Summer 1999

[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED MARCH 2002.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: SUMMER 1999.]

Nature That Depends on People

The largest breeding colony of black-crowned night herons in the Upper Midwest is in the Calumet region of Chicago Wilderness. This heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) is an endangered bird in the state of Illinois because so much of the wetland habitat it requires has become poor for the herons or has disappeared altogether. So what are they doing in Chicago — within easy reach of eight million people?

From Ohio to Iowa, from Missouri to Minnesota, the rural Corn Belt has lost its vast prairies or prairie groves. We near Chicago also have transformed the landscape — in building homes and industry, transportation systems and the businesses to serve us. But visionary thinkers and planners, architects and social workers pushed to create the forest preserve districts and to acquire open lands. We the people have provided refugia for plants and animals, including many species on the edge of extinction; they no longer thrive in the corn and soybeans of the countryside. Only people destroy nature; but only people save it.

The Dunes-Calumet Region, part of a once-vast complex of marshes, wet prairies, and sedge meadows, was also once home to the world's largest oil refinery and largest steel mill. Today its more than 50 fragmented natural sites harbor significant inventories of plants, animals, butterflies, amphibians, and fish, including several federally endangered species such as the Karner blue butterfly, the Indiana bat, and Pitcher's thistle. The Calumet region also receives the greatest concentration of migratory land and water birds in the Midwest. They settle down for a rest here, tired after flying north over all those beans. More than 860,000 people also inhabit this area that is struggling to overcome the industrial legacy of contaminated groundwater, brownfields, and economic stagnation. People and nature.

The Calumet region, in largish microcosm, is one locale where committed citizens are working to restore economic health and ecological health to their communities. Nature and human needs are coming together in Chicago Wilderness.

Indeed, in the central paradox of Chicago Wilderness lies our best hope for the future of our people and our nature. Today, visionaries and planners, artists and poets, citizen scientists and plain folks seek to live in healthy, sustainable communities for themselves and for the other species with which we share a common home.This issue of Chicago WILDERNESS features articles on wetlands and some of the creatures that you may find there. Now that it's summer, why not play in some muck, sit on a log and watch the animals come to drink at a woodland pond, or prowl a grassy savanna in the dew of daybreak? It's habitat for all of us. Like the frogs and orioles, enjoy Chicago Wilderness this summer. It's here because of you.

Debra Shore may be reached at editor@chicagowildernessmag.org.