Piasa Palisades Group grew from passion for Riverbend
Author: Jill Moon
This article was originally published in The Telegraph.

Founders of the Piasa Palisades Group of the Sierra Club led by example for what the organization does today in the Metro East through its Three Rivers Project's coordinators.

"This organization, plus its offspring projects and organizations, can be said to have originated environmental awareness in this region," said one of the PPG's founders, Richard C. Keating.

Keating, a retired Southern Illinois University Edwardsville biology professor, was the Piasa Palisades Group's first chairman and cofounder. In his writings he shares the group's history. 

"Southwestern Illinois is now positioned to move competently into the last great environmental challenge that this country will face."

The Piasa Palisades Group's founding began in the 1970s. According to Keating, the group precedes the Illinois chapter. When the Piasa Palisades Group was founded in 1972 it was known as the Great Lakes chapter and included at least Illinois and Indiana.

"Originally it had 12 states, I think," he said.  "Other state chapters were gradually carved off the Great Lakes chapter until, later, we became the Illinois chapter."

From about 1969 to 1971, Keating and his wife, Jody, became friends with another eventual Piasa Palisades Group founder, Bob Freeman, and his wife, Louise. All were involved in founding Cub Scout packs in Godfrey. 

 "During this period we learned that the scout council was planning to sell mature timber from Camp Warren Levis," Keating recalled.  "Bob and I regarded this as outrageous. Coincidentally, through Alton’s First Presbyterian Church choir, I had become a friend of Bill Drake who was on the Boy Scout Council.   

Keating expressed his concern to Drake, who ran his father’s business, Drake Tires, on Broadway in Alton. Drake got Keating an invitation to speak before the council during a meeting at Camp Warren Levis in Godfrey.  

"I explained why it was a poor idea to be selling timber and how it would ruin an uncommon ecology that had many teachable aspects," Keating said. "I got some flak from some council members: 'Why, those old trees might fall on some campers and hurt or kill them!' But I held my ground and in the end they did not log the camp." 

The whole ordeal fired up Keating and Freeman about the potential in the Alton-Godfrey area for environmental protection.  

"Local industry was in full production in those days and pollution was a major issue," said Keating, who along with Freeman was already a National Sierra Club member. "As a Boy Scout and Explorer in northern Virginia, I had gotten extensive experience camping in the Blue Ridge and elsewhere and was already in love with nature. Bob had extensive experience as a caver and organizer of spelunking groups." 

One day in 1971, the pair discussed founding a Sierra Club group in the Riverbend. There already was a St. Louis group which told the men how to go about organizing. The two contacted the National and Great Lakes Chapters, obtained lists of local members, and held their first meeting at the First Presbyterian Church in Alton.  

"We met there continuously until their big fire and then moved to the First Unitarian Church (Alton)," he said. "The first meeting was well attended."

Now the PPG meets at the Old Bakery Beer Co., 400 Landmarks Blvd., in Alton.

Keating and company also had good help getting started with PPG from a Principia student, who got some student interest going, Keating recalled.

"Our four initiatives in those days were (1) The Bottle Bill, (2)  Alton Box Board saga, (3) the Locks and Dam 26 rebuild, and (4) the ski resort," Keating said.  

University of Illinois-Urbana's John Marlin spearheaded The Bottle Bill with a detailed economic impact study. The initiative would have required a deposit on all beverage containers to be redeemed when a bottle was returned. 

Keating said he, Freeman and Glenn Tockstein, who became the Piasa Palisades Group's first conservation chairman, along with Keating's chemistry colleague professor went to a hearing in the Stratford Hotel.

"The place was packed with bottle makers and lawyers," Keating said. "Glenn testified first. He carried a large refuse bag of bottles and cans (which he was thanked for not dumping on the floor), that he had picked up from a mile of River Road. He explained how doing something to prevent this waste would be a social good, while the hearing officer and workers stared silently at the big black bag."

The chemistry professor discussed the waste of resources involved in making one-way bottles, and workers booed him. Keating also spoke and suffered a few sarcastic comments by lawyers during cross-examination.  

"Considering that we were outnumbered about 100 to one we got equal treatment from The Telegraph, a victory in itself even if we lost that war," Keating said.

