The Chicago River has been in the news quite a bit these last few months, and for a waterway long treated as a transportation corridor and sewage receptacle, its future is looking brighter — even as city officials, water quality experts, wastewater treatment engineers, and environmental activists admit there’s a long, long way to go. Today on public radio WBEZ’s local affairs radio show, Eight Forty-Eight, the Chicago River was a main topic of conversation between host Alison Cuddy and Henry Henderson of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Henderson was the first head of Chicago’s Department of Environment, an agency that ironically may come under the chopping block in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s recent plans to address major budget shortfalls. (A prospect which illustrates that even as progress can be make on one environmental front, two steps back can occur on another.)
Also see this article by the Chicago Tribune’s environmental reporter Michael Hawthorne for more details on the various plans for the river and the proposed locations for the boathouses — one of which is planned for a new park located near the mouth of Bubbly Creek, one of the historically most polluted sections of the river.
Such developments are well-timed for my SUST 220 Water class this semester at Roosevelt, since we’re planning a canoe trip on the North Branch of the Chicago River from Goose Island to Wolf Point on October 8th with Friends of the Chicago River. Expect a report on that urban nature adventure!
Every semester I take my Roosevelt University undergraduate students on field trips — hands-on learning experiences that allow us to put some of the academic ideas we’ve studied into practice, work together in teams, and create a sense of community. That’s especially important in online classes, where virtual interaction is intense and sustained, but face to face action is rare or nonexistent.
This fall at RU’s Schaumburg Campus, my Sustainability Studies 220 Water course’s hybrid format (a combination of occasional Saturday sessions plus weekly online interaction) is ideal for scheduling field trips to likely sites of interest. Normally I would wait until one-third of the way through the semester before venturing on a trip with a group of students — but since SUST 220 had a long Saturday campus session to kick off the semester and early September is usually a good time to be outside in the Chicago area, we decided to get right to it.
Busse Woods (M. Bryson)
So after two hours of morning lecture and discussion on September 10th and meeting each other for the first time, my students and I enjoyed a picnic lunch in the campus courtyard and then headed over to Busse Woods, one of the largest holdings within the Cook County Forest Preserve system (at 3,700 acres), for field-based introduction to water quality sampling techniques.
Busse Woods, aka the Ned Brown Forest Preserve, is a massive and multi-functional piece of green infrastructure in the northwest suburban region, a culturally significant recreation site for the many communities it serves, and a fascinatingly complex mosaic of northern Illinois ecosystems — riverine, woodland, wetland, and prairie. The preserve directly borders the suburbs of Rolling Meadows, Arlington Heights, Elk Grove Village, and Schaumburg; but within a short drive or even bike ride are numerous other communities, including Palatine, Prospect Heights, Mount Prospect, Des Plaines, Wood Dale, Itasca, Roselle, Hoffman Estates, and Inverness. People in these suburbs and beyond converge on Busse Woods year-round to boat, bike, hike, rollerblade, picnic, fly model airplanes, visit the elk herd (yes, elk!), and more, making it one of the most-heavily used forest preserve units in Cook County. Fortunately, the preserve’s sheer size and diverse offerings of groves, parking areas, meadows, and trails enable it to accommodate all this activity and still provide much needed open space for the region and the chance of someone to roam within an extensive natural area. The Cook County Forest Preserve and the Friends of Busse Woods actively work on conservation and restoration projects in the preserve.
Just to the southeast is O’Hare Airport, which at approximately the same size as the preserve represents a completely different way of using land — the concrete and asphalt “hardscape” of O’Hare strongly contrasts with the verdant landscape of Busse Woods. Besides recreational opportunities and open space for its human visitors, Busse harbors a significant amount of regional biodiversity:
Busse Forest Nature Preserve Topo Map (USGS)
the 440-acre Busse Forest Nature Preserve, located in the northeast section of the Forest Preserve unit, is not only a state-designed nature preserve (the third one so dedicated, in 1965) but also a National Natural Landmark. This protected area harbors bottomland flatwoods, extensive wetlands, and upland forest, some of which are in the process of restoration.
