Editor’s Essay

New Innovation

My grandma frequently referred to “new innovations” when commenting on some new gadget or way of doing things. The pesky grammarians of my family liked to point out the redundancy of this phrase, since the concept “new” is already in the word “innovation.”

But Grandma’s redundancy makes me think. It seems to say that just when you think something’s new, don’t stop there. It says that even though you’ve just managed to shrink a room-sized computer down to a laptop, you can already be thinking about making it paper-thin. “New innovation” urges us toward yet a higher level.

Many people get a little uneasy with the idea of innovation. I must admit that I do. I’m usually the grump railing, “The old way was working just fine!” I’m the consummate late-adopter, trying to push everything — clothes, appliances, and especially fancy technology — to work as long as possible before I have to replace it. I get sad each time a modern steel-and-glass structure replaces a classic Victorian building. I don’t quite trust online banking.

When it comes to innovations in nature, people really get uneasy. After all, nature has been around forever. Nature is the template from which everything comets — our raw materials, our best ideas, our clean air and water. Rule number one is you don’t mess with Mother Nature.

As a culture, we haven’t exactly followed that rule. We’ve cut down the forests, plowed the prairies, installed roads and drain tiles, introduced invasive species and pollution, and suppressed natural fires. So it’s tempting to say that we should just leave what’s left of our natural lands alone.

The problem is that “leave it alone” didn’t work. Even inside our forest preserves, species started dying out. We needed new ideas to save them. Today, our preserves are benefiting from innovation that started more than 70 years ago, when students of nature began to see the need for restoration. They saw that all that human disruption reached inside the preserves as well, in more subtle but still highly destructive ways.

The founders of the forest preserves wrote of the need to restore them, but it took decades to develop the innovations that would work. (Even “hiking” for pleasure was something of a new idea back in 1908, when the Prairie Club started organizing excursions.)

It has taken intellectual innovation to save that which we thought to be timeless. We now know that without restoration, we’d be preserving a depleted and mostly dead shadow of nature. In unrestored preserves, our oaks have nearly stopped reproducing. Thankfully, by adapting our ideas, these oaks won’t be the last.

But we constantly need “new innovators.” Like a chess player, we need to be thinking ten moves ahead to face potentially game-changing shifts such as global climate change, new invasive species, and increased urbanization. We need innovators in all arenas, such as the villagers of Homer Glen, who recently passed a groundbreaking lighting ordinance that takes nature into account. Still more innovators may come from kids like those we profile in this issue, folks like eighth-grader Maeve Zolkowski (photo), who is looking for better ways to control invasive buckthorn.

Because it is the nature of things to change, innovation is an unavoidable and even crucial part of life. But it’s key to consider how we innovate. Let it be based in the most rooted and timeless of things. Let us take a page from nature, which constantly shifts, discards, and tries new things, but always draws upon a well that’s billions of years deep. The best way to ensure that our new ideas, technologies, and practices will serve us well is to stay grounded in that holistic sense of renewal. You can feel it in the breeze across a healthy spring prairie. As long as we innovate with that in our minds and hearts, we’ll have exciting new things on the horizon.