Expanding Horizons

By Ron Trigg

Chicago Wilderness Adjusts its Geographic Identity

The Chicago Wilderness map has a new look—plumper and a little rougher around the edges. While many people are trying to avoid a similar transformation this holiday season, the Chicago Wilderness steering committee has revised the reserve’s geographic identity to encompass an area more than twice as large as the original. About the size of the state of Maryland, the new Chicago Wilderness extends beyond the collar counties in Illinois, stretches north to the outskirts of Milwaukee, reaches halfway across northern Indiana, and even takes in a tiny bit of southwestern Michigan.

Dennis Dreher, a former water resources planner for the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission who played a key role in the redefinition, describes the change as “a logical extension of the Chicago Wilderness area. The original region was defined largely by county boundaries, but our mission should not be limited by political lines on a map.”

Treasures Along the Fringe

The expanded Chicago Wilderness region now incorporates some additional spectacular natural features.

1. The southern unit of Kettle Moraine State Forest in Wisconsin is a prime example of glacial landscape, featuring glacial hills, kettle lakes, prairies, and hardwood forests.

Photo: David Schwaegler

2. The Michigan Coastal Dunes area is a continuation of Indiana’s dune habitats and includes the biologically significant Galien River watershed (pdf).

Photo: Hank Erdmann

3. Indiana’s Jasper-Pulaski Fish & Wildlife Area annually hosts as many as 30,000 migrating sandhill cranes and, in recent years, a few endangered whooping cranes.

Photo: Gerald D. Tang

4. The Kankakee Sands area stretches across the Indiana-Illinois state line and includes a major Nature Conservancy preserve and many high-quality savanna, wetland, and prairie features under the protection of both states.

Photo: Carol Freeman

5. The Lower Fox River flows past sandstone cliffs with rich woodlands and stands of red cedar and red pine in native habitat.

Photo: Carolyn Dring

Fellow committee member Geoff Levin of the Illinois Natural History Survey notes that “organisms pay attention to biological rather than political boundaries. The new definition is a more consistent depiction of our ecological region, and it incorporates important natural areas and communities that were previously left out.”

Our ecological region, say committee members, isn’t bound by one landform or ecosystem type. The best definition for the Chicago Wilderness region—consistent with its role in United States history—may be that it’s a meeting place, a nexus, a hub. Naturalists Floyd Swink and Gerould Wilhelm refer to a place where “the deciduous forests of the east meet the western prairies and savannas,” where “northern bogs and swamp forests” coexist with sand dunes and “unique dolomitic limestone prairies.” “It would be difficult,” they say, “to circumscribe another area of the North Temperate Zone with such geologic and physiographic diversity.”

Committee members made cutoff calls on the region’s outer limits based largely on a desire to maintain a Chicago identity. There was also some old-fashioned practicality, says John Rogner, chair of the consortium: “It’s about as far as you can drive to a meeting and get back in a day.”

Members let nature take the lead in drawing a more specific outline of the region by following “biogeographic” lines. Most often, they followed watershed borders, the highland divides where water decides to flow into one river or lake or the other. In some cases, however, such as the Southern Unit of Kettle Moraine State Forest in Wisconsin, which straddles two watersheds, the committee drew boundaries around reserves. Several committee members decline to call them boundaries at all, since they haven’t yet been, and perhaps shouldn’t be, defined at a fine level of detail.

A handful of such decisions came up when significant natural resources fell close to the boundary. The Kankakee River watershed was included, Levin points out, but the Iroquois River and other tributaries going well south of the Chicago region were not. On the other hand, the committee extended the new limits to include some sites that offered unique natural credentials, such as Jasper-Pulaski State Fish & Wildlife Area in Indiana and Kettle Moraine.

The expansion took its lead from the Green Infrastructure Vision, a Chicago Wilderness project aimed at mapping land and water resources that support regional biodiversity. The Green Infrastructure project’s success prompted a Chicago Wilderness committee to organize a series of workshops with planners, scientists, and representatives of member organizations, a process that informed the map expansion.

Chicago Wilderness hopes the change will encourage more regional collaboration. “Many members were located or did much of their work outside the old reserve,” says Dreher. “The official presence of the Chicago Wilderness structure will make available additional resources and mechanisms to help them protect biodiversity in their areas.” The newly included jurisdictions and congressional districts may also increase political support, provide access to new resources, and enhance the coalition’s national impact.

John Swanson of the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission is enthusiastic about expanded regional cooperation. A watershed management plan his agency recently completed dovetails with Chicago Wilderness goals, and Swanson feels that the expansion into more rural parts of Indiana “sends a great message to environmentally concerned citizens that Chicago Wilderness will be a resource for them.” The expansion has already bolstered efforts by newer groups on the region’s outer fringes, such as Friends of the Kankakee in Iroquois County.

The larger range also responds to the expanding urban-rural interface. As the metropolis moves ever outward, natural lands lying just beyond the suburban fringe will become increasingly imperiled. Incorporating them into the reserve now opens up opportunities for restoration efforts and other conservation work before sprawl is knocking on their door.