Salt Creek, looking south from the northern edge of Busse Woods Forest Preserve (M. Bryson)
Busse Woods is home to a couple of significant water features including Salt Creek, which was the first stop on our trip. After hiking through a forest-and-wetland path along the northern border of the woods, we came to the Golf Road overpass of Salt Creek, where the river south into the preserve before it empties into Busse Lake, a sprawling artificial reservoir created by a dam structure at the south end of the preserve. Using a couple of different water quality field testing kits, we sampled the creek and measured a range of physical/chemical water quality indicators: chlorine, copper, dissolved oxygen, hardness, iron, nitrate, pH (acidity), phosphate, temperature, turbidity, and total coliform bacteria. In doing so, we not only took the ecological pulse of Salt Creek at one point in time, we also learned how to use our sampling equipment, compared test results from different measurement procedures, assessed the possible sources of error in our data collection, and analyzed the impact of the surrounding landscape upon the water quality of Salt Creek.
The entire Busse Woods preserve is a significant green space within the Salt Creek Upper Watershed, as it receives stormwater run-off from the eastern half of Schaumburg via the main channel of Salt Creek as well as the Creek’s West Branch. That tributary is important for another reason, as it flows through the heart of Schaumburg before passing around the periphery of the John Egan Wastewater Treatment plant of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.
Satellite view of Schaumburg's east side, showing the West Branch of Salt Creek and the John Egan Treatment Plant at lower right (Google Earth)
The Egan plant’s treated effluent is piped into the West Branch, which then flows east under I-290 to empty into the South Pool of Busse Reservoir. Partly for that reason, we chose to sample water from the shoreline of the South Pool as our second sampling site of the day. (Interestingly, the data from that site were quite comparable to those we gathered much farther north at Salt Creek.)
In this sense, then, Busse Lake is a giant detention pond for stormwater run-off from several suburban communities (either directly or via Salt Creek) and treated wastewater from Schaumburg. As such, it is a flood control structure for Salt Creek, which runs south/southeast out of the preserve and drains several western suburban communities before joining the Des Plaines River near Brookfield.
The south pool of Busse Lake (M. Bryson)
Effective water retention in Busse Lake means reduced flooding in downstream communities, though the persistence of flooding in the western suburbs means the reservoir as currently configured is only a partial solution. Nevertheless, the larger forest preserve complex of wetlands, prairies, and woodlands — of which the lake is but a part — act like a giant sponge for the surrounding towns and villages, absorbing precipitation and run-off from a wide area and releasing it slowly to the atmosphere and to Salt Creek.
Map of Salt Creek's watershed (Salt Creek Watershed Network)
For the first time in decades, people in Los Angeles this month were able to paddle along the much-maligned and concrete-encased Los Angeles River without breaking the law. It was, if you’ll pardon the pun, a watershed moment — both for the river, which is making a comeback in the eyes of the general public as well as elected officials; and for the greater Los Angeles community, which is slowly coming to grips with the fact that it has a potentially dynamic natural resource threading its way through neighborhoods that are starved for high quality green space.
The LA River in 2010 (photo by Mark Boster of the LA Times)
Even the U.S. Corps of Engineers, the same outfit that tamed the flood-prone river in the 1930s by building levees and a concrete channel for the formerly wild LA river, is coming on board. This past month’s float down the Sepulveda Basin section of the river included civic officials as well as Mark Toy, District Commander of the Corps of Engineers. As reported by the LA Timeson 9 August 2011,
Los Angeles is urban territory, and this 1.5-mile trip is arrow-straight, flanked by the San Diego and Ventura freeways and strewn with discarded bicycles, shopping carts, trash and, occasionally, the carcasses of rodents.
It is also home for 212 species of birds, including yellow warblers, hooded orioles and the federally endangered least Bell’s vireo.
In July, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers District Commander Col. Mark Toy issued the license allowing the Los Angeles Conservation Corps to operate the program along a soft-bottom stretch of the river between Balboa and Burbank boulevards, about 17 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.
On Monday, his participation in the program’s inaugural “ceremonial paddle” was viewed by environmentalists as an important juncture in the history of the river that was tamed and polluted in the 1930s by the corps’ concrete walls and 12,000 storm drains.
“For more than a century, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has built walls between people and their rivers here in Los Angeles and nationwide,” said David Beckman of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “So to have the corps’ district commander metaphorically jumping over that wall and into a boat is symbolic and potentially very important.”
Toy shrugged off such accolades, saying, “This is a team effort, and I’m proud to be a part of it. What we learn from the program this year will help shape the future of the river.”
