Meet Your Neighbors

Jill Riddell:
Illuminating Urban Nature

Jill Riddell, the newly appointed and first ever Director of Conservation at the Chicago Academy of Sciences’ Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, recounts an urban nature discovery with her two young girls in front of their Chicago home. The trio found a cicada-killer wasp clinging to a cicada. She explained to the children that the killer wasp stings a cicada, drags it home, and stashes it for its baby to feed on in its larval stage. “It’s thrilling that you can show children all the basic lessons of nature in your own backyard, front lawn, or local park,” she says. “You can see birth, nesting, adaptation, and more complicated processes like predator-prey relationships and territory disputes. You don’t have to wait to show your children nature until you’re in a place with a beautiful view. You can do that right in the city.”

In 1983, Riddell’s interest in the environment and science led her to volunteer at The Nature Conservancy’s field office in Chicago. Following her graduation from Northwestern University, she began working there, eventually directing fundraising and communications. Her timing was good, as the Conservancy had just begun to build the Volunteer Stewardship Network. From her position at the hub of this network, Riddell met hundreds of stewards at a time when volunteers were establishing themselves as an indispensable part of land management. “I got my ‘street-training’ about prairies and restoration at the Conservancy and developed a deep devotion to Midwest landscapes,” she says. “I love the subtlety of the flat topography, the absence of glamour, and the complexity of the plant and animal life in the simplicity of these landscapes.”

After her time at The Nature Conservancy, Riddell worked for the Openlands Project as director of development and communications for three years before becoming an accomplished freelance writer. She has written more than 80 articles and essays about nature in the Chicago region, including several features for Chicago WILDERNESS.

Riddell recently helped write the City of Chicago’s Nature and Wildlife Plan, which, she says, reflected her desire to have a direct influence on shaping natural resource programs and policy. She also serves as one of the nine members of the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission. Meeting quarterly, the commissioners review staff recommendations and designate high-quality natural areas as Illinois Nature Preserves, granting perpetual protection from private and public development.

But it is the challenge of helping the Chicago Academy of Sciences return to its roots of doing “serious science” and working in the Nature Museum itself that is her main focus now. “I’m working to help make links between the Nature Museum and what’s happening in the local science and conservation community,” she says. Riddell is also in charge of exhibits, expanding natural science programs for adults, and disseminating information about nature and science to the general public.

“I love being in a workplace filled with the vibrations of children’s voices…it’s a chance to take ideas and make them not just two-dimensional on a page of paper but three-dimensional. And I love working in a job where I can communicate to every Chicagoan who will listen that nature is right outside their door.”

— Gary Mechanic