By: Christopher Johnson

Glacial Park Conservation Area in McHenry County, Illinois–some 45 miles northwest of Chicago–is a stunning example of the Midwestern landscape. In the space of 3,400 acres, you hike through a restored prairie and past a bog and a marsh. A slight detour leads you through an oak savanna carpeted with magnificent native flowers glowing with purple, yellow, and orange hues. In the western section of the park, you climb two kames–hills formed when streams of melting water flowed through and around a glacier and deposited stones, dirt, and other material. The kames were formed by the Wisconsin glacier, which gradually retreated from northern Illinois about 11,000 years ago. At the top of the kames, you look west upon Nippersink Creek, which meanders through a restored wetland that welcomes great blue herons and other aquatic birds. In the distance lies a farm, but the park itself feels as close as wilderness as you’re going to find this close to Chicago.

Yet 40 years ago, this very land was radically different. It was a dairy farm owned by the Wiedrich family, which had purchased the land around 1875. They owned as many as 25 cows, and they planted oats, wheat, corn, and hay. They also owned heifers, horses, hogs, chickens, geese, and turkeys. In 1902, they built a barn, which still stands and serves as the Lost City Visitor Center for the park. Over the years, the Wiedriches modified the land substantially. They installed drainage tiles to redirect Nippersink Creek into a straight ditch that circumvented the lowlands to the west of the kames, adding to the land available for grazing. In the eastern sector of the farm, they converted a marsh to grazing land by plugging the water source. These alterations all reflected the economically oriented land-use philosophies of the 1950s.

Since the 1970s, though, the McHenry County Conservation District (MCCD) has gradually acquired the land, transforming it into Glacial Park and initiating one of the most successful and comprehensive projects of ecological restoration that the Midwest has seen. Restored prairies and savannas now boast a panoply of native plants. Nippersink Creek has been re-meandered, creating the wetland that’s visible from the top of the ice-age kames. The natural hydrology of the marsh in the eastern part of the former farm has been restored. The result has been a spectacular restoration project that has unfolded over the past 40 years, unique because of the  challenges that the restorationists faced but also because of the number of the different ecosystems that they have restored to their approximate natural condition.

The restoration project at Glacial Park and others like it are critical in reversing the catastrophic decline in biodiversity that has occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In 2019, the United Nations published a report warning that one million species on Earth—out of an approximate total of eight million species–face extinction because of climate change, loss of habitat, and other causes.  (Read about the report at https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/05/1037941.) Many scientists believe that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction in the history of the earth.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, loss of habitat is a major cause of this catastrophic extinction. Humans are gobbling up grasslands, savannas, wetlands, and other ecosystems at an alarming pace, robbing plants and animals of the habitats they need to survive. Ed Collins, the Director of Land Preservation and Natural Resources for the MCCD and a preeminent expert on ecological restoration, said, “We live in a very fragmented landscape just because of the way our culture uses land.”[1] Ecological restoration is the attempt to reverse that fragmentation, to knit together lands that are extensive enough to support the variety of flora and fauna that thrived before the onslaught of urbanization and suburbanization.

I first became interested in ecological restoration in 2004, when I participated in a weekend-long retreat at Glacial Park that explored the concepts of ecological restoration and the processes by which Glacial Park has been restored since the 1970s. Leading the workshop was the Ed Collins himself. He is stocky but fit, with short brown hair that is graying at the fringes, a beard with a silver lining, and a warm smile. You can tell that he is completely home in the outdoors. If this were a 150 years ago, he would have been at the forefront of the pioneers—self-reliant, observant, the kind of person that you wanted with you on your arduous journey west.

Collins kicked off that weekend workshop with this proviso: “The earth is a sentient being.”[2] Many think of the earth as dead—a bunch of lifeless rocks. But it is not—the earth is teeming with life. It is itself a living being. A small group of ten or twelve of us was to spend the weekend learning about the restoration of degraded ecosystems—ecosystems that have, for one reason or another, fallen into disrepair or been modified in ways that harm these natural habitats and the plant and animal life that depend upon them for their sustenance.

The history of Glacial Park reflects changes in how the land in northern Illinois—and throughout the Midwest—has been and is being used. In recent years, these changes reflect the influence of the environmental movement in transitioning concepts of land use away from economic interpretations of value and toward ecological values. The history of this 3,400-acre site reflects as well the growing recognition of the importance of preserving and restoring lands to mitigate the impact of climate change.

