Miracle Under the Oaks

by William Stevens

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead's words are on the inside front panel of the Grand Prairie Friends' brochure. William K. Stevens, author of Miracle Under the OaksTillman., has probably never seen our brochure, and possibly never heard this quotation, but its sentiment permeates his book.

In 1975, Steve Packard discovered some prairie remnants owned by the Forest Preserve along the North Branch of the Chicago River, and for his own idiosyncratic reasons, fell in love with them. They were degraded, garbage-strewn, and being taken over by brush, but nevertheless had been, at one time, prairies. In 1977, after doing some research and getting permission from the Forest Preserve District manager, Packard

...went to a Sierra Club meeting at the Chicago Academy of Sciences and asked if he could have five minutes to show slides and announce that he, as a Sierra Club member, was going to start this restoration project and that it was going to start this weekend.

"They gave me two and a half minutes," he said. Steve Packard can be a very persuasive person, and... the North Branch Prairie Project was born.

Packard, and an increasingly dedicated collection of volunteers who came to be the North Branch Prairie Restoration Society, faced a number of challenges over the next decade, including some internal dissension, the need for an imprimatur from a known member of the scientific establishment, and officialdom's understandable reluctance to use fire. (The North Branch prairies are all in urban or dense suburban areas.) But one of the biggest challenges, and certainly the most interesting, turned out to be the three-hundred year old oaks that dominated one corner of the Somme Prairie Grove restoration site. Packard "carried in his head a vision of... rich grassland running up to, under, and through the oaks. Without that, restoration would be incomplete." Unfortunately, efforts to simply extend the prairie "through the oaks" were less than successful. Packard remembers the second year after burning the brush out from under the oak grove:

"If someone were to show up right then, they'd see a whole lot of dead stuff and a whole lot of burdock and dandelion, and they'd say, 'What a mess this is.'"

This part of Miracle Under the OaksTillman. is an ecological detective story, as Packard fit bits and pieces of the puzzle together and slowly came to understand the surprising nature of the ecosystem he was trying to restore.

Fascinating as this story is, though, perhaps even more important is the growing ecological restoration movement in general. Stevens gives us a look at other efforts, including the giant project to create a prairie at the Fermi National Accelerator outside Chicago, started by Bob Betz and Ray Schulenberg. Outside of Illinois, volunteers are restoring desert in the Southwest, wetlands along the coasts, and riparian forests in California. Some of these efforts are inspired by, and modelled after, the restoration efforts that Packard began at one Sierra Club meeting back in 1977. And as the movement grows, scientists are not only providing help and input into restoration, but receiving feedback and getting ideas tested as well. The Society for Ecological Restoration was created in 1989.

None of this is to diminish the efforts of preservationists, whose battles are often fought in the court-rooms and legislative halls. But restoration is a way to make a difference that was almost (though not quite) unheard of 20 years ago, and at the same time is for many people a concrete reminder of what we're fighting for. Further, as even giant ecosystems like Yellowstone are appearing to be too small and island-like to be completely stable, restoration begins to provide a guide for managing wild areas in an ever more human world; and perhaps even, Stevens suggests, to help ecosystems adapt or move in response to whatever climatic changes (like global warming) humans might wreak in the next century.

By 1993, thanks largely to the efforts of Steve Packard and a few other hard-working and dedicated people, the Volunteer Stewardship Network, sponsored by The Nature Conservancy (for which Packard began working in 1983), had more than 5000 volunteers working on 202 restoration sites throughout Illinois. The Somme Prairie Grove, no longer garbage-strewn, now hosts "a sea of Indian grass and big bluestem," rare plants like the cream gentian, uncommon butterfly species with euphonious names like the great-spangled fritillary and the Appalachian brown, bluebirds, grosbeaks, and maybe even coyotes. The Nature Conservancy, in conjunction with agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and the Illinois Department of Conservation, is now pursuing the idea of a comprehensive "Chicago Wilderness" plan of which the North Branch restoration sites would be a cornerstone.

Like all these projects, the Chicago Wilderness is a long, long-term project, and will require years of effort and thousands of hours of volunteer time; but if it happens, "it will be because the interest was raised here and the genes were saved here and the restoration techniques were worked out here and the education proceeded from here." As Mead said,

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

© 1996, Greg Tillman.

latest update: May 30, 2001
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