Touch of Nature presents annual Maple Syrup Festival

When you think of maple syrup tapping, what’s the first place that comes to mind? Most likely Canada or the northeastern states like Maine, New Hampshire, or Vermont. Southern Illinois definitely isn’t on top of that list, but the abundance of woods located in this area has a surprising amount of trees that make maple syrup tapping easily accessible. So much so that maple syrup has become a staple of southern Illinois due to how much this little area is able to produce a large amount of high quality syrup.

Carbondale’s Touch of Nature has been collecting maple syrup for more than 30 years now, but the annual maple syrup festivals officially began 12 years ago, back in 2011, to bring the community together through this local environmental center.

Unofficially however, it has been going on for over 20 years bringing together a few families who ate breakfast and spent time outside for the day.

“We really, over the past 10 years, especially tried to make it a family friendly kind of day where you just come to Touch of Nature for the day,” said Touch of Nature director Brian Croft. “Yes, you can have the maple syrup, the breakfast; but then there’s vendors, there’s music, there’s stuff for kids, and we’re all about just getting people outside.”

He started his connection with Touch of Nature 20 years ago as a student worker and began working full time soon after.

“I love it here, and when I became the director, I told everybody this is my dream job… and I know it sounds corny, but it’s legitimate,” Croft said. “I think my absolute favorite part of the event is the fact that this is sort of our season kickoff, like reemerging from our winter hibernation… I get to see these moms and dads and kids just coming out and having that first outdoor experience of the year.”

Touch of Nature’s maple syrup festival has been continuously growing among the community over the past ten years and resonating with the locals.

During the morning hours, Touch of Nature cooks up hundreds of pancakes with its signature local maple syrup for the attendees, staff, and volunteers alike to enjoy before they venture out into the rest of the grounds of the festival to enjoy the live music, nature trails, demonstrations and local vendors producing a vast array of different items.

These local vendors fill the grounds selling everything from gemstones and crystals to local art for the general public to purchase and enjoy. Others bring out local supplies produced in Carbondale such as organic milk, honey, baked sweets and even mushrooms. The mushroom vendor sells varying types, some of which can be used for seasoning and in different dishes to add flavor and others for medicinal properties to quell a sore throat or from the Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fleetwood Mac and many others were heard throughout the day. Biver has begun to make a name for himself, not just in southern Illinois but in a few surrounding states such as Kentucky and Tennessee by animals available for anyone to enjoy. The ranch has been up and running for 12 years, the work of mother-daughter duo Judy Hoepker and Morgan Stevenson. Their popularity grew within the community a few years ago when they were shown on the both years and everybody gets a kick out of them,” Hoepker said. Out of all the vendors located on the ground’s of Touch of Nature, the alpacas were definitely visited the most. naturally produce melatonin to aid in sleep. Of course, souvenirs and merchandise were similarly for sale for those whose interest lies outside of mushroom growing and production.

SIU’s own Forestry Club also made an appearance, producing different lumber activity demonstrations. The first up was the wood splitting activity where different members of the club would try to split large chunks of wood with an ax. Second was the dual-handed saw demonstration being performed on a tree-sized log of lumber, being split in half to create large plate-like wooden pieces. Next was the log throwing face-off between most of the Forestry Club, where one team had to throw enough logs within the boundary points. Saving the best for last, the club members presented an ax throwing demonstration where they had to land the ax in a wooden target, needless to say the crowd was hyped when the blade hit the target. All in all, it’s harder than it looks!

Live music always accompanies any Touch of Nature event. Local guitarist and singer Isaac Biver played a variety of folk tunes that attracted a large audience fairly quickly the more the strings of the guitar were strummed and heard throughout the grounds. Songs of his own creation as well as classics performing at small venues to slowly add to his reputation.

A new fan favorite of the festival has been the three alpacas from Rolling Oak Alpaca Ranch located in Makanda, Illinois. This is their second year at the maple syrup festival. The three alpacas are trained for public events and showcases for the public to feed and enjoy as well. The ranch also sells merchandise crafted from alpaca wool from the shearing seasons. There were bracelets, clothes, and stuffed local news and had to take an elevator up to reach the studio for filming when they got stuck with the alpacas inside! Of course, the fire department had to be called out to help and when the fire department got the call, rescuers thought it was fake because of how wild the story must have been, says Judy Hoepker. After all, three alpacas stuck in an elevator does sound pretty unbelievable.

“It’s been a lot of fun to do this, we’ve brought the alpacas with us

Touch of Nature has always been known to use the natural resources available to allow the general public to have fun outside while still maintaining its educational roots to help others really get to know the environment around them. The Maple Syrup festival is just one of the many events it hosts to bring the community together through a balanced combination of learning and entertainment.

“So as these people continue to make connections and build any form of solidarity, whether it is related to gang activity, or if it is genuinely some kind of connection to other people within prison, they’re perceived as threats and they’re put in solitary for extended periods of time.”

