Brunswick's effort paid off

The governor got top billing, but the real star of this week’s ceremony dedicating the Loblolly Marsh Nature Preserve was Jay County’s Ken Brunswick.
While Gov. Mitch Daniels added to his strong conservation record by making the Loblolly Indiana’s 250th nature preserve, it was Brunswick who had the vision and the dogged determination to see hundreds of acres of the legendary Limberlost Swamp restored to its natural state.
A dairy farmer back in the 1970s, Brunswick has been working on this project for something like 30 years.
It’s been a long, hard journey, a trek that took Brunswick back to the classroom to steep himself in the science of wetlands and led him to make the move from farmer to naturalist.
When Ken set out on the journey, the Loblolly was just a bunch of farmland that flooded easily.
 It could offer a good harvest one year and wipe away those earnings the next.
It was also owned by several different people, folks who had agendas and dreams of their own and didn’t necessarily give a hoot about Gene Stratton-Porter’s writings.
Brunswick’s task was to educate himself, earn the trust of his fellow landowners in the region, learn the intricacies of federal conservation easement programs, leverage grant dollars with local contributions, build a coalition of dedicated volunteers, and be so persistent about reaching his goal that higher-ups at the Indiana Department of Natural Resources came to think of him as a “bulldog” on the issue.
This week’s designation of the marsh as a nature preserve is a tremendously important step, one that should guarantee this particular chunk of the natural world in Jay County will be preserved in perpetuity.
But it’s not the final step by any means.
Today, Loblolly Marsh Nature Preserve includes about 440 acres. You can count on that number to grow over time if Ken Brunswick has anything to say about it. — J.R.[[In-content Ad]]