Henne Easement in Charlevoix County

A Gift to the Land

 

Henne Farm Conservation Easement

The choice to donate a conservation easement on one’s own land comes with much thought and with deep understanding of what the land means to the bigger—and broader—picture. It is a big decision.


Bill and Betty Henne

But for Bill Henne, the decision to donate a conservation easement on his 55-acre property and extinguish all future building on the land, except for a small sugar shack, came quite easily. Retired from the Environmental Health Division of the local health department, Bill has been an environmentalist all of his life and still remains active with many local conservation efforts.

“I have deep respect for the land and I consider the conservation easement a gift to the land,” Henne said.

The Henne’s property lies within the Lake Charlevoix Watershed and provides scenic views from Boyne City Road. A historic farm since the late 1800s, Bill and his wife Betty reserved the right to continue some farming on the land and to improve wildlife habitat.

For Bill, the most exciting part of completing the conservation easement is that it may have planted a seed for others in the neighborhood. “I hope the idea spreads like wildfire, well, maybe like spring rain,” Bill said. “Nothing would please me more than to have all possible surrounding land also become conservation easements.”

A Family Member’s Perspective:
Sean Henne responds to his parents’ decision to place a conservation easement on their family farm.
For me, there really isn’t any choice in the matter—putting the land in easement is the only option. You see, I live in a township downstate that represents the very worst of urban sprawl and the nadir of development. What open space there is down here is always under siege and the water and traffic issues are staggering.

My brothers and I grew up on that farm and for us, this means that any season, no matter where we are, calls to mind how seasons change up north. In the early spring, in the clear grey light of March mornings, I expect to see buckets hanging on maple trees to collect sap. Mid-summer makes the most sense to me if I can see Lake Charlevoix sparkling in the sun and earn my way into her by stowing a few hay bales in a barn that I helped to build out of wood cut from my folks’ acres. Any hint of color in trees down this way sends my heart surging north to where it’s all the more spectacular, to where my dad is surely getting the cider press ready for cidering. These are precious and important aspects of who I am; they were gifted to me by my folks and by that land they are stewards of; it is this powerful spiritual and familial reason that most drives my support for the easement.

But not the only one. If you live enough outside you come to recognize the connections between things, the way, for example, sun and wind and rain pattern not just your way of being outside, but the way the living world adapts and changes in response to these and other forces.

From this point of view, easing the farm is not just a right, it is a responsibility. This is a world where the word “use” too often latches onto open space, as in “what can we use this for?” This attitude ignores the fact that all land is already, everywhere, being “used” in ways that positively affect all of us, regardless of how cognizant we are of that fact. No, I am behind protecting the farm because it is open space, and because that space contains the trees and soil and wildlife that help to preserve not just my spiritual sense of well being, but also an entire ecosytem to which I am inextricably, and very physically, connected. My new niece is, as I write this, spending time on the farm for Mother’s Day. For her sake, and for the sake of many young Hennes and other children yet to come, I thank you for the work you are doing. Maybe the farm will move on out of my family some day, but it gives me great joy to think that the spiritual and ecological work that it does will go on unimpeded.