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 some of his stories the natural and human worlds intermix with little apparent harm to either. In the 1840s residents of Three Oaks, in Berrien County, Michigan, produced maple sugar from their forest trees on an almost industrial scale without killing them off. More recently, a beaver on Farmer Creek in suburban Des Plaines was seen building a dam using, among other things, “a sofa and plastic bags full of lawn waste.” In 1879 inventor and businessman Edward Warren bought 150 acres of forest in Berrien County and chose to leave it mostly alone. Warren Woods is now considered one of the finest beech-maple forests on earth.
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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.
In an entirely different category are the stories of extinction. Greenberg doesn’t slight the oft told tale of the passenger pigeon: “I believe that its demise may represent the greatest act of vandalism ever perpetrated by our species against another.” He also calls attention to lesser-known episodes, such as the extinction of four species of the deepwater fish known as the cisco in Lake Michigan, finished off by decades of overfishing and sea lamprey predation: “The last johannae was caught in Lake Huron off of Wolfsell, Ontario, on August 4, 1952. The last blackfin cisco was caught in Lake Michigan off of Marinette, Wisconsin, on May 26, 1969. The last longjaw cisco was caught in Georgian Bay, Ontario, on June 12, 1975. And finally, to conclude this litany of obituaries, the last shortnose cisco was caught in Lake Huron in 1985.”
Few Chicagoans know these stories. Openlands Project director Jerry Adelmann writes in a publicity blurb that Greenberg’s book will help educate the many who don’t. I hope so, because we need to know more about the green, crawly, scaly, and furry things we live with.
This is a strange and revealing passage. Having made the case that Volo Bog is worth more than four lanes of pavement and that the new road should go a different way, Greenberg adds that gratuitous final shot, implying that the road isn’t needed at all. Yet he offers no evidence that it isn’t. If the state were threatening to replace Volo Bog with a light-rail commuter line, or a library, or a homeless shelter, of course he would object vigorously, but would he go on to hope that these projects wouldn’t be built at all, anywhere? I doubt it. He just assumes that the construction of a new highway anywhere is an unnecessary evil.