In the early 1970s, the restoration process at Glacial Park commenced when McHenry County formed the MCCD. McHenry is a collar county of Chicago, and by the 1970s, it was growing rapidly. The mission of the newly formed MCCD was to preserve and restore the rapidly diminishing green space, to protect and expand habitat for endangered plants and animals, and to provide multiple outdoor recreation opportunities for people in McHenry County and throughout the Chicago area.[3]

Helping to lead the restoration workshop on that weekend in 2004 was Dr. William Jordan III, the Director of the New Academy for Nature and Culture and the Co-Director of DePaul University’s Institute for Nature and Culture. For nearly four decades, Jordan has been a leader in the field of ecological restoration and is probably the movement’s foremost philosopher, addressing issues such as the value of restoration as a strategy for conserving nature spaces. For 24 years, he worked at the University of Wisconsin’s Arboretum in Madison. In 1981, he founded and was the editor of the journal Restoration & Management Notes, which has morphed into Ecological Restoration. In addition, he co-founded the Society of Ecological Restoration. He is tall and lean and lithe, with a  thoughtful manner of speaking–selecting his words carefully, searching for the exact word or phrase.

In his book The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature, Jordan explains, “Ecological restoration is the attempt, sometimes breathtakingly successful, sometimes less so, to make nature whole. To do this the restorationist does everything possible to heal the scars and erase the signs of disturbance or disruption.”[4] Jordan further clarifies restoration as “everything we do to a landscape or an ecosystem in an ongoing attempt to compensate for novel or ‘outside’ influences on it in such a way that it can continue to behave or can resume as if these were not present.”[5]

According to Jordan, the environmental movement was initially slow to embrace ecological restoration as a strategy for conservation. One reason was the fear that restoration would distract from or weaken arguments for preserving threatened landscapes. There was also an economic argument—that restoration was, in Jordan’s words, “a costly and uncertain process.” Some environmentalists were also uncomfortable with the idea that restoration commingles the categories of “nature” and “culture.” Put another way, restoration does not happen without the helping hand of humanity.[6]

Gradually, though, environmentalists and conservation managers have embraced the role of ecological restoration in renewing natural landscapes and humanity’s relationship with those landscapes. Part of the reason for this acceptance is the growing realization that ecological restoration can be an important tool in fighting climate change by restoring and protecting vegetation that stores carbon dioxide. According to Jordan, whom I had the opportunity to interview after the 2004 workshop, “[Ecological restoration] happened in the Midwest because the original habitat was gone, and it didn’t come back. The DNA was gone. It was unlike New England, where the forests returned, though the composition of the trees was different.”[7]

The efforts of Ed Collins and William Jordan follow in a long heritage of restorationists who had their roots in the Chicago area. One of the pioneers in restoration was Ray Schulenberg, who arrived at the Morton Arboretum in 1961 and held a number of positions, from Assistant Plant Propagator to Curator of the Herbarium. However, Schulenberg is best remembered as the visionary who pioneered prairie restoration at the Arboretum. Ray Schulenberg’s legacy lives on in the botanists whom he mentored at the Arboretum.

Schulenberg brought an unusual background when he migrated to Chicago and the Arboretum. He was born in 1921 in Fall City, Nebraska, a remote farming community. From an early age, he immersed himself in nature. Fascinated by the prairie, he went searching for remnants of native plants in forgotten corners, such as cemeteries and land that farmers hadn’t cultivated. When he found them, he studied them closely to understand the mix of plant and animal species.[8]

            After graduating high school, Schulenberg traveled throughout the West to study both the land and the people. He was drawn to the cultures of America’s indigenous people, living for a time with a Lakota family. He also viewed with alarm the disappearance of prairie because of runaway development. This period of wandering—a sort of American walkabout–endowed Schulenburg with a better sense of what he wanted to do with his life. He returned to school and finished a degree with a dual major in anthropology and horticulture. He also used money from his father to purchase 20 acres of land at Rulo Bluffs, overlooking the Missouri River in Nebraska. There, he undertook his first experiments in prairie restoration.[9]

            When Schulenberg came to work at the Arboretum, it had just purchased a 100-acre farm on its western border. The Director of the Arboretum at the time was Clarence Gottschalk, a landscape architect who believed deeply in the value of native landscapes. Schulenberg urged Gottschalk to allow him to undertake the kind of restoration that Ray had been doing in Nebraska. Gottschalk agreed, and they consulted with Floyd Swink, a renowned expert in Chicago-area flora, who joined the Arboretum in 1963. Swink’s monumental Flora of the Chicago Region is now in its fourth edition.

