Fall 2001

Marian Byrnes:
Conscience of the Calumet

Photo: Arthur Melville Pearson

In 1979, Marian Byrnes found a notice in her mailbox that the Chicago Transit Authority planned to build a bus barn on the north half of Van Vlissingen Prairie, a 160-acre parcel located in the Lake Calumet region on Chicago’s far Southeast Side.

“When I moved to my house with the Van Vlissingen Prairie in my backyard, it was like a miracle to find a territory like that within the city limits – a large expanse of wetlands and open space of any kind of ecological value whatsoever, and so big that when you’re out there you don’t even know you’re in the city. With all kinds of birds – herons and egrets. And a big pond – about 11 acres. The neighborhood kids would go skating there Christmas morning.”

Byrnes attended the CTA public information meeting and discovered that there were several of her neighbors present with the same thought – no bus barn. Together, they formed the Committee to Protect the Prairie. So began a successful grassroots campaign to save their prairie, and the apprenticeship of Marian Byrnes in her efforts to save the larger Calumet region.

“About the time of our first campaign, Dr. James Landing of the University of Illinois-Chicago formed the Lake Calumet Study Committee, a coalition of regional environmental organizations dedicated to protecting wetlands throughout the Calumet region. I was the only local representative, the only “non-professional” invited to participate. I remember at one of the first meetings, I was asked to describe the Van Vlissingen Prairie, and I replied that it was filled with the most beautiful Queen Anne’s lace. I thought everyone was going to vomit. ‘That’s a Eurasian invasive!

Even today, the retired Chicago Public Schools teacher with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago confesses to not being an expert naturalist. “I love the big birds, especially great egrets. But I’m not a professional birder. I could be looking at a bird from a distance and not tell whether it is a Canada goose or a double-crested cormorant. I haven’t spent that much time to learn things like that because there’s been such a variety of other things to learn – primarily the contamination of the area and possible ways to address that contamination.”

In a region plagued by more than 150 years of wholesale industrial degradation, there is an overwhelming amount of information to learn. But according to Lynn Cunningham, president of the Southeast Chicago Development Commission, “Marian is incredibly self-taught. Today, I think she can run circles around most people about the science in the Calumet.”

Explains Byrnes, “I learned what I felt I had to learn to direct the work of protection and preservation sensibly. The “green” side – birds and plants and all – although certainly my primary interest, wasn’t the part that I had to direct because that wasn’t going to get the job done.”

The “job” for most of the past 20 years has been to battle a nonstop onslaught of proposals that would have eliminated the Calumet’s remaining wetlands and open spaces. Grassroots groups like the Committee to Protect the Prairie were springing up throughout the Calumet to fight this dump and that development. In 1985, realizing there was more strength in working together, Byrnes coalesced several local grassroots groups under the umbrella of CURE – Citizens United to Reclaim the Environment.

“Our first campaign was to defeat the proposal to place a landfill in Big Marsh, one of Chicago’s prime birding locations and Calumet’s second largest body of open water after Lake Calumet itself.” In 1989, CURE evolved into the Southeast Environmental Task Force, a coalition of 30 grassroots organizations that successfully opposed placement of a garbage incinerator on the former Wisconsin Steel site. From 1990 to 1992, Byrnes and dozens of local groups succeeded in defeating “the bomb,” the city’s proposed Lake Calumet airport. “Lake Calumet would have been filled in, the entire neighborhood of Hegewisch razed, and instead of birds, the region would have become a flyway for airplanes only.”

“She’s always been good in rallying people to the cause,” observes Lynn Cunningham. “People see her as a leader. She listens to them. When I’ve seen her in meetings being asked for opinions, she always says, ‘I have to get back to my people and check.’ That’s the mark of a leader who respects and understands her constituency.

Immature black-crowned night heron finds a home where nature and culture mix in the Calumet marshes.

Consequently,leaders outside the community, including Jack Darin, director of the Sierra Club Illinois Chapter, respect and listen to Byrnes. “Marian speaks with a certain moral authority as a long-time resident and as someone who has toiled in relative obscurity in one of the region’s most forgotten landscapes. That dedication commands a certain respect among regional leaders. But also, as a more or less average member of the community, she knows how to communicate to the local residents in a way that is meaningful to them.”

“Marian understands that she is a key bridge between community organizations and government agencies, foundations, environmental groups,” says Suzanne Malec, deputy commissioner for the Chicago Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and one of the principal shapers of the city’s Ecological Management Strategy for the Calumet. “She can speak both languages, and has done an amazingly good job making connections viable and sustained.”

Byrnes’ability to be a bridge has helped the image of the Calumet region progress from dumping ground and industrial wasteland to land of environmental and economic opportunity. At the instigation of Dr. James Landing, in 1993, the Calumet Ecological Park Association was established, its primary focus to petition Congress to conduct a feasibility study to designate the Calumet region a National Park Service (NPS) site. As the Association’s president, Marian eventually convinced then Congressional candidate Jerry Weller to sponsor the feasibility study legislation, which he did once elected.

In 1998, the National Park Service determined that the Calumet region was potentially suitable for designation as a National Heritage Area due to its natural, cultural and recreational resources. Less than the recommendation as a full-blown natural area that many had hoped for, nonetheless Marian believed that “The NPS study was critical, a turning point.”In May 2000, the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois announced a joint initiative to preserve 3,000 acres of Calumet open land for ecological purposes, and to develop 3,000 acres of brownfields for industrial use.

Byrnes, herself observed, “I think the most Jim Landing and I and others expected to do was to keep the Calumet open spaces protected in our lifetimes, and that eventually some government or group would come along that would understand about the necessity for their preservation and restoration. The city/state initiative is almost like icing on the cake.”

At the age of 75, her voice seldom rising above a scratchy sotto voce, Marian continues to advocate as relentlessly for the Calumet as she did the first time she helped save her backyard prairie. She attends an average of five Calumet-related meetings per week, taking the bus wherever she needs to go. She is the volunteer executive director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, and leads several of its “Good Neighbor Dialogues” with local businesses such as Ford Motor Company, Safety-Kleen, and Chicago Specialties, Inc. She is public affairs director for the Calumet Ecological Park Association, and a board member of the Chicago Recycling Coalition. Most recently, she was appointed by Mayor Daley and Governor Ryan to the Calumet Sustainable Growth Advisory Committee. Once again, she is the only local, non-professional member invited to participate. But this time, she knows her native from her nonnative species, and more.

“In our many campaigns, we have become too aware of all the other communities across the country that are fighting hazardous waste dumps and landfills.” she says. “So we cannot in good conscience just ship our garbage off to them. We have to develop the technologies and the will to deal with it locally. And for many years, we had to say ‘Not In My Back Yard’ to any kind of development just to be heard at all. And although I would fight development of the Van Vlissingen prairie to the last inch, we can’t be absolute NIMBYs anymore. We need to favor sensible economic development on brownfields, which don’t have much ecological value, because people in our region need the jobs, and manufacturing has to go somewhere. And it’s certainly much better that it go on brownfields than sprawling out into the greenfields of the suburbs and beyond.”

Thinking globally, acting locally, Marian Byrnes has become, as Lynn Cunningham well observes, “the environmental conscience of the Calumet.”

– Arthur Melville Pearson