The recent resurgence of interest in the LA River, spurred by river enthusiasts and environmental advocates, exemplifies an important axiom in relation to urban streams. If people start using them for recreation, they suddenly become more important, no matter their state of abuse or degradation. And such usage, in turn, spurs efforts to clean up the rivers in order to benefit from their important functions as green corridors.
This has long been the case with the Chicago River, which has experienced a remarkable resurgence in recent decades since the formation of the non-profit river advocacy group Friends of the Chicago River in the 1970s. Now canoe races are held along various stretches of the river, schoolchildren and adults come to the water to learn about aquatic ecology and urban conservation, and the city has poured millions of dollars into building attractive riverwalks and improving water quality — all testament to the fact that the river is a cultural amenity and economic resource.
Yet even Chicago has a long, long way to go before its channelized, reversed, and polluted waterways regain their ecological health and biodiversity. The mere name of the transformed south branch of the river — the Sanitary and Ship Canal — indicates its primary identity as a transportation conduit and sewage conveyance channel, rather than as a living river. But the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s recent decision to plan for disinfecting the treated wastewater it releases into the Chicago Area Waterway System (CAWS) is a landmark step in working toward the river’s ecological improvement and reshaping that identity which dates from the late 19th century.
It looks like LA, with the Corps of Engineers’ recent foray on the river and the building public interest in exploring its hidden reaches, is taking initial steps down a similar path. The ultimate goal: to treat urban rivers like living ecosystems, which they are, instead of mere tools for flood control, shipping, and wastewater management.
Late every August, my family performs a sacred ritual. We get up early, eat a stout breakfast, then drive east from our urban homestead in Joliet out into the countryside. Our destination: Peotone, Illinois — home of the utterly splendid Will County Fair.
From the vantage point of our little bungalow on Joliet’s near-West Side, just getting to the fair is half the fun. We always cut through downtown Joliet, then take country roads out toward Peotone. Minutes after threading our way through the most urbanized part of Will County, we’re whizzing by fields and farms on the outskirts of the Big City. We slow down, open the car windows, breath in the fresh country air, and take in the view of a huge expanse of blue sky.
Though big as the world to a child’s eye, the Will County Fair is a small and wholesome event that looks and feels like a journey back in time. It features all the classic Midwestern fair elements — deep-fried elephant ears, carnival rides, a baby contest, live music, a rodeo, tractor pulls, magic shows, a demolition derby — without the aggressively seedy atmosphere created by over-the-hill 80s rock bands or, worse yet, grandstanding politicians.
In the Swine Barn — that’s some pig!
Best of all, Will County’s fair puts agriculture front and center, as it should be. From the fairground’s main parking lot, you can buy your admission ticket and walk right into the Swine Barn — an arrangement both excellent and deeply symbolic.
The Will County Fair is where city kids like our two girls can get up close and personal with goats, chickens, dairy cows, beef cattle, hogs, sheep, horses, ponies, turkeys, geese, and pigeons — wonderful livestock all.
Visiting with the goats
Airy old barns dominate half the fairgrounds, and we strolled through the long corridors of stalls for several hours to see the animals, scratch their heads, thump their bellies, take in the pleasantly pungent smell of manure, and chat with the farm kids who tend these beasts with skill and devotion. This is 100% fun, and the type of education you can’t get in school or from a book. A few years ago our then 40-pound daughter Lily got to hop into a farmer’s hog pen to help herd several 250-pound swine through the barn to get their baths. She slapped those hogs on their muscled rumps and barked out “Away, pig!” — and by golly, they moved.
And the food? Boy, oh boy. We ate burgers and fries from the 4-H stand run by an enthusiastic squadron of teenagers, portabella mushroom sandwiches and marinated veggies expertly grilled by Farmer John Moore of Wind N’ Oaks Farm, ice cream from the Peotone United Methodist Church ladies, and some sinfully delicious corn dogs.
I wonder how many city folk head to Peotone each year to connect with Will County’s still-thriving but increasingly pressured rural heritage. Year after year our civic leaders race to pave over our fertile farmland according to the economic gospel of “development.” From the vantage point of the county fairgrounds, though, the foolhardy and state-sanctioned land grab called the Peotone Airport looms as an exquisitely ironic example of misguided priorities.