The Alton Box Board had a waste lagoon on the then non-existent River Road, Keating said. 

"It was really causing obnoxious emissions in the area and a hearing was called to force the company to clean it up," Keating writes. "The several-acre lagoon was sickening to see. The surface was multi-colored glop out of which bubbles of gas percolated that had a strong sulfide odor. Like some sort of hot spring from hell."

Again, Keating and Tockstein went to a hearing, this time with a Super 8 film Keating made and equipment he sat on the floor at their front table upstairs in Alton City Hall.

"The lead attorney for Box Board hastily conferred with the hearing officer and had the hearing 'continued' to some later date," Keating said. "We submitted our film to the hearing officer as evidence. Later the lagoon was cleaned up and Box Board disappeared from the Alton scene."

Freeman had the larger role of the two on the locks and dam, Keating noted. The Piasa Palisades Group managed to get the project delayed and restudied as the cost escalated from $3 million to more than $1 billion. The Piasa Palisades Group led and won a lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the locks and dam.

"I think we set a standard for a much higher level of required environmental assessment," Keating said.

After this victory and fighting in Congress, a rider on a bingo bill authorized, said PPG member Jim Bensman.  

"We, however, got a prohibition against a channel deeper than 12 feet, which would have basically turned it into a barge canal," he said.

PPG helped create the Army Corps of Engineer’s program  to repair the environmental damage of the barges, and for the first time ever the barges had to pay a small amount of the cost for construction, he recalled.

The Piasa Palisades Group managed to get the project delayed and restudied as the cost escalated from $3 million to more than $1 billion.  

In 1969, Donald S. Kaplan proposed a ski resort on McAdams Peak in the center of Pere Marquette State Park, Keating wrote. 

"The wooden remains of the ski run can still be seen as our friends the microbes slowly render it to mineral soil" he said of the vacated site at the eastern end of the park, in the same valley as the Grafton juvenile detention center. Keating said the ski resort's operation was attempted during a few winters in the mid 1970s, but Kaplan vacated his lease by 1975.  

Enhancements and support from the PPG went to form The Nature Institute (TNI) at 2213 S. Levis Lane in Godfrey and the Heartland Prairie, a native Illinois site on Illinois 140 (College Avenue) on the north side of Alton's Gordon Moore Park.

The Sierra Club received seed money for the formation of TNI. In 1982, The Nature Institute (TNI) held its first Discovery Day Camp at Talahi Lodge on the Olin Nature Preserve. Because of volunteers and funding from an anonymous benefactor who believed that children should learn about nature so that they would grow up wanting to protect it, the camp has been a success for over a quarter-century, said PPG's Three Rivers Project co-coordinator Christine Favilla. TNI has managed the Heartland Prairie for 60 years.

Sierran Mark Hall lead the PPG's successful effort in turning potato fields at Gordon More Park into one of the highest quality restoration projects in the region.  

"We gathered seeds from many prairie remnants in the region," Bensman recalled.  "At meetings Mark would bring bags of seeds to hand out and we would take them home to sand them.  

"Some seeds we sowed by hand and later a tractor, and others were raised in greenhouses and then transplanted," he said. "We spent years weeding and burning the prairie."

In 1990, the PPG placed a full-page ad in the Alton Telegraph calling for a public meeting (at Stratford Hotel in Alton) on the proposed Raging Rivers Water Park and housing development by Adams Development Company. PPG filed suit May 9, 1990, on the scenic easement boundary; a secondary “benefit” was the scenic easement from Alton to Grafton proposed, Favilla said.

"We teamed up with Pride Inc. and was passed for voluntary landowners along the Alton pool," she said.  "We also held a public hearing on the environmental impact of the National Marine proposed fleeting facility."

In 2012, the Sierra Club was able to enroll the native prairie conservation easement through the city, keeping Heartland Prairie preserved in perpetuity. With more than 150 native prairie plant species and a large variety of grassland-dependent birds, the site offers a glimpse into the past. TNI stewardship staff use prescribed fire and other land management strategies to control invasive species and promote a healthy tallgrass prairie ecosystem.

The Alton Sierra Club chapter also started the Cool Cities campaign throughout the Metro East.