            Schulenberg and Gottschalk agreed to start the process by restoring one acre of the former farmland, and it was Schulenberg’s project to manage. The first order of business was research. He wanted Chicago-region grasses, forbs, and flowers and led his team out to collect seeds, depositing them in shopping bags and bringing them back to the Arboretum. Slowly Schulenberg’s team accumulated myriad grasses and forbs, which would create an extraordinarily rich prairie. After collecting the seeds, they germinated them in the Arboretum’s greenhouse. The next step was to plant the grasses, forbs, and flowers by hand. Workers dug a shallow hole and planted each seedling at the center of a one-foot circle.[10]

            They also did broadcast seeding, carrying the seeds in five-gallon plastic buckets, walking through the fields in a figure eight pattern, distributing the seeds, and then raking them into the soil. The plantings proved to be a remarkable success, producing an incredible array of species. Over the next ten years, they expanded the acreage that was being restored. Through it all, the team worked hard, but Ray also made it fun for the young botanists.[11]

Another key figure in the restoration of Chicago-area ecosystems was Dr. Robert Betz, who was a Professor of Biology at Northeastern Illinois University from 1961 to 1991—and a teacher of Ed Collins during his student days at the university. Betz is best known for leading the prairie restoration efforts at Fermilab National Accelerator Lab in the Chicago suburb of Batavia. The project grew out of conversations between Betz and Fermilab’s founding Director, Dr. Robert Wilson. Dr. Wilson asked how long restoring the grounds to native prairie would take. Bob Betz responded that nothing like this had really been done on this scale, so it might take 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years. Dr. Wilson famously responded, ‘If that’s the case, why don’t we start this afternoon!’”[12]

Dr. Betz’s vision was to undertake large-scale restoration, and today, Fermilab’s restored prairies spread like an emerald carpet over 1,000 acres. Betz was tireless in tracking down prairie remnants in cemeteries, along railroad tracks, and beneath power lines—places untouched  by shovels or lawn mowers. He would carefully extricate seeds from flowers and bring them back to Fermilab. The grounds crew, which helped in the undertaking, was initially skeptical, but when they came to know Dr. Betz, they realized that he was very approachable and personable. Betz had grown up in the Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport and had a working class background. But he also had a Ph.D. in biochemistry. Betz formed Fermilab’s Prairie Committee, which included employees and interested volunteers.[13]

The third member of the triad of pioneers in ecological restoration in the Chicago area was Steve Packard, who had gone to Harvard and then engaged in community organizing. Since the mid-1970s, Packard has led restoration efforts throughout the Chicago area, first as Field Representative for the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission, then as the Director of Science and Stewardship for the Illinois Nature Conservancy, then as the Chicago Region Director of the National Audubon Society, and now as a writer, blogger, and board member or advisor for many independent projects. Two books, Miracle Under the Oaks, by William K. Stevens, and In Service of the Wild, by Stephanie Mills, have highlighted Packard’s pioneering restoration work.

In 1977, Packard started working with a group of volunteers who came to be known as the North Branch Prairie Project.[14] I had an opportunity  to interview Packard, and he told me, “At first we worked on little fragments like two or three acres at Bunker Hill, about an acre at Sauganash, and five or so acres each at Miami Woods and Wayside Woods along the North Branch.” All these sites are on the northwest side of Chicago. Packard continued, “We were thrilled when the Forest Preserve staff liked what we were doing and approved 90 acres of the Somme Preserves for restoration work.”[15]

