Mark Vande Pol ’85

For 35 years, I have been engaged in detailed native plant restoration on a property with a 200 year history of exotic introductions (it adjoins a branch of the Spanish El Camino Real). It was terraced for an apple orchard and abandoned in the mid 1930s. For fifty years thereafter, it endured “environmental preservation.” When we bought it, it was a choking fuel bomb with stands of Acacia, Eucalyptus, ten acres of Genista, and invading native forests that had never been there under aboriginal management. At most, only 60 plant species remained alive and reproducing, many only barely.
Today our plant list comprises 400 species with over 100 identified fungi and as many insects. I have recovered aboriginal proto-agricultural patches and inferred their purposes to useful effect today. I am told by those who should know yhat the Wildergarten is the finest native plant restoration project on earth, largely for its focus upon small native annuals (something most such projects never attempt). That work is documented in a 2,000pp online free acess picture book at wildergarten.org.
I developed several novel processes to those ends along with a new understanding of how and why California’s vegetation was distributed for anthropogenic purposes. I earned a patent for the first free market environmental management business method. I identified corporate corruption infecting the Constitution before the ink was dry. I re-translated much of the Hebrew Torah, reinterpreting it as the product of over 5000 years of pastoral nomadic experience, peoples at one with their G_d identifying principles woven into our history. I am devising uses of native plants to be compatible with the way we live today and how we might live on the land less destructively in the future starting a new industry to those combined ends.
All of those seemingly unrelated elements have synthesized into current work showing the causes of our social meltdown in progress to be the product of but one man probably no one at the College has ever heard of: Dr. Alan Gregg, cheese of medical grant giving for the Rockefeller Foundation from 1931-1956. His goal was “control of human behavior” for the purpose of curtailing human population growth to the end of protecting the environment. My work stands as proof that he was catastrophically wrong. Enviornmental “preservation” as we know it will result in mass extinctions. We don’t have the labor available even to keep it alive and reproducing on a sample scale (never mind a continent), without a serious re-alignment into a new econimic and cultural order. I’m writing that book now (or vice versa, it has me writing it. Books write themselves as long as we can stay with it).
Had I not gone to HMC and studied under Tad Beckman, Bill Purves, TJ Mueller, and Bill Allen, none of this could have happened. It was the multidisciplinary breadth HMC offered with its emphasis upon humanities that made this body of works possible. Yes, this is probably the strangest email like this you’ve ever received. No, I’m not exaggerating. If somebody needs to call me to verify whether or not this is all too scary to put up (and it may well be), my cell is 831-227-4958.
Thanks!
Mark Edward Vande Pol, class of ’85