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NURTURE OR NATURE?

A LOCAL BATTLE OVER THE BEST WAY
TO MAKE A PRAIRIE
THREATENS TO WIDEN INTO A WAR
AGAINST OPEN SPACES

by Alf Siewers

Emily Dickinson was the first to codify rules for prairie restoration:

To make a prairie it takes a
clover and one bee, —
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

Yet, lately there's been more controversy than revery surrounding efforts to restore Illinois' prairie, the grassland that once covered much of our landscape.

In recent months, Chicago-style neighborhood politics managed to stall an internationally acclaimed plan to salvage remnants of 12,000-year-old prairie and the shaded grassland called oak savannah. Community activists, who prefer the densely wooded areas near their homes, challenged moves to cut back and burn stretches of the publicly owned forest in Cook and DuPage counties in the northeast region of the state. As a result, officials in both counties, who oversee the forest preserves, put moratoriums on the project last fall and began reviewing their policies on restoration.

Some environmentalists argue the outcome of those deliberations could well determine the future of our nearly extinct native ecosystem.

Already, most of Illinois' prairie and savannah has been developed or plowed under for farmland. Though it has been preserved in a few places, notably an archipelago of remnants in the suburban forest preserves, restorationists believe even those rare patches, including thousands of oaks and unknown numbers of rare plants, insects and animals, are in danger of being lost. If the forest preserves aren't managed, they argue, the prairie and savannah will be destroyed by an overgrowth of trees and brush.

For years forest preserve officials agreed; they authorized The Nature Conservancy, a private environmental group, to organize volunteers to cut trees, brush herbicides on stumps and burn land. But last fall the project aroused a vocal group of area residents, alarmed at the process, and fearing that nearby preserves would be turned into prairies. They, in turn, found support in arguments among naturalists over how much humans should intervene in nature to save it.

So far, the debate appears to be about how and where to save a prairie. But some environmentalists worry this local battle could grow into a wider war against the open-spaces movement that has flourished in the state over the past decade.

The latest renaissance of interest in regional landscape first surfaced in the early 1980s with the establishment of the Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor, a 96-mile preserve that runs from the south branch of the Chicago River at Bridgeport to the Illinois River at LaSalle. In more recent years, a wide range of professionals, academics and environmental activists have participated in a variety of open-space and restoration projects throughout northeastern Illinois. The Nature Conservancy has deployed some 5,000 volunteers for those projects.

But, ultimately, the restorationists may have been stymied by their own success. As their projects became bigger and more visible, they drew more fire.

Most of the opposition to the restoration efforts came from the tiny but politically clout-heavy Old Edgebrook neighborhood on Chicago's Northwest Side. Residents there were concerned that the forest buffer that insulates them from the rest of the city was being thinned in hazardous ways by overzealous and allegedly secretive volunteers. Neighborhood activists subsequently gained a hearing in the local media and in their ward offices. And though overwhelmed by proponents of restoration at public hearings last fall, they continue to press their case.

But the ensuing public debate over

Illinois Issues January 1997 / 25

restoration carries overtones of what one leading landscape activist has called a "cultural war," one that resonates with the "wise use" and "property rights" movements that have swept other parts of the country. And representatives of some scientific and environmental organizations charge the deep suspicion of The Nature Conservancy's involvement — what radio talk-show hosts have called a deforestation effort by zealots in Birkenstocks wielding buzz saws — is rooted in a profound ignorance of the restoration process.

Nevertheless, the challenge also has raised philosophical questions about the control of public lands and the balance between nature and nurture. "We need to get the restorationists out of our forests now and allow evolution to once again rule as the primary design force in nature," Du Page antirestoration activist Rob Humpf told Cook County Board members at one hearing.

But for more than a decade, the prevailing wisdom behind regional restoration efforts has been that humans are valuable, even necessary agents in the preservation of natural ecosystems. Indians helped burn prairies and savannahs for thousands of years — the reasoning goes — and such help is needed even more as natural habitats are increasingly overwhelmed by civilization.

That argument is advanced by Steve Packard, who as The Illinois Nature Conservancy's science and stewardship director has helped to draw international attention to the savannah remnants in the Chicago area. Packard forged the network of volunteers that became the focus of a recent book by New York Times science writer William Stevens, Miracle Under the Oaks. Subtitled The Revival of Nature in America, the book calls a national restoration movement centered in Chicago "the most vital environmental force in America today."

At last, it seemed to many, the Chicago region was again at the forefront of a movement to involve Americans in a deeper sense of place. The federal government's decision to create the first national tallgrass prairie at the old Joliet Army Arsenal, they believed, was only the latest recognition that the area was on the cutting edge of a new kind of environmentalism. Some even predicted a return to earlier days when Chicago stood on the cutting edge of American cultural life.

In fact, the rapid disappearance of the Midwestern landscape during the 19th century seemed to prompt a focus on ecology and on a sense of place that had stimulating effects on a wide variety of human endeavors.

At the turn of this century, a regional landscape movement maintained important links with literary, architectural, scientific and artistic movements centered in Chicago. An open lakefront and the dunes preserves were part of its legacy. The Cook County forest-preserve system was the first of its kind in the world. Landscape architect Jens Jensen and others sought to recreate the look of savannah and prairie in regional parks, preserves and estates. And such efforts were seen as integral to social- reform efforts in the inner city.