That was in 1984. The Somme Prairie Preserves are in the northern suburb of Northbrook, and it was a particularly difficult challenge to restore. In quiet but inspiring tones, Packard talked about the complex history of the grove. “One problem we had here,” he explained, “was joyriding vehicles that used to tear it to shreds. Dodges, Chevrolets, and pickup trucks left crisscrossed ruts like a plowed field. The kids had party spots that were thick with broken glass and milk crates and car seats.”[16] Packard and the dedicated volunteers cleared out car seats, cut the virulently invasive hedge buckthorn, and used controlled burns to prepare the soil and stimulate the growth of grasses and flowers. Somme had about 240 plant species already. To make the ecosystem even richer, they found seeds of other plants in prairie remnants throughout northern Illinois, brought them back, and seeded the soil. As a result, Somme now boasts some 480 species, including 12 endangered species.[17]  

These pioneering efforts in ecological restoration in the Chicago area provided a foundation of scientific knowledge and strategies that later restorationists like Ed Collins could build on. Economic development stepped up in McHenry County in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then really exploded around 2000. In response, the District was able to pass two bond referendums successfully. The funds were intended primarily for acquiring and preserving open space, which was being rapidly developed as the population grew. According to Collins, “That’s when Glacial Park really came into its own in terms of size. It’s around 3400 acres today. When I came to work for the District, I believe Glacial Park was just under 600 acres.”[18]

Collins and his colleagues faced numerous challenges in restoring the natural habitat at Glacial Park. The Wiedrich family had plugged up a marsh to create more grazing land for the cattle. Nippersink Creek ran through the western section of the farm. The creek had once meandered through the valley to the west of the delta kames, creating a wetland that had attracted great blue herons and other aquatic species. However, to create more farmland, the family had diverted the creek into a channel that flowed north and then east. The wetland had disappeared, and an agricultural field had replaced it.

In addition, the park featured two oak savannas, but the floors of the savannas were choked with invasive plants, especially buckthorn, which threatened the very survival of the oak trees themselves. And then there were the farm fields, on gently rolling lands, which had been used to grow corn and soybeans and wheat. These lands had once been native prairie, where the rich panoply of plants had had the ability to support multiple bird species and other animals.

Yet despite these challenges, the land held great promise as a site for restoration. Collins explained, “Glacial Park had a really interesting history that I think allowed it to become the site that it’s become today in terms of the ecological communities that survived there.”[19] It became dairy farming primarily, and small dairy farming. As a result, small areas of savanna and oak woodland were allowed to remain on the landscape. There was farm drainage, as there was everywhere in the Midwest, where wetlands were drained, but not as severely as on larger farms. Consequently, a number of small wetlands persisted on the landscape. There was a rail line that was built through what would eventually become Glacial Park. It’s now a bicycle trail line–and patches of original prairie survived along that line.[20]

Collins explained further, “At the time that the district began to acquire [the land], it was a bit like a chocolate chip cookie. There was a lot of dough, which was the areas that had been heavily used by human beings for making their living and for being on the landscape. But there were also these delicious chocolate chips that were scattered throughout that dough. Those would be the remaining oak savannas and the remaining pieces of prairie and the remaining wetlands.”[21] Consequently, the land provided a wonderful matrix of ecosystems to work with from the very beginning. As MCCD staff members and volunteers began to re-apply fire to the landscape, remove invasive species, and restore wetlands by removing the hydrological modifications, the land woke up. Collins emphasized, “Things came back in ways that were nothing short of phenomenal.”[22]

In 1987, the staff at the MCCD undertook a feasibility study on what it would take to recreate a large functioning landscape that was typical of the Midwest and of McHenry County at the time of settlement. Where could they conduct this grand experiment? How big would the site have to be? What would restoration entail? They studied a number of sites in the county, and Glacial Park wound up being the site picked to undertake the first large-scale project.

The staff took a look at wildlife species and tried to figure out which species could be brought back—species that were either extirpated from the area or were in very low numbers. Today, visitors see species that they never thought they would see again: bald eagles, ospreys, badgers, whooping cranes, bobcats, and river otters. Collins said, “They’re all species that we crossed off the list and said it’d be nice to have them, but not likely to happen in our lifetime. Creation kind of runs in a sequence, and as one thing is restored and repaired and comes back to help, other things follow in sequence. So it’s been a really interesting time to watch this ground wake back up again.”[23]

The most challenging restoration initiative at Glacial Park was undoubtedly the dechannelizing and re-meandering of Nippersink Creek. What had been 3-1/2 miles of meandering stream had become 1-1/2 miles of straight ditch, surrounding a field that the farmers had used for grazing or cultivation. The channelized ditch—through which water flowed rapidly–had all kinds of ecological problems. The banks were highly eroded and falling into the stream. During storms, the water would rise high and then drop down very low. The diversity of mussels and fish in the stream was extremely low.

