Fall 2001

The Nature of
Chicago Wilderness

Guest Essay by John Rogner

Photo: Greg Neise

In recent years, we in the Chicago region have been using the word “wilderness” in a highly unconventional context.

We have coined the term “Chicago Wilderness” to refer to the rich biodiversity that resides in this huge sprawling metropolitan area – an area most people think of as anything but “untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor who does not remain,” to use the words of The Wilderness Act of 1964.

This is an area that is associated with, and defined by, humans and our cultural footprint. The biodiversity is concentrated in the fragments of land, slivers of land by conventional wilderness standards, that are scattered throughout the region – 200,000 protected acres in all. It is found in dozens of 100- to 1,000-acre units separated from each other by houses, offices, roads, factories, railroads, cornfields, concrete. Some fragments are larger, some smaller, but most are small isolated islands by wilderness standards.

Within these fragments of protected land can be found some of the best remaining examples in the world of tallgrass prairie, oak savanna and woodland, fen, dolomite prairie, and other natural communities. Also found within this complex of preserves is an abundance of degraded, biologically depauperate land, in need of restoration. Much of this degraded land was used and abused for 150 years before coming under formal protection. Aldo Leopold – noted conservationist, founder of the Wilderness Society and author of A Sand County Almanac – pointed out that the land has an innate capacity for self-renewal. But because our islands of degraded land sit in an urban matrix of lawns and homes, far from propagules of native species, the land without help has little chance of restoring itself to ecological health. People will, of necessity, become the vehicle for restoring nature.

Chicago Wilderness is also the name we have given the collaboration of over 130 organizations in the Chicago region. These diverse groups have banded together to better protect, restore, celebrate, promote, and publicize our rich biodiversity, and reconnect a landless urban people to nature. Our goal is to reconnect people, in Leopold’s words, to the “raw material out of which we have hammered that artifact called civilization.”

The term “Chicago Wilderness” has been called an oxymoron. The name was probably intended to some extent to be provocative, to draw attention to the rich nature in and around a city that few people associate with nature. It was probably not a deliberate attempt to redefine wilderness. But it does raise the question, is this an inappropriate application of the concept of wilderness? Does it dilute it, or might broadening the idea ultimately be of benefit both to our nation’s network of formal wilderness preserves, and to the fragments of real nature in and around the places where we live? Might it be a way to reconcile the two?

Lesser Yellowlegs. Photo: Kanae Hirabayashi

Various writers have pointed out that wilderness is a mental construct that proves to be conceptually slippery when you try to define its boundaries. And its connotations have changed drastically over time. “Wilderness” has gone from being a dark unknown place to be feared, to an equally unknown place to be held in religious reverence and awe, to the birthplace of American rugged individualism and democratic ideals, to Leopold’s early thoughts of wilderness as primarily a place for primitive recreation. Some have pointed out that all of these concepts maintain a separation between humans and wilderness, made explicit by Wilderness Act language, which says that man himself is a visitor who does not remain. This thinking also holds that the American ideal of wilderness has tended to shape our dominant view of nature itself as a place that can only be corrupted by human influence.

I think this historical analysis has merit. Yet I think that maintaining this separation, mentally and physically, will not serve our national conservation interests indefinitely. We in Chicago Wilderness have reversed the relationship. Our wilderness will not thrive without human influence. If we do not adequately enlist people to help manage and restore these lands, they will not become or remain healthy. And so our strategy is to take our campaign to the people and ask that they exert a direct but creative influence on our wilderness.

I realize, of course, that there are two very opposite types of human actions. One type the Wilderness Act tries to prevent. The other we encourage. One is destruction. The other is conservation. Because we did not know how to use land without abusing it, The Wilderness Act – and its attempt to isolate nature from human influence – was perhaps the appropriate remedy at the time. The post-war economic expansion threatened to completely eliminate the last remnants of our wildlands.