Woodfox credited the Black Panthers with giving him morals he had never had before, curing him of his desire to commit crimes. According to the New York Times, Woodfox and other prisoners were often forced to work the fields by guards on horseback wielding shotguns. Accusations of sexual slavery plagued the prison. Despite witnesses to the case often proving to be unreliable in some shape or form, Louisiana’s attorney general, Buddy Caldwell, called him “The most dangerous person on the planet,” according to NPR in 2008. Woodfox wrote a memoir called “Solitary” in 2019 on the system that claimed his life for the possibility that he took another’s.

Vogel said, “A lot of the time these long term sentences are used for people who are perceived to be great threats to prison safety, or for people who are severely mentally ill. They continuously go through the cycle of having two weeks to a month sentences in solitary confinement and then they are released from solitary back into the general population and get sent back because they disobey orders or they stand up too slowly during Roll Call, or they talk back to a guard, which also happens in solitary confinement. When you’re in solitary, if you continue to do things that break prison rules, regardless of what those rules are and regardless of if it is actually a threat to safety or not, they just compound your sentence in solitary and continue to not release you.”

Shourd, who visited and spoke with 75 prisoners in solitary confinement from prisons all over the U.S., condemns modern prison labor and solitary confinement as racially-biased, noting that prison wages are so little, often lower than 50 cents an hour, and the percentage of black prisoners so high, that our system is better referred to as a “carceral state”.

According to a study from the Justice Policy Center, a research group dedicated to improving the justice system, “Solitary confinement in prison is used more frequently among Black and Hispanic/Latino men. Bertsch and coauthors (2020) found that of all men in solitary confinement in the summer of 2019, 43.4 percent were Black, a higher rate than their representation in the US prison population (40.5 percent).”

“I heard examples of someone who was forced in Arkansas prison to pick cotton. And when he refused to pick cotton, he was beaten,” said Shourd. “We live in a big country and prison looks different in different places. But for prison labor I’ve never heard of anything even approaching fair, prisoners don’t have rights. They can’t unionize. So, to call what they do labor as far as an actual legitimate job is just not accurate.”

To Shourd, a prison abolitionist, race has always been part of the picture, which she considers part of a dichotomy between transformative justice and punitive justice.

“So prison abolition is actually an invitation into reimagining safety and justice in our country, saying, locking people up, you know, punishing them, depriving them of any resources or any ability, or means to be accountable for the harm they may have done. Because, for sure, there are people, people in prison that have done a lot of harm. It’s also true that almost everyone that perpetuates violence, has experienced violence. No one experiences violence for the first time by doing it. So abolition asks us to look at the cycles of harm, and the root causes, and not blame the individual. We live in a very individualist society that says, ‘you did something bad, therefore you are bad’, not ‘let’s be curious about why and what happened to your sense of belonging to something; to your community, or your family? What happened to you that would cause you to do that? Let’s get to the root of it so it doesn’t happen again and we can understand why other people do this.’”

According to Shourd and Solitary Watch, there is no federal apparatus regulating the use of solitary confinement in prisons, making it extremely difficult for journalists to collect any information uninfluenced by state officials on the sites of the prison. According to Shroud and Solitary Watch, communities around prisons are often forced to simply take prison official’s word that circumstances inside of prisons are humanitarian.

“I don’t do traditional journalism. I’m a trauma-informed journalist and my investigations have been adapted into creative projects,” Shourd said. “So, I’m much more interested in personal testimony and narrative and doing and practicing a form of journalism that does no harm to the people that I’m interviewing and the people who are sharing their stories. So that is, to me doing no harm. In traumatized communities and populations, it is far more important than some kind of outdated idea of objectivity. I think it can be thorough, and you can be transparent about the limitations of getting data to support the claims, but personal testimonies are often all we have to contradict what a sheriff or a warden says about their prison and the people that are incarcerated. And the sheriff or warden is in a position where often journalists will see their perspective as legitimate but not the person incarcerated.”

Vogel, who started out at Solitary Watch sorting through the mail the organization gets from prisoners, says that the vast majority of Solitary Watch’s reporting on the conditions of modern prisons relies upon prisoners who have themselves become journalists or advocates after witnessing the brutal conditions of U.S. prisons first hand.

“A lot of times, how we get started on articles is that we hear something either from the advocacy community, who has like this humongous network of advocates who are either formerly incarcerated themselves or who are friends and family members who have been or are incarcerated,” Vogel said. “And from there we form our articles and we do our investigations. It’s really hard because of the limits on communication in and out of prisons, and specifically with prisoners in and out of solitary confinement. It’s really hard.”

In the past, Solitary Watch had provided grants to prisoners interested in writing their own articles. Currently, the organization is preparing to send out a second round of grants.

“When past sheriffs or wardens have lied to the public blatantly and been caught in lies, they shouldn’t be seen as reliable sources just because of their position of power,” Shourd said. “So I think traditional methods are a very flawed metric for determining truth when we have these institutions that have no oversight and no transparency.”

Solitary Watch publishes the best prisoner letters it receives, including the following excerpt from a (at the time) 54-year-old woman held at New York Correctional Institution that describes the start of a stint in solitary confinement.

“Upon arrival in the cold, dreary backdrop known as “SEG” [Administrative Segregation], I could already hear the madness that occurs under such dire conditions,” L. LeDonne wrote. “I heard the yelling between two girls recently brought in for fighting.

