Meet Your Neighbors

Joel Rosario:
Parable of a Weed-Fighter

Joel Rosario fights weeds. He cuts buckthorn, pulls garlic mustard, and assists on controlled burns to keep them in check. He's learned how to battle such invasive plant species working for the Forest Preserve District of Cook County over the last eight years. But he's been doing battle with himself for even longer.

Rosario grew up in Humboldt Park, a challenging neighborhood even for a preacher's kid. He followed his dad's advice and didn't get into drugs or gangs. But at age 13, things started to go wrong. "There were weeds in me, like my anger," Rosario recounts. "It distanced me from my mom and dad, and my siblings, so I dropped out of school at 14."

Rosario bounced around for a few years, occasionally disregarding the law. Then a faith-based organization dragged him back to school to get a diploma. He started college, but didn't finish.

It seemed that his future was in retail, until he went to work for the Forest Preserve District in April 2000 as an entry-level woodsman. John McCabe, now training coordinator for the district, befriended Rosario and answered his countless questions about restoration work. After a district restructuring in 2002, Rosario secured a new job as resource technician. "Each day is different," he says. "I get my tools ready, and they tell me where to go. Today we're removing dead trees along the trails at Indian Road Woods."

As he labored early on, doing mostly habitat restoration work, a childhood memory kept tugging at Rosario's heart. "Scattering seeds is a good thing," he says, "but if they land among weeds, and you never take the weeds out, they overcome the good things and choke them out. Jesus said this in a parable. I started comparing my life to these forest lands and prairies."

The amount of work it takes to restore natural areas is staggering, says Rosario. And, he adds, it was just as hard to get rid of the weeds in his own life. But one gets the sense from Rosario's gentle nature and boyish enthusiasm that he's gone a good way toward self-restoration. Now he wants others to experience the parable.

"The forest preserves have no gates," Rosario says. "That was the original vision: everyone can enjoy the forest preserves at no charge. But to inner-city kids, it's just grass. Or many actually fear the forests. I say, what about the bullets in the inner city? If they experienced nature, they could reflect on their lives like I did."

Inner-city kids don't see gangs as wrong--as weeds--because their parents are working two jobs and the gang has become their family, says Rosario. For some kids, their weeds are friends who like to hang out all day and play video games and basketball. Their grades start to fall, and they flunk out. "I want to reach these kids who have hit the wall," he says. To do it, he'll take kids to the preserves to forget the neighborhood and see what invasive plants have done to the forests and prairies. "I can show these kids buckthorn 14 to 16 inches in diameter, thickets that are all buckthorn where there used to be wildflowers."

Rosario believes this work can also benefit the homeless. "They would see why they are constantly in this position. Self-pity is a weed. It dominates your life. It paralyzes you."

Rosario is working to apply his philosophy by developing a nonprofit program, aptly called "Weeds." McCabe thinks the program will be a good fit with the district's nature centers and volunteer programs. While the program is still in its infancy, Rosario is convinced it has promise: "Even five minutes with a preserve steward," he says, "would give teens a sense that they can do something of significance."

— Alison Carney Brown

Want to help the Weeds program grow? E-mail myweeds@gmail.com.