The restorationists knew as part of their overall planning that they wanted to dechannelize the ditch and restore the 3-1/2 miles of meandering stream. “So how do you go about something that big?” Collins said. “It had not been done in the Midwest, and as far as I knew, it had not been done anywhere in the country.” (Collins, Interview) Collins and his staff realized that in order to fix the stream, they had to fix the surrounding wetlands that bordered it first. From 1990 on, they went through a process of smaller but very significant wetland restorations on the smaller streams that fed Nippersink Creek. They restored wetlands on half a dozen small streams. That’s where the wetlands would gather up enough water to actually create a small tributary stream that would feed into the Nippersink. Those had all been straightened. Some of them were underground and in tiles.[24]

Collins and the MCCD staff learned their craft by working on those smaller streams, bringing them back to the surface, recreating the original channels, and removing drain tiles. At this time, the staff members were also restoring prairies, using the experience that Schulenberg, Betz, and Packard had gained in their restoration efforts in the Chicago area. Collins recalled, “It took about a decade of smaller work on around a thousand acres of surrounding wetlands and prairies and savannas before we were ready to take on the Nippersink.”[25]

According to Ed Collins, dechannelizing and re-meandering Nippersink Creek itself took three years. The MCCD staff hired a contractor who drove equipment such as steam shovels to move the dirt that had formed the banks of the channelized ditch. Otherwise, it was the rest of the staff in the Natural Resources Department of the MCDD that worked all the equipment, along with retirees who were looking for a summer job and had some skill in running equipment. In addition, the MCCD hired college students who were looking for summer jobs.

The re-meandering of the creek occurred in stages. Staff and volunteers blocked off the two ends of the channelized ditch, where they would eventually divert that channelized stream into its original channel. About half of the creek was dechannelized in 1999, and it spent the winter as kind of an isolated meandering wetlands.  Collins recalled, “One of the beautiful things about that was that you could feel the Nippersink slumbering and then starting to stir as the stream restoration got further and further along. The young people worked their hearts out that summer because I think they understood they were redefining the relationship between Americans and American rivers.”[26]

In 2000, the staff and volunteers worked to dechannelize the next section. By then they had completed enough of the stream that they were able to turn it loose. In August of 2000, they opened the blocks, and the Nippersink flowed into its original channel for the first time since 1955. According to Collins, “It was quite a moving event. We cut a ribbon that was stretched across a stream. The Nippersink flowed into its own banks like college alumni that hadn’t seen one another for decades.”[27]

As Nippersink Creek once again followed its meandering flow and slowly filled in wetlands, the channelized ditch began to dry up. The MCCD staff and volunteers invited the public to climb down into the stream, gather mussels and fish, put them in buckets, and turn them loose in the now-meandering Nippersink Creek. Collins recalled, “I have a picture of that ditch with about three inches of water in it, and it is full of people, some of them dressed in very nice clothes, and they are gathering up fish and mussels, and they are bucket brigading them over to the new stream.” (Collins, Interview) According to Collins, one man kept coming back to transfer fish and mussels. He told Collins,  “I just thought there would be more of them in there, and they’re going to die if I didn’t come back.”[28]

Earlier, the MCCD staff had conducted surveys of all the plant and animal species to establish a baseline of the biology of the area. They studied vegetation, tree density, fish populations, mussel populations, breeding birds, butterflies, reptiles, and amphibians. They have repeated those surveys over the years. In fact, since restoration efforts have started in McHenry County, the MCCD has conducted approximately 7,000 biological surveys.[29]

In the original Nippersink Creek dechannelization, the mussel population had been buried. When the staff and volunteers started to excavate that channel, they hit the live mussel beds. In 1955, the stream had had 26 species of mussels. The creek at the time they did the dechannelization had only 16 species in it. The re-meandered Nippersink today has 22 species of mussels in it.[30]

Glacial Park has a high population of  both migratory birds and breeding birds. In fact, Glacial Park is an amazing place during migration season. On any given evening in the spring or fall, the visitor can view hundreds of sandhill cranes, geese, and ducks because of the wetland restoration. In springtime, shore birds go through there and utilize the marshes.

