[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED MAY 2001.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: FALL 1997.]

Chicago Wilderness, Chicago Renaissance?

Learning the Lore of the Land

By Alf Siewers

There’s a little book that I take up from time to time when looking for inspiration, Siftings by Jens Jensen. Jensen’s name deserves to be emblazoned on the portals of Chicago history with Jean Baptiste Du Sable and Jane Addams. But few know him as the man who helped found our forest preserve network, who helped save the Indiana Dunes, and who designed many of Chicago’s great park landscapes in native style.

When Jensen came here from Denmark in the last half of the 19th century, he was fascinated by the prairie, which he saw in some ways as having a similar affect on the human soul as the sea in his native land. Prairie nurtured friendliness, he said, because it had no strong hiding places, but also mightiness, because its horizons called to you. The combination made for great art and a great people that Jensen felt would come forth in the fullness of time.

A century later, industries have come and gone but the work of Jensen and other like-minded folk endures as the defining element of this region: the ring of forest preserves, the first such urban system in the world; our mostly open lakefront; the Indiana and Zion dunes; Chicago’s landmark parks and boulevards, and the greenway network now being built to extend them across six counties.

It is this legacy that Chicago Wilderness seeks to celebrate, to update on new planes of ecological understanding, to revive, and to let us all embrace. The name of the consortium is itself mystically oxymoronic: Wilderness, commonly defined as a pristine natural area, does not seem to fit, nor does its older meaning of a kind of bleak wasteland. Yet these meanings both do fit and do not. There is a sense in which modern life has become a spiritual wasteland, and a sense in which a pristine natural wilderness must include human society to survive. And vice versa.

The challenges of relationships between humans and nature in this region today are much the same as in Jensen’s time, but with new twists.

There are attempted land grabs of forest preserve areas with riverboat casinos looming around the bend. There are activists who make their environmentalism both a science and a religion in disregard of the artistry of their work. There are angry critics who see in restoration efforts a dangerous cultural heresy.

Yet in Jensen’s day, when the region’s character was defined in part by the rediscovery and celebration of its landscape, he happily defined the weaving of a meaningful relationship between humans and landscape as a kind of gardening and, thus, the greatest of civic arts.

"Art must be a guide, a leader, in the evolution of mankind toward a higher spiritual goal," he wrote in that little book. "None of the arts is more able to do this than that of the garden. It is a living expression of peace and happiness, and therefore a great influence in the forming of a people. It matters little if the garden disappears with its maker. Its record is not essential to those who follow, because it is for them to solve their own problem, or art will soon decay. Let the garden disappear in the bosom of nature of which it is a part, and although the hand of man is not visible, his spirit remains as long as the plants he planted grow and scatter their seed…Man in his arrogance and conceit passes away. A bird singing over his grave drops a seed, and out of that seed grows a beautiful tree getting its substance from what was once conceited man. So nature goes on without any vengeance."

"Who can realize," he asked at the ending of his extended essay, "the supple power and the emotional forces that lie hidden in the misty bloom of the witch-hazel in the purple shadows of the dying day?"

All this is a good reminder for the city in a garden. The stockyards and steel mills have mostly passed away, and so someday will the gambling casinos and shopping malls, but the preserves and the lakefront shall remain. If both preservation and restoration are in a sense gardening, and thus an art, it is because of the way in which they involve people. But the garden endures only as long as its shape reflects the flow of nature in both the environment and people.

Chicago Wilderness is an effort to get us to see the forest because we see the trees and the people in it, to recognize how much the warp and woof of this region is inescapably a bioregion, and how we as a people shape it and are shaped by it. This is an iconic paradox for which there is no simple category besides the sense of awe that Romantic poets used to call the sublime and that the religious know as the mystic.

You know when you walk into a restored oak savanna that it is aesthetically right, with its multi-colored flowers and butterflies. Surveys have shown that people across cultures, in fact, prefer such landscape aesthetically. You know from studies done so far that such involvement of people in their landscape increases diversity of species in the long term and strengthens the presence of the native species that shaped our region for thousands of years before the last few generations of humans arrived.

But without involving many people and diverse insights, efforts such as preservation of natural sites, restoration, and even Chicago Wilderness itself, will be doomed to failure, or at least to the kind of political marginalization that the earlier Chicago landscape and cultural renaissance met with. That’s because, as Jensen noted from political exile in Door County, working out the relation between people and landscape is art. And that’s why the work of Chicago Wilderness needs to be done not so much on a blackboard or map as on a metaphoric loom.

The cost of failure is high, as can be seen by the corruption and stagnation that afflicted so much of our regional culture after the first landscape-linked renaissance lost steam. There is no more singly important project underway today in the Chicago region than Chicago Wilderness if it is rightly understood. And there is an urgent need to involve as many people culturally, economically, and environmentally as possible.

That’s because we are still essentially a rootless culture, an historical ticking time bomb. Except for descendants of Great Lakes Indians in our midst, this was not our tribal land. If we are to make it our own, we must humbly let it make us its own first. In the process we will discover, as the early Celts knew, that in learning the lore of the land, we become protected by it. Or, as aboriginal elders from Arnhem Land, Australia, put it: "Understand and know the land to know yourself." Likewise, in our society’s mainstream tradition, God says to Moses in Leviticus: "The land shall not be sold forever; for the land is mine: for ye are strangers and sojourners with me."

It is a sense of place we still lack, not just geographically but in the network of life, and with it a sense of self. Taken in the right spirit, Chicago Wilderness can help us — as individuals and as a region — surf the energy of that epiphany yet to come.

Alf Siewers, formerly urban affairs writer with the Chicago Sun-Times, studies ancient cultures and their interaction with landscape at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.