Maybe more of our urban and suburban citizens, and especially our politicians, should spend some quality time in the livestock barns visiting with farmers and the 4-H kids who live and work on our county’s farms. It might provide some much-needed perspective on balancing economic development with the preservation of rural culture.
The only bad thing about the 108th Will County Fair? Having to leave. We’re already looking forward to next year.
A print version of this essay was published on Sunday, 4 September 2011, as “County Fair a Crucial Connection,” my monthly op-ed piece in the Joliet Herald-News, p26. Also see the online version here.
Environmental reporter Michael Hawthorne of the Chicago Tribune has published a series of excellent articles this month about the state of water quality in Chicago and the suburbs. These detail the detected presence of lead, chromium, hormones, vinyl chloride, herbicides, antibiotics, and other contaminants — some of which are regulated by the EPA, others of which are not. He also reports on the latest developments in the Crestwood IL water scandal in which village officials knowingly laced their Lake Michigan municipal water supply with vinyl chloride-polluted well water for over 20 years.
This morning in Joliet while biking to the city’s public library, I had the 2nd urban fox sighting of my life. The first dated back to my years in Chicago, when once in the early 2000s while driving home after teaching a night class, I saw a red fox (Vulpes vulpes) cross Lawrence Avenue, right along the Chicago River’s North Branch.
Today I was biking on a quiet side street, listening to the gentle throb of the early August cicadas, when a very slight rustling on my right caught my ear.
Photo by Dan Walters (AKA Images)
I kept pedaling but turned, and saw a beautiful adult red fox lope through a front yard, then turn down a grassy alley. I never made eye contact, as the encounter lasted all of five seconds — but got a good look at this splendid creature’s color and form, especially the distinctive tail.
It’s good to know that there’s at least one fox on the prowl on Joliet’s West Side. (For you locals, this was on Mason Avenue, between Midland and Larkin Avenues — an area of ranch houses and ample, though not huge, yards.) For more reflections on the presence of foxes in urban environments, see this 2009 article from Chicago Wilderness.
The announcement that the Forest Preserve District of Will County has begun work on developing a short trail through Teale Woods, a small nature preserve near where I live in Joliet, Illinois, got me thinking about this little essay I wrote about that patch of urban nature for the Joliet Herald-News back in March of 2010.
The advent of spring last week inspired me to visit one of my favorite quiet corners of Joliet — a place where time slows down and wild nature flourishes amidst the paved-over, gritty landscape of concrete, traffic noise, and hustling people.
My destination was Teale Woods, a 15-acre woodland along Theodore and Center Streets on Joliet’s near northwest side. With only one low-profile sign marking its existence as Will County Forest Preserve property, Teale Woods is still undeveloped and without official public access; but a couple of informal trails cut through the woodland and afford a quiet route away from the tumult of Theodore Street’s traffic.
This humble urban sanctuary is emblematic of wild spaces that exist, and sometimes flourish, against all odds within the built landscape of our cities. Homes, businesses, and busy roads are only steps away. The thoughtless litter of humans, newly revealed from the recent melting of winter’s snow cover, distracts the eye and disturbs the spirit.
Nevertheless, these scrappy, imperfect woods provide a natural haven where one can hear the plaintive tones of a white-throated sparrow and study the rugged form of a downed oak.
I suspect very few people in Joliet today know this place’s namesake, Edwin Way Teale. Born in 1899 in Joliet, Teale’s love of and fascination with nature were stoked in his formative years during visits to his grandparents’ farm near the Indiana Dunes. He later became one of the most celebrated American nature writers and photographers of the 20th century.
One of Teale’s most admired books was North with the Spring (1951), which chronicles a 17,000-mile journey following and celebrating the season’s arrival throughout the eastern US. While Teale visits several famous landscapes along the way, he also describes many virtually unknown spots of no particular significance — except that they provided a place for him to encounter a lively insect, find a native wildflower, or admire an old tree.
I like to think that Teale Woods in Joliet — about as low-profile and neglected as a nature preserve can get — is been one of those places he would’ve cherished.
The next time I visit the woods, I’ll pause a moment to reflect on Edwin Way Teale’s immeasurable impact upon Americans’ growing interest in preserving wild nature, even in cities. Then, I’ll grab my work gloves and trash bag, and get down to work picking up some litter.