Collins explained, “The breeding birds are what we concentrate on because that’s the habitat that the birds are using year round. We have had a large suite of wetland birds that are endangered or threatened, including things like American bitterns, least bitterns, and pie-billed grebes, which have taken a hit across the range.”[31] Glacial Park also has a large concentrations of breeding grassland birds. These are birds that would have been very common in the Midwestern landscape a hundred years ago, but their populations were in a steep spiral downwards because of loss of habitat. Glacial Park boasts extensive tracts of continuous grassland, nurturing large populations of Eastern meadowlarks, Henslow’s sparrows, grasshopper sparrows, savanna sparrows, and bobolinks–birds that are very typical of the grassland suite.

Collins explained, “You’re essentially sewing the landscape back together, one piece at a time. As you move from one block to another over the years, the available habitat expands. We live in a very fragmented landscape just because of the way our culture uses land.”[32] Even where there is grassland, it is often very small and surrounded by fencerows, where predators hide. But when restorationists created larger blocks of grassland, birds were much more successful in breeding. Those two groups of birds—the wetland birds and the grassland birds—have done remarkably well at Glacial Park.

On that restoration weekend in 2004, we participants learned about the efforts to re-meander Nippersink Creek. But we also went to work, helping to restore one of the park’s splendid oak savannas.  After a day in the classroom, we pulled on our jeans and sweatshirts and work boots and hiked off-the-beaten trail to one of the savannas.

An oak savanna consists of oak trees that are widely spaced out. The canopy cover is less than 50 percent, allowing sunlight to reach the soil and permitting prairie grasses and forbs to grow beneath the canopy.[33] Midwestern savannas are the result of periodic burning, either through natural causes, particularly lightning, or human causes. Fires burn seedlings and other ground vegetation, creating more open space than is found in a woodland. The Pottawatomie and the other native tribes that originally inhabited northern Illinois used fire for a variety of purposes, particularly to facilitate hunting.[34]

When Anglo-American settlers began to settle the region, they started to suppress those fires, allowing invasive plants such as buckthorn and honeysuckle to invade and take over the floor of what had once been open—and healthy–oak savannas. This process is exactly what had happened at Glacial Park.[35]  

To begin the work of restoring one of the two oak savannas at Glacial Park, we needed to reintroduce fire and mechanically remove the brush and seedlings that had taken root.[36]Members of the MCCD staff handed us handsaws and brush cutters. The savanna was choking with buckthorn, which is ubiquitous in the Chicago area. Buckthorn was introduced as a decorative hedge from Asia early in the twentieth century. The leaves have pointed tips and are dark and glossy. The hedge grows fast and completely overtakes the understory of a savanna, prairie, or woodland once it establishes itself.

Using our tools, we waded into the savanna, identified buckthorn, and cut the stem of each plant as close to the ground as we could. At the same time, specialists operated chain saws to cut the larger growth of buckthorn. After an hour of cutting stems aggressively, I suddenly felt severe spasms in my neck and shoulder. My office-bound, computer-typing self was not at all used to this physical encounter with nature. I rested while others continued to attack the buckthorn, and one kind woman massaged my shoulders. Eventually I recovered from the spasms and continued to cut buckthorn, pacing myself better than I had before. After we cut the brush as close to the ground as we could, specialists followed us and applied herbicide to the stems.

We then piled all of the brush into piles, which resembled nothing so much as giant cockroaches. We set fire to the piles and watched the flames and smoke rise like black ghosts through the tree canopy. Meanwhile, specialists lit controlled fires to clear away the rest of the small invasive plants on the floor of the savanna.[37]

After the burning was completed, Collins gave each of us a handful of seeds of native plants to distribute. The prescribed burn had helped prepare the soil to receive the seeds and germinate them. There is an extensive list of plants that are appropriate for the oak savanna understory, including yellow stargrass, prairie lily, wild lupine, and Jacob’s ladder.[38] Restorationists use two methods to distribute seeds. In broadcast seeding, we flung the seeds as evenly as we could over the ground.  In the second method, a native seed drill—a sizable machine–drills into the soil and deposits seeds. Such a machine would have taken up too much space in the oak savanna, so we broadcast the seeds by hand. Toward the outer fringes of the savanna, where there was more sunlight, the mix of seeds included prairie plants. Toward the center of the savanna, we were broadcasting the seeds of plants that grow in shade.[39]  

