This event is in collaboration with Hearts & Minds Bookstore. 

As we celebrate Earth Day week 2025, you are warmly invited to an inspirational evening with two ecological activists who have spent over a decade mobilizing their community to care for and restore one of the most polluted streams in Michigan. David Warners and Gail Gunst Heffner founded the Plaster Creek Stewards in Grand Rapids, Michigan, organizing college students (from Calvin University), nonprofits, church groups, and others, to learn the art of waterway restoration and reconciliation ecology. They will talk about the dangers of inadequate care of local waterways, their experiences learning about native plantings, and how a larger vision of care for the greater watershed will help us all live more attentively to our own communities, knowing the past challenges and being faithful in nurturing responsible care for the future.

Author and ecologist Dr. David Warners is a beloved biology and environmental science professor at Calvin University, and Gail Gunst Heffner has been the chief organizer for community service and ongoing activism for Plaster Creek Stewards.

Drawing on their religious convictions and experiences of working with the broad range of concerned citizens, they will highlight their work with a view to how others (here) can learn from their hard-won insights about best practices in community-involved conservation.

Their book, Reconciliation in a Michigan Watershed: Restoring Ken-O-Sha, is published by Michigan State University Press and will be for sale at the event.

Using their story, they will share with us their study of the local history of waterway pollution (having a lot to do, they show, with settler colonists who rejected Indigenous wisdom),the embrace of materialistic Western ideologies and worldviews, churches that failed to see their call to be responsible to our places, faithfully nurturing other creatures and institutions, and misguided urban planning policies.

The evening with Dave Warners and Gail Heffner is free. It is sponsored by Hearts & Minds, an independent bookstore in Dallastown, PA, with RegenAll and Sunnyside Mennonite Church.