Winter 1998

[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED AUGUST 2001.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: WINTER 1998.]

Nature's Metropolis and Indiana
By Lee Botts

Have faith, I say when I give directions to first-time visitors from Chicago. Just keep coming past the steel mills and tank farms and haze and smells and you will not believe what you see when you get here.

I now live in the Indiana dunes, where my guests are always astounded by the view. From my house we look over a lovely marsh and sand dunes to Lake Michigan, and at the steel mills in both directions down the beach. Smog permitting, the Chicago skyline can be seen across the lake. They marvel at how such different landscapes can truly thrive side by side.

But they do. Faith in improbable futures has always been a key to destiny in the Chicago region. To me, survival of world-class biodiversity in the midst of industry and other urban development is the most interesting feature of the whole region, especially on the Indiana shoreline of Lake Michigan.

With the steel mills, oil refineries, harbors, and residential communities, there is also the Clark and Pine Nature Preserve, the Hoosier Prairie, a growing number of natural areas being protected and restored by industries along the Grand Calumet River — plus the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and the Indiana Dunes State Park. Too many people think of this area only in terms of industrial pollution without recognizing that the conditions still exist here that inspired basic ecological concepts a century ago.

Living in Chicago for decades, I, too, thought the Indiana landscape was either a "pristine natural area" or a "bleak wasteland." My family always hurried past Hammond, East Chicago, and Gary, where the air seemed too dense to breathe, to reach the wonderful dunes, woods, and wetlands to the east. Now I have come to appreciate why the "Chicago Wilderness" concept of creating a nature preserve with urban development must extend through all three counties on the Indiana shoreline.

The concentration of special natural areas is only one reason the Indiana shore of Lake Michigan belongs in the Chicago Wilderness. Another is that social and economic ties with Chicago both provided the reasons for the industrialization and actually reinforced many of the efforts to preserve the area's unique natural resources.

Consider that The Nature Conservancy found the greatest concentration of unique natural areas in the whole Great Lakes basin in the same Northwest Indiana area that the Chicago office of the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) found to be the most degraded area in the six-state region that also includes Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois. Today almost a quarter of the steel produced in the United States is still produced here, but how the steel is made is changing in ways that help clean up past pollution and offer new hope for pollution prevention into the future.

Where else did Congress authorize new major industrial development to be surrounded by a national park whose mission is to preserve its special natural resources for all time? Yet the conflict that resulted in Congressional authorization of a national park, together with construction of Lake Michigan's busiest commercial port flanked by two huge new steel mills, continues to force attention on how to allow the beauty of the dunes to persist along with industrialization.

One of the mills has the only steel industry Community Advisory Committee in the country. The committee and the company are working to protect a woodland with a new heron rookery on land one steel mill no longer needs — possibly by incorporation into adjacent national park lands. Not long ago, the other mill sought help from local conservation groups to transplant blue lupine to preserve essential habitat for the endangered Karner blue butterfly.

Cowles Bog in Porter County is named for the scientist whose research on how plant communities develop helped launch the new science of ecology at the turn of the century. Henry Chandler Cowles had come to earn a doctorate at the new University of Chicago, financed by John D. Rockefeller in the 1890s with earnings from the world's largest oil refinery in Whiting just across the state line.

Cowles' ideas about how plants evolve as communities excited scientists in Europe and North America. When the National Park Service was established in 1915 with Stephen Mather of Chicago as its director, his first proposal was for an "Indiana Sand Dunes National Park." It finally happened 50 years later because Illinois Senator Paul Douglas joined Indiana residents in the Save the Dunes Council to persuade Congress to override the objections of the Indiana delegation.

Then, the powers-that-be in Indiana wanted to industrialize the whole shoreline. But today Indiana residents, industry, and politicians agree that natural areas as well as economic development are essential to long-term sustainability of the quality of life.

Still flanked by a tank farm and pipeline facilities, the never-plowed Hoosier Prairie survives because Indiana and Chicago forces worked together.

The ongoing restoration of the Grand Calumet River also began with cooperation across the state line when members of the Steelworkers Union asked the Chicago-based Lake Michigan Federation for help in the 1970s. Assisted by the office of Chicago architect Harry Weese, the Federation produced a report that convinced USEPA and Indiana agencies of possibilities for restoration even though 90 percent of the river's flow is industrial effluent.

The Indiana Grand Cal Task Force was organized with help from Chicago and still leads cleanup efforts by residents of communities along the river, local governments, and industries. Approving beavers have now returned in the shadow of what was once the world's largest integrated steel mill.

Yes, the natural "wilderness" in Indiana is part of Chicago Wilderness. The dunes and more in Indiana demonstrate that Chicago survives as "nature's metropolis" with unique biodiversity in the midst of intense economic development on both sides of the state line.

My faith is that the destiny of the Chicago region now is to amaze the world with our capacity to restore and preserve our unique natural heritage and our economic capacity into the future.

Lee Botts is a longtime Great Lakes environmental activist who now lives in the Indiana dunes where she can see Chicago across the lake.