By the end of the day, sweat had poured through our T-shirts, and my jeans felt as if they had been through a washing machine. I was exhausted. I had trouble catching my breath. But I also had an extraordinary feeing of purpose and accomplishment. To bring the weekend to a close, Ed Collins gathered us in a circle to reflect upon our experiences over the weekend. Once again, he reminded us, “The earth is a sentient being.”[40]

Not only had we restored an important ecosystem that would support diverse plants and animals. Restored ecosystems like wetlands, prairies, and savannas have another overarching benefit—they help fight climate change by storing enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, the most common of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. In the Paris Agreement of the UN Climate Change Agreement of 2015, in which 196 nations signed on to strategies to limit greenhouse gases, the signees recognized ecosystem restoration as a “natural climate solution” because healthy ecosystems help both to mitigate climate change and to adapt the environment to warming temperatures. The report that came out of Paris Agreement urged nations to fund the restoration of degraded forests, wetlands, agricultural fields, and rivers.[41]

In 2021, the Friends of the Forest Preserves (FOTFP), which was formed in 1998 to safeguard and improve the ecological condition of the forest preserves in Cook County, where Chicago is located, sponsored a webinar, “Take Action on Climate Change in the Forest Preserves.” The webinar laid out the connections between ecological restoration and climate change. During the webinar, Derek Ziomber, the North Branch Field Organizer for FOTFP, explained, “People tend to ignore the tool of ecological restoration to fight climate change. We can help natural communities and human communities fight climate change, using ecological restoration as a tool.”[42]  

During the process of photosynthesis, plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in their leaves, stems, and root systems. The carbon combines with sunlight to form glucose and other sugars, from which plants build their plant structures. Because the plants in forests, prairies, and wetlands store carbon, those ecosystems function as carbon sinks. However, different plants store carbon in different ways. Trees store most of their carbon above ground, in the leaves and limbs. When a tree burns or is cut down, it releases its carbon back into the atmosphere.

In contrast, Derek Ziomber explained in the FOTFP webinar, “With grasses and flowers, a larger proportion of the biomass and carbon is stored underground. There are lots of roots in the soil of a grassland grass, as compared to the roots of an agricultural grass. When organic material is left in the air, it turns back into carbon dioxide. But when it’s buried in the soil, it’s much slower to decompose because it’s less exposed to oxygen.”[43]

In an interview, Benjamin Cox, the Executive Director of Friends of FOTFP, told me, “We know that one of the best ways to store that carbon is with what was here before, which was a whole lot of prairie. Even in our woodlands, there were lots of plants in the ground like grasses and flowers, which would drive that carbon down into the ground into their deep root systems.”[44] 

Moreover, native grasses and wildflowers store much more carbon than does lawn grass. Native grasses have roots that reach as far down as sixteen feet. These root systems and the surrounding soil store carbon. According to Cox, “The comparison is that if you pull out a chunk of your lawn grass, it’s shallow. It’s not as bad as asphalt or blacktop, but it’s not far off. It doesn’t store much carbon.”[45]

Consequently, as volunteers restore prairies, woodlands, savannas, and wetlands in the forest preserves, they are augmenting the capacity of the natural areas to absorb and store carbon. Jim Blackburn, the Co-Director of Rice University’s Severe Storms Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters Center, estimates that the entire panoply of native grasslands in the United States can store as much as one billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year.[46]

Native plants also store more carbon than do invasive plants like buckthorn and honeysuckle. Buckthorn has run rampant through the forest preserves, parks, roadsides, and even people’s yards. It outcompetes native plants and degrades wildlife habitat. The root systems are shallow, storing much less carbon than do the deep roots of native grasses. Cox explained, “If you look under [invasives like buckthorn and honeysuckle], there’s actually a lot of space between those stems, and there’s a whole lot of bare ground. That bare ground is hard; it doesn’t really store water. In fact, the water just shoots off of it. As the water shoots along on this bare ground, it takes the soil with it.”[47] Consequently when volunteers cut buckthorn and plant native grasses and flowers, they are accomplishing several purposes. They’re increasing the stability of the soil and the ability of that soil to absorb rainwater. And they are restoring a native ecosystem that serves as an excellent carbon sink.

