GLENN, Mich. – A 13-year-old boy who co-founded a horse-drawn lawn-mowing service in his small West Michigan town has won an honored role as an organizer of a United Nations environmental conference for children.
Six-hundred young people from 100 countries are expected to meet July 19-23 at Connecticut College in New London, Conn., for the Tunza International Children's Conference on the Environment. Among its organizers is Christian Birky.
Christian regularly has conference calls and Internet brainstorming sessions with children from Iran, Ghana and Australia. Gov. Jennifer Granholm tentatively plans to meet with him Thursday evening to talk about his work.
In 1997, parents Curtis Birky and Jean Veenema-Birky moved Christian and older sister Kathryn from South Bend, Ind., to Glenn to bring their family closer to nature and to Lake Michigan, which is 300 yards away at a public access where their dirt road ends.
They moved into a 100-year-old farmhouse nestled in a woods teeming with wildlife.
"Everything we do, we try to look at how it affects the environment," said Kathryn, a 16-year-old Saugatuck High School student who tends to chickens and rabbits behind the garage.
"It makes it easy to be concerned about the environment, living here," said Curtis Birky, who shares a clinical social work practice with his wife in an office above the family's garage. "It's been something we've been trying to pay attention to."
Five years ago, Christian began lobbying his parents to help him begin mowing neighbors' lawns for cash.
Kathryn, meanwhile, was lobbying for a pony. Their parents decided to merge the two dreams.
They bought Clementine and an Amish-made lawn mower designed to be pulled by a horse.
"I liked the idea. Especially the pony part," Christian told the Detroit Free Press for a story Wednesday.
Thus was born Clementine's Lawn Mowing.
"Come and enjoy our alternative lawn mowing," says a color flyer that Christian and Kathryn passed out to neighbors. "Let Clementine, Kathryn and Christian help protect the serenity of Glenn by mowing your lawn the Earth-sensitive way."
The siblings have five clients this summer, charging up to $50, depending on the size of the lawn.
Clementine, 21, is a cross between pony and draft horse. She loves to be ridden down the Lake Michigan shoreline, where she wallows in the surf and rolls in the moist sand.
At work, one sibling generally sits on the mower using reins to direct Clementine while the other does close-in trimming work with a manual push mower.
The business gained international acclaim when the United Nations Environment Programme chose Christian - based in part on his lawn-mowing service - to be among nine Junior Board members to coordinate the international conference.
Christian, Kathryn and their mother attended the 2002 UN Tunza conference in Canada, where Christian had been overwhelmed with stories of environmental damage from throughout the world.
"Tunza" means "to treat with care or affection" in Kiswahili, spoken in eastern Africa.