring we had 50 or 60 Canada geese eating here – living on our rye crop. That’s what it’s there for."

The riverside restoration project, nominated last year for the Habitat of the Year award by the Wildlife Habitat Council, is part of a master plan for ecological renovation at the site. It will include a large 40-yard by 80-yard rain garden that will also re-channel storm water while offering an array of native plant growth in what is now a gravel parking lot, according to Lehr. 

Nativescapes is also designing a "treatment train" for power plant wastewater management. Contaminated water will flow through a series of different wetland areas which will naturally cleanse the water. "By the time it goes through this it becomes cleaner and cleaner," explains Lehr. "Vegetation filters out materials, the water soaks into the ground. Any water coming out is going to be clean."

This is a large industrial power plant – a place you'd expect to be clean and safe, but not necessarily pretty. The aesthetics are not only about appearance; there is a psychological benefit to "people seeing green, having a natural environment" that creates a "calming" effect among employees, Lehr explains. He has planted a greenway of spruce trees and shrubs along a DTE Energy coal train rail line that prevents "fugitive dust" from blowing off the plant grounds into the river. It’s also a visual treat for the coal train operator, says Cousino.

A growth business

Elsewhere Downriver, Nativescape, working with the Grosse Ile Nature and Land Conservancy, restored a 970-foot shoreline of the island, using "soft"engineering techniques to cost-effectively reduce erosion, stabilize shoreline, enhance wildlife habitat and improve aesthetics. The restructuring involved the use of innovative bioengineering techniques and reintroducing native wildlife. A 2006 University of Michigan study of Grosse Isle confirmed an increase of macro invertebrates, Lehr says. The Grosse Isle project won the Environmental Achievement Award from the Environmental Management Association.

Nativescape is involved in projects from the shoreline of Lake Superior to Lake Erie, and inland throughout the peninsula. In addition to several DTE Energy power plants, the company’s clients include Pfizer’s North American Research and Development Center, University of Michigan, and Wal-Mart. Lehr is currently developing a rain garden to contain storm water at Fox Creek Village in Novi.

But Lehr is a pragmatist who doesn’t make it pretty as much as he makes it environmentally right, often where nature has been wronged. And he’s making a good living at the same time. "If you would have asked me, when I was in school, would you be working with a power plant or working with a steel plant in restoring their shoreline on the Detroit River, I would have said, 'Why??? No way…' I wouldn’t be doing that kind of stuff."

At industrial sites like U.S. Steel’s Detroit River plant in Trenton, Lehr’s shoreline restoration is recreating "the basic building blocks of a habitat…We give nature a jump start. If we get it planted with 20 different species of plants – in nature you would see 200 different species – we’d have the basic matrix that can be built upon by nature. Once you get it started…build it and they will come."

Indeed, they are coming. Wild turkeys roam the grounds at U.S. Steel, and don’t seem to mind the noise.