Four decades of study in the Native American teachings and the Chinese internal arts. Forty-five years caring for privately held woodlands. And a father-and-son business with the equipment to carry a plan out. Whichever one brought you here, the door is just below.
These are three separate undertakings, each with its own site. Pick the one that matches what you came for — or just call, and Del will point you to the right one.
Native American teachings, nature awareness, and the Chinese internal martial arts — four decades of practice, set into living relationship rather than kept apart.
Woodland assessment, timber stand improvement, wildlife habitat, and long-horizon land care planning for private woodland owners. The work Del has been doing since 1981.
Storm damage cleanup, brush and tree removal, trail building, driveway grading, tilling, and hauling. A father-and-son business with real equipment, not hand tools.
They look like three different things. They are not.
Del grew up on a working farm in northeastern Ohio with a farmer and logger for a father. He has been in the woods since he was five years old, and he has never really left.
The name for the whole of it comes from one night on a dark country hill. He looked up and saw the Pleiades — the Seven Sisters — begin to move: seven stars circling overhead in perfect, undeniable relationship. He never saw it again. What it left him with was the understanding that different traditions are, in the end, speaking the same language, and that nothing is learned well in isolation.
That study has run for four decades — many years with Native American elders, including Grandmother Twylah Nitsch of the Seneca Wolf Clan Teaching Lodge, alongside decades in the Chinese internal arts. It is taught now under the name 7 Star Circling.
Environmental Woodland Management is the working half of the same life. It started in 1981 and has run ever since — forty-five years of reading forests, improving timber stands, building habitat, and teaching owners to read their own ground.
MD LandWorks came later, with his son Michael. It puts the equipment behind the plans: the tractor, the grapple, the chipper, the landplane. Between the two, a woodland plan and the crew to carry it out are generally the same phone call.
The same question runs underneath all three: what do you owe the ground you are standing on, and the people who will be standing on it long after you are gone?
The seven-generation horizon that shapes the woodland work comes out of years of study with Seneca elders, and it is named here for that reason. It is used as an ethical framework — a way of deciding what a plan is accountable to. It is not offered as instruction in Haudenosaunee philosophy, and Del does not speak for the Seneca Nation or for any other nation.
Not sure which of the three you need? Call or text and say what you are after — a woodland you cannot read, a job on your property, or a place to begin studying. Del will tell you honestly which door you want, including when the answer is none of them.