The first settlers in the wilderness that became Evanston, Wilmette, and Winnetka bought their land for a dollar an acre in the 1820s. Then they started cutting down the trees, clearing space to farm and making money at the same time. They could sell a cord of oak firewood for 75 cents in Chicago. And they could stack stumps ten feet high, let them burn for weeks, and sell the resulting charcoal for five cents a bushel. After a century or so of hard labor, the “Big Woods” of oak and hickory and other trees was all but gone.
In other stories the natural world overwhelms the human. On December 18, 1837, John Piper left the Barkley settlement in Indiana to file his land claim 30 miles away in La Porte. Caught in a snowstorm, he walked in a circle until he died of exhaustion. In the Veteran’s Day storm of 1940, freezing temperatures and high winds killed 66 people in Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota and drowned another 59 in Lake Michigan.
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Other episodes are painful and prolonged, as when Beaver Lake in Newton County, Indiana–part of the Kankakee River’s Great Marsh–was drained about a century ago. Greenberg quotes a 1925 account: “There were tens of thousands of these big, soft, fuzzy goslings suddenly bereft of their native element–water….They walked and rolled and dragged themselves painfully to the few depressions in the marsh bottom where water still remained and crowded these places to suffocation.” Also stranded were buffalofish and pickerel “of enormous size, patriarchs of these primeval waters, whose carcasses littered the bottom of the lake so thickly that one could step from one to another in any direction, like upon so many stepping-stones.” The late Gordon Graves told Greenberg that his grandfather could smell the stench 40 miles away.
He also knows that the line between what’s natural and what’s been tampered with can be hard to define, especially in the not-so-pristine past. Native Americans set prairie fires to shape the landscape and may well have hunted a few large animals to extinction. The midwest that the first European-American pioneers saw wasn’t, as many imagine, untouched by human hands. Greenberg makes this point, but he underplays it and occasionally even falls into the trap of describing the presettlement landscape as “original.”
Because hardly anything is always good or always bad, caution makes a good rule in managing natural areas. Yet even cautious management can’t always escape controversy. Cutting weed trees and killing excess deer are regarded by most conservationists as unfortunate necessities. But in recent years some people who venerate deer and trees and claim to be conservationists have mounted grassroots campaigns that stymied some prairie restoration and pest-control efforts.
Was this sacrifice worth it? That’s the question anyone who cares about the environment has to answer, yet Greenberg and the conservationists he interviewed seem reluctant to address it directly. Clearly we’ve compromised great expanses of nature to be able to enjoy fast cars, flush toilets, lifesaving drugs, and satellite TV. Can we improve the terms of that trade, so that we get more nature without becoming poorer? Sure. We already have. No one in Evanston clear-cuts the backyard for charcoal anymore. And we can do much better. No Com Ed customer would have suffered had the company dropped its coal somewhere other than on top of the last lakeside daisies in Illinois. As Greenberg observes, home owners on inland lakes would have perfectly nice places–and create a much better natural habitat–if they gave up their obsession with killing the underwater “weeds” that shelter small fish, clams, and insects. And so on. But can we have unbroken prairie, forest, and swamp from sea to shining sea? Not likely.
Greenberg misses his chance again when he describes how drained marshes can be restored, which he favors. He reports that the states of Illinois and Indiana are at last cooperating in a multiyear Corps of Engineers study of the Great Kankakee Marsh, which once covered between 400,000 and 1,000,000 acres of northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana. The study includes proposals for a wildlife refuge and reconnecting the river with parts of its old meandering course. “If these and other conservation proposals reach fruition,” he writes, “nearly a hundred thousand acres of the old marsh would be protected and subject to restoration. While no one is contemplating re-creating the marsh to its former size, the lollygagging river that looped its way through marshland and forest may once again become a reality and not merely the stuff of dreams.”
