Calvin News

The Vincent and Helen Bunker Interpretive Center at Calvin College will be dedicated on September 10 with a variety of activities, including a 2:30 pm dedication service and then tours of the center from 3 to 5 pm.
The following day, Saturday, September 11, Calvin will host Kalamazoo naturalist Wil Reding for a 10 am event at the center. And the following week, from September 13 to September 18 the center will play host to such things as a special creation Chapel service, an open house for area teachers, a showing of the film Winged Migration and a birding and breakfast event.
Although it's the newest building on Calvin's 400-acre campus, the Bunker Center may also be the one of the toughest to find. But that's by design. The building is not intended to be the centerpiece of Calvin's 100-acre Ecosystem Preserve, but rather to complement the preserve's natural wonder.
The new center sits only a few hundred yards east of the heavily traveled East Beltline in Grand Rapids, but the 5,270 square foot building is shielded from the passing traffic by a variety of trees, bushes and native plants. Behind those natural buffers visitors will find one of the most innovative buildings on Calvin's campus.
The Bunker Interpretive Center is a largely self-sustaining entity, independent of the city's sewer system and taking more than 60 percent of its operating power from a photovoltaic array on its roof. Much of the center - including paneling, insulation and interior trim - is built of recycled materials. On days the weather permits, the windows open automatically to heat and cool the building. Gray water (from sinks) is recycled through a biomass, a large window box filled with plants that filter the water and return it to preserve ponds. Waste is processed through chemical composting toilets. The soil from those toilets, processed by worms, will eventually enrich the center's landscaping - all indigenous plants grown in the preserve.
Calvin architect Frank Gorman says the Bunker Center is intended as a tool to help people better understand the environment and concepts of sustainability, even as it educates visitors about the wonders of the preserve, home to 135 species of birds, 30 species of mammals, 235 plants and a variety of fish, reptiles and amphibians.
Calvin president Gaylen Byker, an outdoorsman who was one of the main movers behind the center, says the new facility will be a benefit to the community.
"I've always really appreciated the preserve," says Byker, "and thought we had a great asset that had broader appeal for the community. The idea for a center came up and I became enthusiastic to get enough funds to build a building that could be of use."
From its conception, the center was intended by its planners to fit gently into the preserve environment, while providing space for educational programs and displays, offices and a biology classroom. 
Working closely with Preserve director and Calvin biology professor Randy Van Dragt, Gorman designed a building that met that ideal, while meeting enough environmentally-friendly criteria to qualify for a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold rating from the US Green Building Council. (LEED specifications award points for every aspect of a building's sustainability: design, site, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and indoor environmental quality design).
The first donor to catch Calvin's vision was Helen Bunker, whose $750,000 gift put her name and her husband's above the door (although she once remarked that "the name can fall off, and that's okay, but the center itself will be there to teach them (children) about what's outside, about the environment, about all the fun they can have and how to enjoy nature and be kind to it."). 
In 1995 Bunker had donated a home at 3770 Lake Drive that abutted the preserve's northern border to Calvin. That house, and its eight acres became the preserve's original headquarters. In 1999, Bunker, who had lived at 3830 Lake Drive for 40 years, added her home and its two acres to the Ecosystem Preserve before making the $750,000 gift in 2002.
Thelma DeJong Venema, a Grandville native, 1961 Calvin alumna, Indiana businesswoman and amateur geology buff, donated $500,000 to the project. Aware of the more than 2,000 local school children per year who visit the preserve, she resonated with the center's ability to educate the next generation of naturalists, saying "It's an opportunity to influence children, and there are very few occasions to influence children outside of media. It's an opportunity to bring children into a natural setting."
Those two substantial lead gifts were augmented by $100,000 from the Grand Rapids Community Foundation, $82,500 from the Frey Foundation, $50,000 from the DTE Energy Foundation and $91,000 from the Energy Office of Michigan for the photovoltaic array energy system.
Wolverine Construction Management, which had previous experience on Calvin projects, won the job of building the Bunker Center. 
"I would say that the biggest challenge was, in fact, integrating all the systems together in such a way that everybody approved of it," says Curt Mulder, a 2000 Calvin graduate and Wolverine Project Manager who oversaw construction. "Not only mechanically and chemically but aesthetically."
Calvin's Ecosystem Preserve was pieced together over a 35-year period, beginning in 1964 when the college acquired 25 acres of wetlands, mixed-hardwood forests, horse farm and agricultural fields east of the East Beltline. In 1978, a study committee from the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship advised that, as a fitting expression of environmental stewardship, those acres should be set aside as a nature preserve.
That vision took actual shape in 1985 when Van Dragt and engineering professor Marv Vander Wal (employing 12 engineering and biology students) created a trail system on the original property. Over the years, Calvin widened the preserve holdings, purchasing seven acres to the north in 1984 and 48 acres that form its eastern half in 1986.
Except for the 30 public acres where the trail system wanders, the remainder of the land is a sanctuary where deer, fox, mink and other creatures live undisturbed except by research - tree mapping, insect studies, weather studies and more.
School groups, ecologists, nature lovers and other wanderers have made themselves at home at the Ecosystem Preserve. Since 1995, local children have studied everything from trees and wildflowers to insect life at the preserve, including Calvin's Wetland and Woodland camps which began in 2000. In 1998, Cheryl Hoogewind signed on as preserve manager, to administrate these camps and other educational programs. And every year, Van Dragt hires stewards to do trail maintenance and ongoing research.