Editor’s Essay

A Whole Future

Anyone who’s heard a pack of coyotes yipping knows it immediately: that is a barbaric yawp, in the best sense. In Chicago Wilderness, people sometimes hear coyotes calling exuberantly to a passing fire truck siren. To stewards of natural areas, that’s the sound of wholeness. Even in the midst of this metropolis, a coyote breathes a wildness and life into the land that it didn’t have before.

A big part of it, at least for habitat stewards, is that coyotes help balance the ecosystem. Being predators, and moderately large ones at that, coyotes throw around some weight in the Chicago ecosystem machine. Species that were overabundant return to natural levels, and the biological diversity increases.

Yet coyotes do all this while staying mostly invisible to us, moving along the fringes of society. Last winter, I happened to look up from driving and saw a coyote trot across a railroad bridge over Peterson Avenue and into Rosehill Cemetery. Then it vanished into a gust of blowing snow.

Two hundred years ago, the Chicago region hosted a suite of large animals that mostly no longer live here. To the ecosystem, that was only yesterday. Those giant oak trees you can’t fit your arms around? They were already mature trees when cougars and bison roamed the land. Our prairies and woods also held elk, bear, cougar, bobcat, and wolf. To see a coyote is to glimpse a living part of an ancient ecosystem — still holding on.

The natural land remembers these lost parts. Ecosystems have changed, of course, yet they have complexity we’re only beginning to understand. Research agencies such as the Illinois Natural History Survey are learning their secrets.

At Lake County’s BioBlitz this past June, scientists peeled back the green cover of Middlefork Savanna to reveal 1,098 species, from tiny aquatic invertebrates to large, charismatic mammals. This is the kind of wholeness that coyotes help foster, the kind of whole natural world that many of us want to pass on to our kids. It’s an amazing world full of critters and creepy-crawlies such as the incredible spider on our cover.

As Craig Vetter details in his provocative story, several lost parts — wolves, cougars, bobcats — are wandering back of their own accord. It remains to be seen how they may be able to fit into this metropolitan wilderness. Biologists don’t expect breeding populations of cougars and wolves to establish here anytime soon. But they at least pass through — and we feel a certain excitement. One wonders how many of the land’s natural processes we can preserve, so that it will be as resilient as possible. How well, we ask, can we make it function? We have to do it in a way that’s compatible with our modern society, but just how whole can our nature become?

A Big November

This November will be a big month for Chicago Wilderness, and we hope you’ll join us in celebrating. On November 11, Chicago Wilderness will hold its annual benefit dinner in a new and highly appropriate venue: The Field Museum of Natural History. Celebrating the connection between children and nature and the nation-sweeping Leave No Child Inside effort, the event will honor special guests Mayor and Mrs. Daley for their work on green initiatives and the well being of children.

And on the evening of November 13, renowned conservation biologist Dr. Thomas Lovejoy will speak at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Lovejoy, who coined the term “biological diversity” and founded the public television series Nature, will discuss the impact of climate change on biodiversity. The event is open to the public and free of charge. Find details in our calendar.