Editor’s Essay

Room for Improvement

Ten years ago, Chicago Wilderness was launched as a regional network of public and private organizations with the goal of protecting and restoring the biological diversity of the greater Chicago metropolitan area. Ambitious? Absolutely. Essential? Our regional well-being depends on it.

Today, Chicago Wilderness is 193 organizations and more than 250,000 acres of natural lands. As is proper, any organization ought to examine its progress toward its goals — hence The State of Our Chicago Wilderness: A Report Card on the Health of the Region’s Ecosystems issued in April. (See our article or read the full version of the report). Several years in the making, the Report Card assesses the state of our region’s woods, wetlands, and grasslands and makes recommendations on how to improve the grades.

The progress report is mixed, frankly. Collectively, particularly in the counties surrounding Cook, we’ve done a good job acquiring open space and adding to the acres of protected natural lands. Our natural areas and native biodiversity are the envy of many other urban centers; these natural lands immensely enhance our quality of life in ways both measurable and sublime.

Yet, the condition of these natural communities is mostly fair or poor. Most received grades of “C” or “D” We’ve increased the amount of protected holdings, but we haven’t gone to work restoring the habitat. The low grades are due to the encroachment of invasive species in grasslands and woodlands, the detrimental changes in water flows that cause wetlands degradation, lack of natural fire, pollution, and overpopulation of white-tailed deer.

Some natural areas are in excellent condition because they are being actively managed. Volunteers like Espie and Don Nelson and the staffs of land management agencies are assisting these places back to health, doing what nature in an urbanized area can no longer do for itself.

The Report Card stands as a call to action. We know what to do to get better grades; we just need to do it. And some of what we need to do is hard, kind of like buckling down to learn advanced calculus or master a Bach piano sonata. Learning to love whole ecosystems requires so much more of us than learning to love a tree. Our affections attach to known places — a grove, a riverbank, a swimming hole, a meadow — not to large landscapes (or the teeming world of microorganisms beneath our feet).

Our tendency is to want to be in the picture. We are, after all, primates, and it is natural for us to establish our primacy. Yet in our eagerness to express our capacity for invention, to improve our homes, and to give full rein to our free society, we have lost our balance with the natural world.

I believe this will become the moral imperative of our time — to accept that we have an obligation to the rest of nature no less compelling than the one we have to our fellow human beings. To live in a just and free society, to respect the rights of others, means to live in “right relationship to the land community.” Indeed, what kind of creatures are we if we cannot use our distinctive capacities for love and learning to embrace ecosystems in full and to make amends? I submit that we are less than fully human if we think only of ourselves, if we do not embrace and sustain all of creation.

The world will open up to us if we are open to its lessons, its possibilities. Spend the summer discovering Chicago Wilderness and send us your reports. Your help is needed to improve our grades.