[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED MAY 2001.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: FALL 1997.]

John Case: The Case for a Natural Areas Management Plan

By Debra Shore

Anyone who has roamed the woods and fields of DuPage County for nigh on seven decades knows full well that not all the changes on the land have been salutary. One such lifelong resident and roamer is John Case, who decided to do something about the evident decline in his county’s natural assets when he joined the Board of Commissioners in 1986.

Case, 67, is himself a member of a vanishing breed, the sole commissioner whose work has kept him rooted to the land. Born and raised on a dairy farm, he earned a degree in animal science from Iowa State University. Case now owns Case Farms — he and his son are cultivating 2,500 acres — and Agrinetics, Inc., a specialty seed business. "When I came on the Forest Preserve Board, I decided I would look around and see what our assets were," Case recalled, "and they were in pretty bad shape, not as I imagined they should be kept." The hardwood forest of Egermann Woods that Case remembered from his childhood wanderings had since been invaded by buckthorn and was fast becoming an uninviting, overgrown thicket. Where have all the wildflowers gone? Case wondered.

Guided by longtime ecologist Wayne Lampa, Case assisted in developing a Natural Areas Management Program (now known as NAMP) to restore 9,000 acres of the District’s highest quality wetlands, woods and prairies by the year 2003. (The District’s total holdings comprise approximately 23,000 acres.) With Case pressing for its adoption, in 1992 the Board allocated $11 million for natural areas management over the next 10 years. Plans include the expansion and restoration of a diverse marsh complex at Brewster Creek Wetland, part of Pratt’s Wayne Woods in western DuPage County, for instance. District employees have begun removing buried agricultural tiles to restore the original hydrology of the area. Wildlife biologists predict that a variety of migratory birds and waterfowl will be drawn to the 310-acre complex. Indeed, on a blustery March day at the ceremony to begin work on the $800,000 project, visitors saw a sandhill crane swoop in for a landing at the site.

After 11 years on the Forest Preserve Commission, Case is no stranger to controversy. During his term as president from 1992-94, he vetoed a Commission-approved measure to permit a sewer line through a Class 1 forest next to Black Patridge Woods in southern Downer’s Grove. "It was a very difficult site with boulders and unstable land," Case recalls, "and it took hundreds of years to develop that way. If you scar it, it will never come back. Some people think I’m a hero," he mused, reflecting on his tough decision. "I’m not. Right now, I’m trying to be effective protecting the management program."

During the Board’s last budget cycle, a small group of citizens opposed to restoration sought to remove some funding from the program, but Case and his fellow commissioners retained funding for NAMP. Now he’s working to encourage cooperative agreements with the Highway Department and various townships to remove buckthorn and honeysuckle from rights-of-way to prevent the spread of invasive species.

"It’s not a short-term program," Case says of NAMP. "It will take 25-to-50 years of fairly concentrated effort to maintain and bring back our better 9,000 acres that we’re working on. We have 15,000 acres of grassland and agricultural land that we have yet to determine what to do with. It’s difficult to re-create a prairie," he adds, "but if we don’t do something with our hardwood forests, they won’t regenerate themselves. In another 10 to 15 years our mature oaks will start to die off and there better be some young stock to replace them."