Editor’s Essay

The Calumet Issue

Don Parker, Editor

This issue is almost entirely devoted to the multifaceted view of just one region within Chicago Wilderness — the Calumet.

Most people know the Calumet region for its hulking steel mills and smokestacks along I-90 headed toward Michigan, if they know it at all. They have little sense of the region as an ancient, noble place with its own unique pulse.

In modern times, the brusque treatment of the land by industry has often been just plain ugly. But these hulking mills made the steel for the skyscrapers, bridges, trains, and cars we rely on for life, work, and play — even the tractors that plant and harvest the food we eat. In many cases, the existence of the mills is precisely why the natural areas still exist.

If you talk to some people, there’s a distinct “Calumet region” with definable borders. To others, it’s just “Northwest Indiana” and the “Chicago Southland.” (To the people who named the region, “Calumet” referred to a peace pipe, or, metaphorically, “peace.”) Geographer Mark Bouman, who created our special map insert, tracked the modern boundaries in part by mapping businesses that use Calumet in their name. They’re most concentrated around the Illinois-Indiana state line—in Hammond, Whiting, Chicago, and East Chicago. But the name has been embraced more widely, leading us to draw the region liberally, from the city of Blue Island, Illinois, all the way east past the Indiana Dunes, Michigan City, and LaPorte.

Historically and ecologically, the Calumet region is at the heart of Chicago Wilderness, and it expresses the potential and challenges of Chicago Wilderness perhaps more intensely than anywhere else. If Chicago has been considered the “city of the big shoulders,” many of the biggest of those shoulders were pushing heavy metal in the Calumet steel mills. As for the beefiest concentration of rare nature, you’ll find many of the region’s finest prairies, savannas, forests, and endangered species habitats here, sandwiched between mills and neighborhoods.

If Chicago Wilderness is about the interconnectedness of nature and people, that doesn’t happen more dramatically than a steel mill sitting within ten feet of a prized wet prairie with its endangered orchids and rare birds.

We received input from scores of people — scientists, resident naturalists, geographers, planners, both Calumet residents and not — and they all had one thing in common: they were deeply excited about this issue. They told us it is needed — to rally and coalesce a region around its present importance, and its potential.

We attempted to share as many of the details as we could fit in, but it’s not easy to make a Michenerian epic come alive in one magazine issue. We have tried to do justice to a region that served as primary field laboratory for pioneers like the world-legendary early ecologist Henry Cowles, and saw the decades-long crusade by Senator Paul Douglas and Save the Dunes Council to protect miles of the Indiana lakefront for nature. We could have filled pages just listing the courageous people who worked so hard and continue to soldier on — Marian Byrnes battling the landfills; Michael Boos and Rod Sellers straddling the state line to protect Wolf Lake; Joann Podkul, Kevin Murphy, Victor Crivello, John Hayes, Lee Botts and so many others teaching kids to love nature; not to mention the many agencies who both drive and fund the work. Further, we sought at least to outline the complex interactions of social justice, education, race, and poverty, all inevitably tied to the environmental health of the region.

We hope we’ve managed to capture some essence of the Calumet region, to interest you in this simultaneously rough and sensitive, sobering and inspiring place. We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to the many generous individuals who have contributed their time and counsel to this issue, and to the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, which provided major support and has been deeply involved in the region for years. May all the great hearts and dedicated groups in the region continue to be a force for cooperation, reconciliation, and conservation of the natural areas we all need to thrive, forever.