But by institutionalizing that separation, we create in some people the false comfort that nature is something that is adequately cared for in remote places, and not something that exists and needs to be cared for by everyone in their backyard. It deflects responsibility. In Chicago Wilderness, we are trying to get people to assume responsibility. It also creates the illusion that big wildernesses themselves are self-contained and self-sufficient, or that they are not still subject to human abuse through formal designation, which they certainly are.

Of this I am sure: we need to promote in the public a sense of connectedness. This becomes more urgent with every person who leaves the farm and enters the suburbs. And I mean not only connectedness of people with nature, but an appreciation of the connectedness between remote wilderness and so-called urban wastelands.

I spent three weeks several summers ago on a remote Canadian Arctic river, as unpeopled and untrammeled a place as you can reasonably find. Pure, glorious, unadulterated wilderness. I took special delight in seeing the abundance of bird life typically associated with wilderness areas: merlins, peregrine falcons, gyrfalcons, and others. But the birds that remain with me now are the lesser yellowlegs, which rose from every gravel bar as we floated by. The memory of seeing this rather unremarkable shorebird crystallized only three weeks later when I stood on the artificial shoreline of Lake Calumet, set in the post-industrial wasteland of southeast Chicago. Steel slag waste and fill covered the uplands, forming the lake borders. In the thin strand of beach material between the slag and the water’s edge, lesser yellowlegs were refueling on their way south. Where I had seen them three weeks previous was clearly wilderness, this place clearly not. Or is it clear? Did the yellowlegs know the difference?

I personally hold the national wilderness preservation system in the highest regard. I have spent much time in these areas, and think Leopold and others created what has become a flagship of American conservation. But the idea is in need of tinkering in light of changing American attitudes and changing conservation needs.

Wilderness is an idea in need of a greatly expanded American constituency. It may be time to broaden the concept of wilderness to emphasize connections between wilderness and people. It may be time to recognize that humans always have influenced landscapes, for better or worse, and that humans can be a positive creative force in nature. And it may be that by using the word “wilderness” for a 200-acre patch of ancient prairie in a sea of suburbia, we can promote a correct sense of unity between the places where we live and remote places most will never see except as pictures on calendars.

In contrast, the “leave it alone, don’t touch” attitude toward wilderness actually threatens the preservation of nature in Chicago. In a few localities, there has been sincere and strong opposition to land managers’ efforts to introduce natural ecological processes, like fire, into our preserves. Anti-restorationists are not anti-nature – they merely subscribe to the idea that human interference is, by definition, corrupting, and nature will thrive only if we leave it alone. Although methods will probably remain a subject of debate, I am as certain of the need for constructive human interference in the form of ecological restoration and management in Chicago Wilderness as I am for the need for it in large designated wildernesses. Neither is outside the reach of human influence, both constructive and destructive. Humans are part and parcel of both systems. To the extent that the “designated wilderness” approach to conservation has promoted dualistic thinking and separation from nature, it is a counterproductive concept in the Chicago region.

Yet the lands comprising Chicago Wilderness have important values traditionally associated with wilderness. They are nature playgrounds for millions of city dwellers. They are a repository of great biological diversity, much of which cannot be found in any other “Wilderness” area, anywhere. Thus these lands are base datums of ecological health against which to measure land sickness. (This became the highest value that Leopold placed on wilderness.)

So, back to Chicago Wilderness. It may offer some hope of changing people’s relationship to nature and insert people back into wilderness in ways that make both kinds of wilderness relevant. What better way to reintegrate people into the nature of which they are a part than to call all of these scraps of nature in their own backyard wilderness, and then redefine it to include – indeed require – humans to maintain it in a healthy condition?

Restoration and stewardship will be the antidote to dualistic thinking. And will this familiarity with wilderness not then carry over into public support for the large tract wilderness areas on the other end of the wilderness spectrum? Both types of wilderness benefit when they are seen as part of a single system that includes people.

John Rogner is Field Supervisor, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and chair of Chicago Wilderness