Eight years ago I wrote a story about the Cook County Forest Preserve District for Chicago magazine. The story was, overall, considerably less than complimentary.
The uncomplimentary parts of my story were mostly about the district’s failure to manage the lands it had so nobly acquired and defended. Prairies on district land rapidly turned into brushy thickets, alien species invaded the woodlands, and the district’s own forestry department was filling open fields with a weird mixture of trees that had never appeared together in any natural community anywhere in the world.
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According to Nevius, “By joining forces, we hope to be able to expand our expertise and our dollars. I think the Forest Preserve District is in a position to become a national model for these types of projects.” Becoming a national model is an excellent goal. The district began life at that exalted level, and there is no reason why it cannot achieve that status again.
In my 1985 article I told of a visit to Jurgensen Woods Prairie at 183rd and Cottage Grove. There was a sign along 183rd identifying the place as a prairie, but I described the landscape as looking like “Tarzan’s summer home.” The prairie was being buried under a junk forest of invasive trees, vines, and European buckthorn. If it were neglected much longer, the prairie plants would be gone.
