Winter 1999

[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED MARCH 2002.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: WINTER 1999.]

Charlotte and Herbert Read:
Saving the Dunes

By Eva Dienel

At the base of Mount Baldy, a sign invokes the dilemma of defining the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. "Predator or Prey?" reads the sign. Predator because the dunes are continually moving, obliterating forest as they go. Prey because humankind's penchant for development can move so much faster than the dunes' geologic pace. The evidence is as clear as a day at the beach, which along Indiana's lakeshore includes equal parts sand, water, and majestic views of industry. Puffing steel mills are as accepted by the millions of beach-goers as is the heat of summer.

Those millions, however, do not include Herb Read, one of the few not properly dressed for a day at West Beach. Milling around him are young women with tanned bodies wrapped in bikinis and kids scuffling along in Tevas behind parents toting huge rubber rafts, coolers, and towels. Dressed in a white shirt, blue jeans, and walking shoes, with a camera slung around his neck, Herb's here to teach me.

For the past 46 years, Herb and his wife Charlotte have been active members in the Save the Dunes Council, a preservation coalition that has contended with big industry and an assembly of politicians, private property owners, and the National Park Service. The Council's goal is enabling a park marked by political boundaries to be defined instead by its own ecology, a contiguous 25-mile stretch of lakeshore and inland vegetation, interspersed with bogs, pannes, and more than 1,400 vascular plant species. Among national parks, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore ranks seventh in native plant diversity, far greater than preserves many times its size. Right now, however, the park map looks like a child's drawing, with some park land outside the lines and some holes in the center.

"That's park. That's not," Herb says, pointing first to the right, then to the left, indicating which land they have won for preservation as he drives along Indiana State Highway 12.

This natural-versus-political boundary debate is played out in most national parks, whether Yellowstone or the Indiana Dunes. "Our struggles are to do what we can to improve the ecological boundaries," says Charlotte, who is wearing a Save the Dunes tee shirt. "Scientists have realized it all along. It's a balance between the needs of the resource and the political realities of getting the resource protected."

The difference at the Indiana Dunes is the people lobbying for the park's protection. Founded by Dorothy Buell in 1952, the Save the Dunes Council is a grass-roots effort Herb and Charlotte joined because they feel personally connected to the region. Unlike the larger parks in the West that gained national attention with outsider champions such as John Muir, the Indiana Dunes need the support of the local community to survive.

The Reads have made this a family crusade. "The Dunes are personally special to me because I grew up in Chicago near Jackson Park," Charlotte says. "I always had a park in my backyard. I thought everybody had that opportunity, and I think that created an awareness and sensitivity in me early on, that open spaces and places to go are a part of growing up." Herb's family also lived in south Chicago and made frequent trips to the Dunes when he was young. Now, given their full schedules working at the Council's office in Michigan City and occasional lobbying trips to Washington, D.C., the two don't get to visit the Dunes as much as they would like.

But, then, the Reads live in the park. Their current house, tucked in the woods of the National Lakeshore, is on leaseback until 2010, when it becomes property of the federal government. Many of the residents who settled before the Dunes became part of the park system also have their homes on leaseback.

Herb joined the Council in 1952 as chair of the engineering committee, and after their five children got older, Charlotte became the Council's first employee in 1974. The Council now has 1,000 members, an office, a small staff, and a gift shop run by volunteers. And support from outside the Council is growing. Other regional groups, such as the Friends of the Dunes and the Shirley Heinze Environmental Fund, have joined the effort to preserve the Dunes.

"While the Dunes Council was the leader in all of the Dunes legislation, we were never there alone," Charlotte says. "In 1992, we had a coalition of 22 groups in Indiana convincing our federal legislators that the Dunes area needed to be larger."

Since Congress first authorized the creation of an 8,000-acre Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in 1966, the Council has lobbied in Washington dozens of times, expanding the national and state park's boundaries to approximately 16,000 acres (see our Into the Wild profile). Many of the Dunes bills were small victories — 13 acres here, another plot there — but slowly the culture is changing. The steel industry, the Council's biggest opponent in the 1960s and mid-70s, has morphed into a quasi-ally, even donating park land for the protection of endangered species such as the Karner blue butterfly.

The next step most likely will be getting more support from the people who use the park. With progress in education, especially at the new Indiana Center for Learning at Camp Goodfellow and the Paul H. Douglas Center for Environmental Education at Miller Woods, younger kids are starting to recognize the importance of open spaces and preservation. And this education touches more than just the immediate neighbors of the park. "You start with the kids," Charlotte adds with enthusiasm. "The next generation will be more sensitive to the environment and ecological boundaries of the park."