Here you will find articles and reports about Illinois plants and animals, natural systems, ecological change, mined land restoration, pollution, soil erosion, toxics pollution, water supply and flood control, ecosystem restoration, and climate and weather, as published mainly by Nature of Illinois, Illinois Issues. Chicago’s Reader, and Illinois state government agencies.

I came of age at the same time as the federal and state environmental protections agencies. The environment was a new issue in Illinois, but not a new problem. During its first century, Chicago’s filth was fabled. While in Chicago, Rudyard Kipling toured the city in the company of a house-proud cabbie, who took the famous writer to “canals as black as ink, and filled with untold abominations.” Meatpacker Gustavus Swift used to boast that his factories were so efficient that they used every part of the pig but the squeal. In fact, there was lots left over—and Swift’s factories, like every other factory in Chicago until the 1960s, simply dumped it into the nearest stream or piled it onto the nearest empty lot.

All the in-city reaches of the river and its branches were bad but the worst was Bubbly Creek, a sluggish branch of the Chicago River into which the packing houses dumped what survived their reductions of hogs and cattle into money—and what they couldn’t salvage willing to put into sausage was very nasty stuff indeed. Putrifying flesh generated noxious gases whose escape from the surface—a surface by the way that at times became so congealed that chickens cold walk across it—earned it the name Bubbly Creek.

One could no more write about Chicago without mentioning pollution than one could write about a visit to Springfield without writing about boredom. “Chicago is the product of modern capitalism,” railed Eugene Debs in 1908, “and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation.” Visitors’ dismay at Chicago’s failure to clean up after itself constitute an entertaining subgenre of local literature. Rudyard Kipling, who knew dirty cities from India, tipped his hat to Chicago. “Its water is the water of the Hooghly,” he wrote in American Notes, “and its air is dirt.”

Consider the fate of the old Calumet marshes on Chicago's far southern side. The nearby presence of so much “waste” land made the Calumet a natural dumping site, first for local factory wastes, then municipal wastes from across Chicagoland. What was for 20 years the City of Chicago's primary dump site for municipal waste was at Lake Calumet too, and when the city quit dumping there the Metropolitan Sanitary District dumped sewage sludge there for another 20 years. (The younger Mayor Daley, for example, mindful of the Calumet’s history as a garbage dump, tried to dump a third metropolitan airport there in 1990.) By the 1960s not even sludge worms could live in the Calumet River.

Consider also the city’s air—which was a more pleasant thing to do than breathe it. “The frightful stink seemed to infect the sun itself,” Saul Bellow once noted about the old stockyards district, “so that it was reeking as well as shining.” People who lived in the Back of the Yards used to say that you'd never die of pneumonia because no germs could live in your lungs.

Writer Stuart Dybek recalled touring the stockyards in the 1950s:

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First stop was the Armour packing plant, where the meat was processed into bacon and sausage. I think the entire class was relieved that the smell wasn’t as bad as we worried it might be. We knew we had traveled to the source of what in the neighborhood was called ‘the brown wind’ or ‘the glue pee-ew factory.’

Worse than the stink was the smoke. Chicago was one of those towns that long believed that smoke meant jobs. What smoke really meant was uncounted premature deaths from lung and heart diseases. Chicago ran itself almost exclusively on soft coal until well into the 1930s, with the result that the sobriquet “Black City” owed not to morals or the color of its inhabitants but to soot from coal smoke that stained every surface. The city (as was reported in a hundred memoirs by first-time visitors) did not shimmer on the horizon like Oz but huddled unseen in a cloud. (Yellow, brown—the color varied.) William Cronon titled the Prologue to his book Nature's Metropolis “Cloud Over Chicago,” and in it he recalled how the city in the 1950s burdened visitors with “an atmosphere that suddenly made breathing a conscious act.”

Pollution so dire reorders ecosystems, including human ones. As in all industrial cities, attempts by people who could afford it to escape the stink of Chicago shaped the city. The prospect of a cleansing lake breeze at their well-tailored backs insured that the rich would build their posh houses along the lakefront; many a suburb was founded as a summer resort to which the wealthy repaired to escape the heat and the symphony of city smells caused by rotting flesh and garbage and manure. 

M. W. Newman in 1986 described the Chicago River as “a working-stiff stream, green where it should be blue.” Newman may have had different things to say 100 years earlier. Biologically speaking, the Chicago River then was less a working stiff than a stiff. The river was used as a dump, but all rivers were used as dumps; the problem was the Chicago had more dumped into than most and was less able to carry it away than most. The river was by mid-century was lined with abattoirs, tanneries, hog pens, gas works, manufactories of a dozen kinds. To call the 19th century Chicago River an open sewer is to defame sewers.

In most parts of Illinois, sewage is a problem in local surface waters. In a city with as many people in it as Chicago, sewage often was the local surface waters, a modern witch’s brew of acids oils, guts, and sometimes whole dead animals, including human ones. When the young Charles Walgreen was fired from his first job in a drugstore, he was so broke he hurled his two last pennies into the Chicago River for good luck; they probably dissolved by the time they hit bottom.

People coped by staying away from the river, or fleeing the city in the summers, or turning their backs to it. Marshall Field’s department store was moved from its original site on Lake Street one block from the river out of consideration for its lady shoppers, who had had to hold handkerchiefs over their noses on warm days while they shopped. As recently as 1929, architects of the Civic Opera House turned a windowless face of that building away from the river for the same reason. Nor was the river the only cesspool. The streets—filled with horse manure and dead dogs and uncollected garbage—were just as bad in wet seasons. 

Chicagoland’s air and waterways are hugely cleaner these days, if not quite pristine. (The biggest threat to air quality for example is not belching smokestacks but burping tailpipes.) Some thanks are owed to anti-pollution regulations, but changes in basic industrial processes helped, as did the fact that so many of the worst polluters—the packing plants, the steel mills, the coal boilers—have shut down. Whatever effect the de-industrialization of the region has had on its people, its effect on the environment was restorative.

The perception persisted that pollution was a city problem in Illinois. Those of us who lived Downstate knew better. For decades, its farmers had poisoned streams with farm chemicals and clogged lakes with eroded soil, acidic rain from the burning of Illinois coal was killing forests in the northeast U.S., prime soils were being built on or washed away, and the ecosystem for which the Prairie State was named scarcely existed in its original form.

In my off hours in the 1970s I enjoyed poking around on the backwaters of Lake Springfield, an artificial reservoir built in the 1930s. When I discovered the place, the ponds were dotted with muskrat lodges, deer fed at water’s edge, fish frolicked, and egrets nested in the trees. An orgy of corn planting in the fields upstream of the lake caused the backwaters to fill with sediment within a very few years. The lodges disappeared and the waters on which I floated in a kayak became mud much of the year. Such damage, I felt, was not wrong so much as it was stupid, and when I could, I explained why I thought so in journals where explaining was appropriate and I ranted about it in journals where ranting was allowed. Not until I compiled this archives did I realize how often and how much I'd written about nature and the environment.

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An old pal once said that if he lived in Montana, he'd die for the environment, but Illinois was not worth it. A lot of Illinoisans don't agree, and the state has made hard-earned advances on every environmental front thanks to them. 

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Revised 03/04/2021