[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB—PUBLISHED MAY 2001.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: FALL 1997.]

Bill and Alice Howenstine: Quietly fighting for environmental justice

By Debra Shore

So much of nature displays a splendid constancy. Each year at the fall equinox, for example, Bill Howenstine stops shaving. Six months later, at the advent of spring, Howenstine resumes shaving. This stubborn economy deprives Howenstine, now 72, of the need for a scarf through the winter and at the same time demonstrates one mammal’s remarkable capacity for adapting to his environment.

Besides, what more fitting accouterment than a flowing white beard for the proprietor of a Christmas Tree Farm? Howenstine and his wife Alice live on 120 acres in northern McHenry County known as Pioneer Tree Farm.

Both are inveterate activists and irrepressible outdoor educators. Bill Howenstine has served several terms, beginning in 1971, as a Trustee of the McHenry County Conservation District. Alice has been a seminal force in the recycling program of the McHenry County Defenders. Years ago they ran an environmental education summer camp at their farm. Indeed their 46-year marriage is testimony to a summer camp romance with staying power!

For many years Bill Howenstine was a professor of geography and environmental studies and an administrator at Northeastern Illinois University. He retired in June 1996. While there, Dr. Robert Betz, a faculty colleague, recruited Howenstine for his fledgling effort to restore remnant patches of native prairies and savannas. "You just couldn’t avoid getting involved," Howenstine remembers. "We roamed a lot, camped a lot and hiked through the forest preserves." Howenstine developed natural areas and wildlife management courses at Northeastern and many of his students now lead resource management programs throughout the region.

Over the years Bill and Alice, sometimes with their three children in tow, made extended visits to Mexico, Peru, and Costa Rica to participate in community development projects with the American Friends Service Committee. (Bill and Alice joined the Religious Society of Friends in 1951.) In Peru, for instance, they spent a year working in shantytowns organizing several producers’ cooperatives — for making beds, concrete blocks and sewing — and a family planning clinic. Both continue to work with the Friends Committee on Unity with Nature, a Quaker environmental group formed in 1987 to explore members’ spiritual relationships with nature. Bill outlined his philosophy in a lecture titled "Loving the Universe" presented to the Illinois Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in July 1992: "Our labels would leave us to assume that human society and the natural environment are separate from one another, but in reality we are one whole. Lasting solutions for social problems and environmental problems are dependent upon one another."

In the San Luis Valley of Costa Rica, Bill and Alice Howenstine are helping a small Quaker community buy a farm to demonstrate sustainable agriculture. "Our group has started helping landless people acquire property where they can practice conservation techniques and raise coffee as a cash crop," Bill explains. In northern McHenry County, the Howenstines have been restoring their own modest plot. The previous owner had planted corn, soybeans, and an acre of Scotch pine trees.

"We planted more pines the first spring we were here," Bill adds, "and we knew we had to thin them, so we put a little ad in the paper: Old Fashioned Fun in the Out of Doors — Cut Your Own Tree! They were $5 apiece and we sold about 50." Now they have a thriving annual Christmas tree business — and donate their earnings to the Costa Rica project. "It’s going to be the urban people of the world who save the biodiversity of the world," Bill says. "It may go down the tubes anyway, but it sure won’t be saved without urban involvement and that includes people in the central city, not just the suburbs."