Living Locally
In my view, it is indeed a bit of
a stretch to make the connection between farming and the
conservation of biological diversity. Prior to the steel
moldboard plow, farmers had a terrible time trying to
'break' the rich prairie turf. The cast iron plows settlers
brought with them from the east were designed for the
thin New England soils. Here in the Midwest, the rich
prairie soil, formed over thousands of years by the deep
root systems of tall grasses and wildflowers, clung to
the plow blades. In the mid 1830s, John Deere, a blacksmith
in Grand Detour, Illinois, and John Lane, a blacksmith
in Yankee Settlement in Homer Township, independently
used steel from broken saw blades to make a plow that
could break through the prairie. Thus was the once unimaginably
vast ecosystem of the tallgrass prairie swiftly reduced
to mere remnants in the space of a generation.
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Photo by John Weinstein, © 2002 The Field
Museum.
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Of course, we need to eat. Agriculture,
at least in a primitive form, has been with us nearly
as long as the prairies. Not only is eating a necessity,
it affords us some of our greatest pleasures. It knits
us together as families, as social beings. That being
the case, is there a way for farming and nature to support
each other?
There are, in fact, some signs of
hope. As our article, Good Food
from Happy Soil, shows, the Chicago region is home
to a fledgling food movement seeking to promote regional
growers using agricultural practices that are better
for the land and for people. Moreover, one of the principal
reasons to oppose the construction of a proposed new
airport in Will County is that it could occupy
as much as 24,000 acres of prime farm land — land
currently devoted to corn and soybeans, for the most
part, but that might be converted to farms producing
vegetables right near our burgeoning metropolis. If
the airport is built, we will never reclaim that land
— for farming or nature. Ron Engel captures these
issues elegantly in his essay, The
Vision of Ecological Democracy.
This is the challenge of Chicago
Wilderness. To have rich nature and a robust economy,
to have places that people want to live and the food,
jobs, education, and transportation to sustain those
lives, we in this region will need to preserve both
farms and natural areas. We will need to work toward
large macrocomplexes of cultivated lands and natural
lands, both contributing essential ingredients to a
healthy sustainable future.
The premise, the grand hope, of
Chicago Wilderness is that we can do things differently
here, that we can imagine a society bound by a common
vision and working for the common good. For no matter
what our religious beliefs or political views, no matter
what our income or race, we are all neighbors occupying
this small, fertile crescent of land on the southwestern
rim of a great lake. We share habitat and we are, collectively
and individually, responsible for keeping it healthy.
The shining promise of Chicago Wilderness is that it
charts a way to a sustainable future wherein we become
caring neighbors, stewards of the earth, kin to all
creatures.
With this issue, Chicago WILDERNESS
begins its sixth year of publication.
We hear from many of our readers how
much they love this magazine, its beautiful photography,
its guide to wonderful places, its thought-provoking articles.
Won't you please help us become a powerful voice for nature
in this region by giving gift
subscriptions this holiday season?
