Spring 1998

[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 2002.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: SPRING 1998.]

Prairie Passage
Excerpts from Prairie Passage: The Illinois and Michigan Canal Corridor

By Tony Hiss

Across the country, hundreds of towns, cities and regions are trying to discover if it's possible to renew America by settling down and appreciating it.

In northern Illinois and wherever it's been taking root, this process has to do with seeing afresh the places where we live and work. It leads to a new kind of positive bookkeeping for places, as people set up and get the feeling for an accounting system that turns our customary thinking about assets upside down and inside out.

As the photographs in Prairie Passage so meticulously and elegantly point out, time, as it flows through communities over decades and centuries, is not always an enemy and a thief, undermining worth, gnawing through value. Just as often, time's a ripener and repairer, a force that can heal, scour, comfort, burnish, and recombine, sometimes restoring value, sometimes generating it. It's the sense of time, the sustainer, that suffuses the activities and accomplishments this book records. The book's recurring central image — the blue thread that dews its pages together — is its views of a narrow, shallow, long-abandoned and now rediscovered 19th-century canal, the Illinois & Michigan, an alteration to the landscape that an ordinary listing of assets might ignore or discard altogether, seeing it only as a liability, ill-used by time.

....The Illinois & Michigan Canal is one of those artifacts — planners call them "lovable objects" — that, even if they had no further story to tell, people can almost instinctively feel affectionate and protective toward, thanks to their size and shape and workmanship.

The integrity of such objects is not diminished by mere dilapidation. And this particular skinny old canal has yet another level of potential resonance, because, in landscape terms, it's a lovable object nested within the kind of place where awe can linger long, long after great natural events. An immense natural force shaped the larger area around the canal — what's there now is the remnant of a raging, icy torrent once as potent as Niagara or the Amazon and known to geologists as the Chicago Outlet Valley. Another name for it is the Prairie Passage.

Beginning in the late 19th century, Americans who recognized the value of superb wilderness landscapes campaigned to have the naturalness of those special places protected as public parks. In the 125 years since Yellowstone was set aside as America's (and the world's) first national park, we have both fulfilled and outgrown that original dream.

We have created the world's most extensive system of natural sanctuaries, and from a planetary point of view are, despite lapses, within striking distance of setting aside enough land to permit the healing of the earth's ecosystems and watersheds. But along the way we have, without quite defining it, been creating a second legacy, a parallel network of lived-in landscapes. These inhabited and semi-inhabited places take up at least as much room as the wild places that remain. And in the aggregate, they have as much deep meaning for us as the wild lands beyond them.

The old buy-it-up-and-set-it-aside national parks solution is irrelevant to this new situation, because humanized landscapes present a separate kind of complexity. This doesn't just mean that, unlike protected wilderness parks, they're mostly made up of private property. The truly complicating factor is that, in America's new special places, much of the private property has sometimes rapidly and sometimes gradually taken on community-sustaining functions that don't appear on title deeds — with the result that it now benefits entire communities as much as it does the owners of the moment. The "takings" clause of the United States Constitution properly guarantees that no private property may be expropriated for public purposes unless the owners receive full value for what they're giving up.

But, because the situation hadn't yet presented itself in the 18th century, the Constitution doesn't incorporate a "givings" clause, that sets up a mechanism for identifying, working with, and further enhancing the unvoiced public value that private property often begins to accumulate in special places.

The idea that "public rights" can adhere to privately-owned land, as Charles E. Little, America's leading environmental writer on public landscapes, has pointed out, was first voiced by one of humanity's greatest poets; it appeared in print in 1810, in a short guidebook to the English Lake District written by William Wordsworth. The consummate beauty of that area, Wordsworth wrote, the totality created and sustained by its hills, ponds, villages, farms and woods, spoke so feelingly to every succeeding generation of the English people, it had come to constitute "a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to see and a heart to enjoy."

Fifty years ago, just after the Second World War, the English set up their own national park system as a way of celebrating the peace, and modeled it on the Wordsworthian, or "green-line," approach, as it's more usually called. This means calling a park into being by taking a map and drawing a green line around the outermost limits of a special place. It's an act that's both imaginary and real — imaginary, because as far as ownership is concerned it's exactly as it was, both inside the line and out; real, because now the place has public standing. In the special place now officially treasured as the Lake District National Park, for instance, national and local government agencies own almost no land at all.

A quarter of the land is in the hands of a much-admired, scholarly, and non-profit group of museum and parks administrators called the National Trust, and the other three-quarters is privately held. The government, whose role has been strictly limited by careful design, protects the national interest in the Lake District by championing its continuity, so that changes when they come (as of course they must) can be absorbed without compromising any of the recreational, historic, ecological, and scenic qualities that have already rewarded so many eyes and hearts.

Campaigning to bring the qualities of a special place into sharper focus is usually quiet work that's underfunded. The one ground rule is that nobody can force anybody to do anything. Which sounds like saying that it works by consensus, but that's a grudging word, often only a synonym for a truce. Whereas this process can only really be said to exist whenever or wherever or for as long as people are acting in harmony.

....The Chicago Outlet Valley was the first sliver of America to take on the risk of re-evaluating itself at this scale. It also became the first American special place to be nationally recognized for attacking problems by burnishing specialness: Under unprecedented legislation passed in 1984 by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by a Republican president, the entire Valley became the country's first "National Heritage Corridor." With this official federal designation, the Valley became a uniquely American green-line park. Valley land, as in English green-line parks, remains, and will never cease to be, predominantly privately owned. The American law acknowledges, as English laws do, that because the Valley is a special place, public rights have become attached to its private property.

But in the National Heritage Corridor, the national government has not taken on the mission of maintaining the cohesiveness of these public rights; it instead sets up an arena in which volunteers — citizens, businesses, non-profit groups, foundations and even agencies within local and state governments — are encouraged to step forward to champion the public interest.

Excerpts from essay by Tony Hiss reprinted by permission, Canal Corridor Association. Photographs by Edward Ranney. Prairie Passage: The Illinois and Michigan Canal Corridor is available at fine bookstores throughout the region or directly from the University of Illinois Press at (800) 545-4703. Copyright 1998 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.