Cleaning Streams in Cook County, IL: Forest Preserves, Water Pollution, and Interwar Environmentalism in the Chicago Region

In 1916, the Forest Preserve District of Cook County began acquiring land to create a natural retreat for Chicagoans in that booming metropolitan region. Since district officials acquired many properties along county streams, water pollution soon interfered with their mission of creating an urban wilderness for recreational pleasure. To address the problem, in 1931, county leaders appointed the Clean Streams Advisory Committee that collaborated with forest preserve staff members to pressure polluters to clean-up their operations and to persuade enforcement agencies to prosecute ongoing offenders. They also lobbied the Public Works Administration to earmark New Deal funding for sewage treatment in Cook County. Their efforts suggest that early activism against water pollution in American cities emerged not only from efforts to ensure clean drinking water, but also struggles to protect nature. The interwar campaign to clean forest preserve streams anticipated the goals of the federal Clean Water Act (1972) to make all American waterways fishable and swimmable. The movement also preceded the burst of anti-pollution activism that historians have documented in U.S. suburbs after WWII and laid the groundwork for postwar efforts to mitigate water pollution in Cook County.

The Role of Naturalness in Ecological Restoration

While ecological restoration may help bridge the nature-culture gap, restoration still holds relevant meanings for naturalness, as demonstrated in this case study of staff and volunteers in the Cook County Forest Preserves (CCFP) in Illinois, United States. Translating naturalness as an agency policy into restoration goals for sites, CCFP integrated historical evidence, ecological science, and human values. Naturalness was constructed as historical fidelity, a scientific designation to be objectively discovered, while the scales at which people interpreted historical fidelity, namely, species, communities, processes, and practices, were sites of value deliberation. The multiple renderings of naturalness can be a strength that provides flexibility to restore what is locally valued, constructing restoration projects that acknowledge, rather than attempt to overcome, the constructed nature of naturalness.

Regional Plans and Regional Plants: Jens Jensen’s Vernacular Landscape and Metropolitan Planning in Chicago, 1904-1920

This article traces the origins of regional planning in Chicago through the work of landscape designer Jens Jensen. It argues that the city’s first regional planning efforts, led by Jensen, developed in conversation with ideas of the vernacular landscape and plant behavior at the turn of the twentieth century. Jensen’s embrace of Chicago’s “native” landscape encouraged him to adopt a regional scale of planning that celebrated urban diversity and addressed the needs of workers. His efforts, backed by the city’s social reform community, spanned the successful 1904 Forest Preserve plan and the failed 1918 Greater West Park System project. Marked by contradictions, Jensen’s work reveals a reform tradition distinct from the 1909 Plan of Chicago, which promoted the Forest Preserves as part of its comprehensive redevelopment program. It fused ecological metaphors with social concerns, inspiring some of the first public projects envisioned for a regional community, not an urban one.

Behavior and survival of white-tailed deer neonates in two suburban forest preserves

Neonatal survival influences growth of unhunted populations of suburban white-tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus (Zimmerman, 1780)). Understanding the interaction of habitat and survival may inform conservation efforts and studies of life history of cervids at high density. We chose two forest preserves representative of forests in suburban Chicago. We radio-marked 56 neonates (1999–2001) to investigate mortality and habitat use. Through 1 July, 21 of 29 (72%) neonates and 6 of 22 (27%) died mostly because of predation by coyotes ( Canis latrans Say, 1823). Akaike’s information criterion suggested that optimal mark–recapture models of survival contained covariates reflecting differences by preserve and timing chosen to coincide with behavioral change from hiding to accompanying the doe. Survival was lower during early parturition (0.26–0.78) relative to the latter part (0.90–0.96). Early fawns (hiders) at one site had lower survival (0.26–0.29) than fawns at the other (0.78). Lower survival associated with larger home ranges, greater movement, and reduced understory cover, suggesting that hiding cover may mediate fawn survival in the presence of predators. Our study demonstrates spatial heterogeneity in population biology of suburban deer and suggests that site-specific differences may influence neonate survival in the face of coyote predation.