Some of that excitement returned in the 1980s as concepts of cultural landscape and landscape ecology helped spur interest in exploring ways in which a large metropolitan area like Chicago could reflect the interrelationship between people and nature. Beyond the I&M heritage corridor, networks of greenways and bike trails were developed, and ideas about environmentally friendly development and urban greening were explored. The late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington's park policies and the urban environmentalism of the city's current mayor, Richard M. Daley, lent such efforts clout in city projects and meshed with a strong interest in environmental projects by Gov. Jim Edgar.

In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times in 1991, at a time when the restoration movement was picking up new momentum, Packard gave the definitive statement of the philosophy of human involvement in nature that undergirded many such efforts. "When you know something is about to go out of existence, it calls out to you," he said. "The greatest concentration of prairie and savannah ecosystems anywhere within the range of the eastern tallgrass prairie are here in the Chicago area. What's true today for the tallgrass prairie is rapidly going to become true for the planet as a whole. There will be nothing that survives in a healthy state except what people learn to restore and maintain." Preliminary studies tend to support those rather sweeping views. A study of preserves in Chicago's far western suburbs found that land not managed through restoration techniques had experienced a 12 percent decline in the number of native plant

Enabling the light to reach the ground helps promote a heavy herbaceous ground layer. This is a photograph of an open oak woods after invasive shrubs have been removed. It was taken in Spear Woods in Cook County.

species since 1979, while areas where restoration had begun in 1985 have since shown an increase of 24 percent in the number of native species. Environmentalists estimate that Cook County alone is losing 15,000 hard-to-replace oak trees a year and that intervention is needed to save ancient oak ecosystems from extinction.

Jeff Brawn, a wildlife population ecologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey and a science adviser to Chicago Wilderness, a consortium

26 / January 1997 Illinois Issues

Somme Woods in Northbrook, where Packard began developing the art of savannah restoration, is in summer a blend of colorful wildflowers and butterflies under cathedral-like oaks. U.S. Forest Service reports indicate that psychological surveys of human landscape preferences show that such primordial savannah landscape seems to be universally preferred among people of different cultures.

To Floyd Swink, there is no comparison between the value of such a restored landscape and that of the often overgrown brambles found in many forest preserves where non-native plants and trees have taken over.

"Flowers like sunlight," says Swink. "If forest preserves are just a thicket of buckthorn or multiflora rose [two non-native plant invaders], you don't get sunlight. What do taxpayers really find wonderful about going into a buckthorn thicket?"

Ironically, Swink and two other pioneers of the Chicago-area restoration movement — Robert Betz and Ray Schulenberg — were honored with awards for their work at a national conference of land managers in St. Charles last fall as local criticism of restoration was reaching a fever pitch.

Still, there have been serious and sophisticated issues raised by opponents of restoration, who say they are just calling for moderation. One of the most thoughtful critics has been Jon Mendelson, an environmental biology professor at Governors State University in University Park. Joined by Judith Dolan Mendelson of the Illinois Endangered Species Protection Board, he testified at hearings last fall. "We are told that oaks will not regenerate in the absence of fire, and that years of fire suppression [have] caused our forests to deteriorate. These claims seem exaggerated. ... It may well be that at reduced fire frequencies oaks will not be as dominant as they have been in the past, but they will certainly remain a significant portion of our forests."

Others raise questions about the ways in which officials make decisions affecting the preserves. They argue there has been very little public input. "The residents of our area are not opposed to a healthy forest preserve system, and are not against the removal of brush and damaging weeds," says Cook County Board Commissioner Peter Silvestri, who represents the Old Edgebrook area. "We simply want all the information, including management plans outlining the goals of ecological restoration, made available to the public. As a community which values the woods, we demand community input on these plans."

That point could well be the Achilles' heel of restoration efforts in Cook County. No public hearings on the plans were held in Edgebrook before the current controversy, though restoration had been going on in nearby preserves for years.

Still, it could be argued that Cook County politicians might not be the best stewards of some of the continent's rarest ecosystems, and that neighborhood politics might not lead to the wisest decisions about preservation. Gerould Wilhelm, who with Swink co-authored the definitive guide to native Chicago plants, says the controversy needs to be placed in a more timeless context than 150 years of Chicago politics. At Walpole Island in Ontario, Wilhelm has observed some of the same Indian tribes that once predominated in the Chicago area still burning the landscape.

"They have been burning the landscape annually since time beyond mind, and it's an Eden, an Elysian Field. It's just unbelievable," he says.

The search for common ground continues. "One important thing that has emerged from all this is how much people do care about the forest preserves," says Gerald Adelmann, executive director of the Openlands Project, a Chicago-based landscape advocacy organization. Adelmann masterminded plans for the national heritage corridor and is a key figure in Chicago's recent landscape renaissance. A skilled negotiator, he shares concerns about the long-term fallout if the current controversy gets out of control.

Chicago, once known as the "city in a garden," blew it decades ago and forfeited a leading role in the urban ecological movements when the city lost its vision and became mired in politics. That earlier renaissance ended when landscape guru Jens Jensen fled Chicago, ultimately for exile in Wisconsin.

Without some revery, we're at risk of blowing it again.

Alf Siewers, former urban affairs writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, is currently researching issues involving landscape and ancient cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Illinois Issues January 1997 / 27