This essay was published as “Teale Woods Hidden Joliet Gem” on 25 March 2010 in the Joliet Herald-News, p20. A few month’s after the article’s appearance, the Will County Forest Preserve District held public hearings on planned future developments of Teale Woods. The WCFPD plans to start restoring the woodland in 2011.
Ever since last April’s elections, I’ve been waiting for some blockbuster news to come out of City Hall in downtown Joliet. Now it’s late July, and though the outside temperature has been in the 90s, things are mighty cool in the city’s governmental chambers. So cool, in fact, one might think all’s well in the land of casinos, racetracks, and intermodal shipping container transfer centers.
But this deafening silence from Joliet’s leadership worries me a tad. I can’t help but wonder what we’ve been doing about that teensy little $27 million budget deficit projection for 2012.
The old Joliet Prison, shuttered since 2002 (photo courtesy of Joliet Herald-News)
There’s only one little hitch: raising the tens of millions necessary to secure and restore the monumental but crumbling limestone structure. By comparison, breaking out of jail is child’s play.
Again, it’s been almost four months since the April election. Our fiscal clock is ticking very loudly. Where is the budget crisis mitigation plan from our City Council? What is Mayor Giarrante doing to lead this critical effort?
I have a couple of friendly suggestions for City Manager Tom Thanas, whose job surely must be one of the most stressful in Will County. First, reassign the brilliant technocrat who wrote that blockbuster EPA wastewater grant to plugging the leaks in the city’s budget, which surely could use some re-engineering.
Secondly, get in touch with Senator Wilhelmi and see if you can hold a special budget meeting in the old Joliet Prison, where the peeling paint, rusting cell bars, and weed-filled exercise yards are evocative symbols of neglect and decay — and a grim foreshadowing of the city’s future if we cannot put our fiscal house in order.
Perhaps such a setting will impart the proper sense of seriousness and urgency the situation demands. And if some of Joliet’s well-compensated police officers could patrol the grounds to make sure that no Councilman or Councilwoman escapes until an initial plan is hammered out, all the better.
A few weeks ago marked the summer solstice, and I venture the following exhortation as we relish (or endure) this season of heat and long days.
We need to get out of our cars and get back on our bikes. Few things you do this summer will be better for your mind, body, and spirit.
Whether you’re a twenty-something or a senior, bikes are low-impact exercise machines that folks of all ages can use safely and pleasurably. My five-foot-tall arthritic Grandma Dorothy, bless her departed soul, rode a three-wheeler well into her seventies. And my spry 71-year-old father just got out his 1950s-era English road bike — the same one he rode through Joliet as a teenager — and started cruising again. Dad, I salute you!
Don’t have a bike? Just get one. Try a garage sale, where bikes abound; or even a neighbor’s garage, where I once scored a dusty vintage Schwinn Varsity ten-speed for fifty bucks. I’ve already put hundreds of miles on this classic and fully expect to be riding it for the next thirty years.
Feeling cheap? In case you haven’t noticed, gasoline is no bargain. For the price of a few fill-ups, you can get a very good bike at a local establishment and soon recoup your investment hand over handlebar. After that, you’re saving money every time you ride.
Old bike need a tune-up beyond oiling the chain and inflating the tires? If you’re not up to doing it yourself, take it to your local repair shop, get the job done right, and feed our hometown economy rather than the multinational oil production/pollution complex. (Yes, I’m liberal, but I’m also patriotic.)
Beyond these undeniably compelling reasons to get on your bike is something intangible but no less important: the experience of riding.
On a bike, life is palpably different. You feel the wind and sun. You breathe fresh air instead of recycled, air conditioned exhaust. Out of necessity, you pay attention to your surroundings. You use your muscles — remember them? — and challenge yourself physically. You glide by queued-up cars and see envious glances from the imprisoned drones therein.
On a bike you discover new ways to travel to your favorite places — back streets and bike paths where car traffic is lighter and life moves more slowly. You say hello to people working in their yards or to kids playing on the sidewalk, and in return get a smile or a friendly wave. In the process you start to see your community in a much different way — and, I would humbly suggest, a much better way.
Dear readers, I therefore beseech thee: get on your bikes! If you do, be sure to check back with me at the autumnal equinox and let me know how your summer went.
The essay, one of my monthly op-ed pieces for the Joliet Herald-News, was originally published as “See Joliet, Will County by Bicycle” on 23 June 2011.
