BOOK REVIEWS

Untold Riches and Slaughter

Of Prairie, Woods, & Water: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing

Joel Greenberg, Editor
The University of Chicago Press, 2008

Joel Greenberg’s Of Prairie, Woods, & Water: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing is a compilation of 100 original sources the author encountered while writing his 2002 tome, A Natural History of the Chicago Region. Greenberg’s selections, more than 90 of which were written from the 1840s to the 1950s, range across the entire Chicago Wilderness region. Some of the jewels in this trove possess a sacred-text gravitas, filled with the secret delight of discovery in an untouched landscape.

With attention to footnotes, the reader can follow first-person accounts on a westbound walk from dark, virgin forests in southern Michigan; along the shore of Lake Michigan where vast marshes teemed with waterfowl; and over dry ground where travelers delighted in sunny oak savannas, “which seem to have been planted by the Hand; the Grass grows so high in them, that one might lose one’s self amongst it.” Upon reaching Chicago, the oaks gave way to fire-loving prairies that ran to the western sky. When prairie fires threatened a home, settlers fought fire with fire, as David Turpie dramatically describes, by creating a “burnt-off space” to starve the wildfire of fuel.

The book also contains original sources for the refrains about passenger pigeons so abundant that their weight could snap the limbs of trees. I have always had the sneaking suspicion that this is a belief conditioned by repetition, but Greenberg intelligently includes corroborating sources as diverse as a staid newspaper editor and a misanthropic recluse of the Kankakee Marsh, Josiah Granger: “Pidguns are around. They broke some ded lims on the iland this week whare they roosted. Thares slews of them…I got 33 with 2 shots.”

Hunting and fishing figure prominently in these accounts, which describe staggeringly enormous flocks of waterfowl and mind-numbing carnage inflicted upon them by gunners. They portray pickerel so naïve and numerous that kids caught them on every cast in the Kankakee, prompting Francis Ling’s boyhood pal to exclaim, “Damned if this is fishing. It’s slaughter.” In one of the more spectacular reminders of how abundant game once was, an individual identified only as “Lowther” recalls that it was “no feat” to kill a hundred prairie chickens in a day. At that rate, the entire prairie chicken population of today’s Illinois could be exterminated in a single week.

The grief felt by those who witnessed the changes that birthed our city could be intense. Imagine growing up in Albert Herre’s boyhood cabin in the 1870s, where two species of lady’s slipper orchids — now vanishingly rare — grew right outside the front door. Contrast this idyllic vision with Halvor Skavlem’s bleak witness of sod-busting: “Those great unwieldy breaking teams, consisting of 10 to 14 large oxen…crawling like some huge Brobdignagian Caterpillar around and around…leaving a black trail behind, that, day by day, increased in width, bring certain ruin and destruction…to the plant inhabitants who had held undisputed possession for untold centuries.” Ouch.

Of Prairie, Woods, & Water is not intended to be an authoritative sort of anthology, but a miscellany of obscure sources that the editor thought deserved a wider audience. Greenberg highlights a number of interesting characters like Chicago writer Leonard Dubkin, who wrote a very charming piece about observing a bat colony as a boy, even spending his nights in their grotto right in the city on the banks of the Chicago River. (Greenberg’s commentary rather shrilly labels Dubkin “pridefully superficial” because he could not distinguish the calls of various thrushes by ear.) Other characters, like the murderer Nathan Leopold, who wrote about a pet robin he kept in prison, might have been better forgotten.

Some readers will finish Of Prairie, Woods, & Water with a sinking feeling about our modern landscape: Oh, what might have been. The use of the passenger pigeon, that icon of hopeless extinction, on the book’s cover doesn’t help, but it has as much to do with the editors’ decision to omit selections after 1960. For this book leaves out the latest chapter of Chicago nature writing, which must describe this modern age of restoration, when many ecosystems are being saved from certain doom. In this decade, the whooping crane has been seen again migrating in Chicago’s skies, the bald eagle has returned to nest in Cook County, and even the wolf has crossed furtively back into Illinois. Let us take the lessons in this compilation and realize the region’s bounty once again.

Reviewer Joe Walsh is a lecturer in biology and evolution at Northwestern University and a habitat restoration volunteer.

Revolution Underground

Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners

James B. Nardi
The University of Chicago Press, 2007

That soils are integral to the workings of the natural world will come as little surprise to many readers of this magazine — most gardeners are, of course, adept stewards of the matrix in which their gardens grow. However, gardeners (indeed, most ecological stewards) most often manage soils as a mysterious “black box:” they know what goes in and what emerges, but have no intimate acquaintance of the intricate processes occurring in the soil, nor the diverse organisms orchestrating it all.

Those processes reach even deeper than many might suspect. In recent years, ecologists have devoted considerable attention to soil organisms and their role in ecosystems. This skein of research has resulted in a mild revolution in our thinking. (Ecological revolutions tend to be bloodless and polite, but are revolutions nonetheless.) Enter “plant-soil feedback theory,” which asserts that entire ecosystems cannot be fully understood without appreciating the strong influence of living soil on the life above its surface, and vice versa. Many of the critical processes running our world, goes the new thinking, are governed at least as much from beneath our feet as from before our eyes.

The superb new book Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners by James B. Nardi, a biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Illinois Natural History Survey, serves as a splendid introduction to the world of soil. Not only does it provide an ample introduction to soils as a “marriage of the mineral world and the organic world” — that is, to basic soil science — it also furnishes the reader with an extensive account of the soil community, detailing organisms from kangaroo rats to microbes. The book is strong indeed on invertebrate groups, and many readers will be introduced to creatures to which they have previously paid scant attention. Crisp prose, color photos, and delightful illustrations (the author’s work) make Life in the Soil pleasingly complete without getting stuck in the mud.

At approximately 300 pages, Soil can afford to dazzle as well as inform. The reader may emerge not only a more astute naturalist and steward of the soil, but also will come away with a few pleasing tidbits to share. Consider Nardi’s account of a massive, 1,500-acre fungus discovered in the Pacific Northwest, establishing fungi as arguably the largest of living things. (This latest discovery destroyed the 1992 fungus size record, an already astounding 38 acres.)

Nardi clearly wants us to put his insights to use. He advocates not only ecologically knowledgeable gardening, but also a greater attentiveness to the conservation of soil biodiversity, diversity so rich that it has been described by ecologist Paul Giller as “the poor man’s tropical rainforest.” This book will be useful to gardeners, naturalists, and ecological managers; useful, in fact, to anyone who cares to tread lightly — knowing, thanks to this satisfying volume, what is beneath one’s boots.

Reviewer Liam Heneghan is professor of environmental science at DePaul University, where he co-directs the Institute for Nature and Culture and is co-chair of the Chicago Wilderness science team.