Tallgrass prairie that might have become extinct but for visionary Dr. Robert Betz...
Torkel Korling's amazing photographs and books illuminating nature...
Mayor Daley's green initiatives... and more pioneers for nature in our culture

Prairie Rex

id you know that the gripping story of the discovery of Sue, the skeletal T. rex debuting at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, has a prairie counterpart?

(Sue’s story belongs to Sue Hendricksen, a fossil hunter with a commercial fossil collecting team from the Black Hills Institute of South Dakota, who was out on a dig 10 years ago. While other members of her team went into town one hot August morning, Sue hiked over to some sandstone bluffs that had previously caught her attention. There, protruding from the cliffs above she saw bones, big bones, what turned out to be the largest, most complete Tyrannosaurus skeleton ever found.)

When Dr. Robert Betz wandered through an open area in suburban Markham in the 1960s (see Classic Prairie Restorations), his eye searched for another kind of relic. Today, twenty-two million acres of Illinois are corn and soybean fields. A mere one hundredth of one percent of original prairie now remains. Dr. Betz was searching for something that was on the verge of becoming extinct.

Sue Hendricksen, scanning the cliffs of South Dakota, knew what she was looking for: bones. Dr. Betz, scanning those brushy fields, also knew what to look for: the species of the tallgrass prairie. Relic plants living together as they had for many millennia — a healthy remnant of things past. Midwest wilderness.

Dr. Betz knew that the informed eye could recognize an ancient ecosystem that, to others, looked like an average field of brush. He knew he wasn’t seeing the postcard perfect Kodak picture of ancient nature but, rather, the disrupted but surviving biota, the tightly woven, pulsing and throbbing, decaying and renewing biota: whole complexes of species interacting, interdependent, in magnificent array above and below ground.

Dr. Betz believed that if one found the remnant core of a native ecosystem, people could learn to restore it to health, could regain not just the skeleton but essentially the whole flourishing natural community. As the stories that unfold in this issue will show, this was visionary indeed. Dr. Betz gradually demonstrated that nature needs more care than anyone had thought, and that good care would, in fact, produce dramatic results. As Dr. Betz and others demonstrated, we won’t have to bear witness to the extinction of ancient ecosystems. At least in the case of the Midwest’s prairies, wetlands, and woodlands, we can work the wilderness and bring them back.

Most of the rare nature we have today — at least in this region — is due to the care of generous people. People who conceived of and fought to establish the forest preserve districts that bought the land that harbored the natural communities that contained the grassland and forest and marsh remnants that constitute our wilderness. Only recently came other visionaries — the first people who recognized what was needed to save the dwindling species and restore health to those wild places.

This issue of Chicago WILDERNESS describes so many pioneers. The folks who labored to save the endangered peregrine learned from falconers how to restore a noble falcon to nature — and to do it in cities and suburbs across the country. Torkel and Diane Korling’s pioneering books and exhibits (see our profile in this issue) helped launch the appreciation of our local wild nature. Mayor Daley’s green roof, treaty with birds, and urban habitat initiatives are pioneering in their own right.

Pioneers? I nominate this magazine’s writers and photographers, and all the Chicago Wilderness communicators and educators who seek to create a culture of conservation. The policy advocates and sustainable development planners who are increasingly incorporating nature into the fabric of our metropolitan lives — we’re all pioneers.

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