One girl’s nose was sprawled across her face, covered in crimson streaks that had not yet dried, confirming the violence. I watched the COs chuckle and laugh as they placed bets on which girl would win if they let them fight, and they decided to place them in our rec cages (my dog had a nicer one) outside to see it play out. I was appalled by their barbaric behavior. “Video et Taceo”—”I see and I am silent”— had become my survival mantra. I was brought into a cell, stripped, searched, and given stiff red scrubs. The finality of the door slamming shut will reverberate forever in my psyche.”

According to Vogel, prisoners are barely ever able to receive proper medical care, only receiving about 20 to 30 minutes of practitioner’s time when health issues, including psychological issues that solitary confinement complicates, come up.

According to the Prison Policy Institute, prisoners in solitary confinement usually only make up about 6% to 8% of the prison population, but represent half of the suicides.

In the Washington Journal of Law and Policy, Dr. Stuart Grassian found that extensive solitary confinement in the early days of the prison system was discontinued for similar reasons.

“The results were, in fact, catastrophic. The incidence of mental disturbances among prisoners so detained, and the severity of such disturbances, was so great that the system fell into disfavor and was ultimately abandoned. During this process a major body of clinical literature developed which documented the psychiatric disturbances created by such stringent conditions of confinement.”

According to Vogel, many prisoners are sent to psychiatric institutions when symptoms become severe enough but, due to capacity issues, these institutions are unable to retain them after they become stable again. They are sent directly back to prison and its solitary confinement-reliant system, which caused their illness in the first place. A 2014 Treatment Advocacy Center study found on one of Solitary Watch’s fact sheets says that 350,000 individuals with severe mental illnesses were being held in U.S. prisons and jails in 2012, while only 35,000 were patients in state psychiatric hospitals.

“You can even go even further back to the late 50s early 60s, when there was the closing down of all of the public mental health hospitals,” Vogel said. “And so there was this movement for deinstitutionalization in the mid20th century, and the thought process behind that was that taking people out of these institutions and putting them back in the communities would allow for the communities to support them in ways that the institutions couldn’t. But what ended up happening was that as these institutions were defunded, and as these institutions were closed down, that money was not redirected to the communities to provide adequate care to individuals who are coming home.”

Consequently, people were forced out of the structured environment of institutions, and back onto the streets, where they returned to violence and crime as the solutions to their problems. This landed much of the severely mentally ill population of the U.S. in prison, an environment designed only to keep them off the streets.

In his studies, Grassian found that solitary confinement was capable of producing its own set of symptoms, completely independently from any previous mental illness of the detainees.

“The paradigmatic psychiatric disturbance was an agitated confusional state which, in more severe cases, had the characteristics of a florid delirium, characterized by severe confusional, paranoid, and hallucinatory features, and also by intense agitation and random, impulsive, often self-directed violence. Such disturbances were often observed in individuals who had no prior history of any mental illness. In addition, solitary confinement often resulted in severe exacerbation of a previously existing mental condition. Even among inmates who did not develop overt psychiatric illness as a result of solitary confinement, such confinement almost inevitably imposed significant psychological pain during the period of isolated confinement and often significantly impaired the inmate’s capacity to adapt successfully to the broader prison environment.”

Shourd and Vogel are skeptical of many solutions to the behemoth creature of bureaucracy which is our prison system. Shourd is wary of most attempts to imprison people rather than incorporate them into specialized reform programs, believing that all forms of imprisonment traumatize and damage prisoners. According to her, the only real value in the prison system is its ability to isolate people from the circumstances which led to their crime, giving them room to change. Enlarging our surveillance state by placing prisoners under house arrest or otherwise allowing the government to monitor them is dismissed, but reallocating police funding to the right groups is most supported by Vogel.

“We have this thought that prisons are a place for rehabilitation, but then when we actually look at what prisons do, and the programming that is available in prisons, and the resources that are available in prisons, we realize that they’re not built to actually rehabilitate people,” Vogel said. “They’re built to punish people. And so, I think that working with models of restorative justice and community care-based models of justice is really important in preventing people from going into prison in the first place. But that doesn’t mean that the people who are already in prison aren’t deserving of care themselves.”

Shourd said, the U.S. needs to learn from its mistakes.

“As a society, we should want a system that actually makes us safer and what actually makes people less likely to recidivate is, not to torture them with isolation to dehumanize them, to stigmatize them to deny them more resources, but to really address what is the root cause of the actions that led to them doing harm if they did harm. And in many cases, people are just in prison for being poor, for being Black, for being at the wrong place at the wrong time or being targeted. Some people have done harm and those people you know, studies show that that a very, very, very small percentage of people actually harm again, the most violent crimes are the least likely to ever harm again, because people are very often traumatized by having committed a violent crime, and it sticks with you the rest of your life and people want to heal they want to change. They want to live in a world where something that horrible doesn’t doesn’t haunt them anymore, right. People want to be redeemed. people want to do ‘sorry’.”

Staff Reporter Daniel Bethers can be reached at dbethers@dailyegyptian.com