“Wetlands store carbon,” Cox explained, “because they have a lot of organic material that is stored under the water. It does not decompose at the same rate. The carbon is not released back into the atmosphere as wood would release it.”[48] The U.S. Global Change Research Program estimates that wetlands in the United States store an astounding 13.5 metric tons of carbon.[49]

Wetlands also counter the effects of climate change in another way. Climate experts expect that in the coming decades, rising temperatures will bring heavier precipitation and more flooding. Wetlands mitigate the impact of increased flooding by absorbing water, storing it, and slowly releasing it into surrounding fields, rivers, and streams.

Only recently have many conservationists come to understand the critical role that restored ecosystems play in mitigating climate change by storing carbon. The Glasgow Climate Pact, issued at the conclusion of the UN’s Glasgow Climate Conference in November 2021, explicitly recognized the importance of protecting, conserving, and restoring nature and ecosystems to achieve the Paris Agreement temperature goal of limiting the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Amid the political divisions, the cynicism, and the aimlessness that pervade our society, the magnificent restoration of Glacial Park to its natural beauty and biodiversity nurtures a sense of hope, a sense that extraordinary things can be done, a sense that collaboration for the common good is possible. Toward the end of my interview with Ed Collins, he told me, “I had an interesting experience not too long ago. In the morning, our wildlife ecologist was running through pictures taken by one of our trail cams. She had a family of four river otters on the camera. They had been using the Nippersink during the night. A couple hours later, a park visitor came in. We have a board where you can list the birds you saw that day. The person came in and said, ‘It was a really good day. I saw two bald eagles and an osprey in Glacial Park’.”[50] (Collins, Interview)

Two eagles. An osprey. In them perhaps lies the salvation of the world.

***

Chris Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area with a diverse background. Over the years, he has taken on various roles, including merchant seaman, high school English teacher, corporate communications writer, textbook editor, educational consultant, and freelance writer. His writing portfolio includes short stories, articles, and essays published in journals and magazines such as The Progressive, Snowy Egret, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Wilderness, American Forests, Chicago Life, Across the Margin, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Blue Lake Review, The Literary Yard, Scarlet Leaf Review, Spillwords Press, Fiction on the Web, and Sweet Tree Review.

In 2006, the University of New Hampshire Press published his first book, This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. His second book, Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests, co-authored with prominent New Hampshire forester David Govatski, was published by Island Press in 2013.

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[1] Ed Collins, telephone interview by Christopher Johnson, February 18, 2022.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] William Jordan III, The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003), 11.

[5] Ibid., 22.

[6] Ibid., 17.

[7] William Jordan III, telephone interview by Christopher Johnson, December 8, 2006.

[8] Craig Johnson, interview by Christopher Johnson at Morton Arboretum, Lisle, Illinois, December 12, 2006.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ed Hedborn, interview by Christopher Johnson at Morton Arboretum, Lisle, Illinois, March 18, 2009.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ryan Campbell, interview by Christopher Johnson at Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois, July 15, 2015.

[13] Ibid.

[14] William K. Stevens, Miracle Under the Oaks: The Revival of Nature in America (New York: Pocket Books, 1995), 51.

[15] Steve Packard, interview by Christopher Johnson, Northbrook, Illinois, July 7, 2015.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Collins, interview.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] John N. Maloney, “Oak Savanna Restoration Techniques,” Restoration and Reclamation Review vol. 2, no. 6 (Spring 1997): 1.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid., 2.

[38] Ibid., 4.

[39] Ibid., 3.

[40] Collins, interview.

[41] Gregory Fuchs and Rebecca Noebel, “The Role of Ecosystem Restoration for the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement,” United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (https://www.decadeonrestoration.org/publications/role-ecosystem-restoration-unfccc-and-paris-agreement): 1-2.

[42] Derek Ziomber, Friends of the Forest Preserves, “Take Action on Climate Change in the Forest Preserves,” Webinar on November 9, 2021.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Benjamin Cox, telephone interview by Christopher Johnson, November 17, 2021.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Mary Beth Gahan, “Storing Carbon in the Prairie Grass,” The Washington Post, August 19, 2020.

[47] Cox, interview.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources. “Carbon Sequestration in Wetlands,” (https://bwsr.state.mn.us/carbon-sequestration-wetlands), accessed November 22, 2021, 1.

[50] Collins, Interview.