When Columbia College called on Gensler to restore a historic Michigan Avenue façade, the design team put a bird on it.
They had previously discussed Chicago’s problem with bird collisions — due to the city’s location amid many major migratory routes, Chicago’s skyline kills more birds than any other in the country — but abandoned the idea of plastering a classic Michigan Avenue address with conspicuous bird decals.
Ecologists have long known of buckthorn’s ability to push out native plants, but two new studies from Chicago scientists suggest the woody shrub also changes the distribution of large mammals like coyotes, and causes spinal defects in unborn frogs.
"We already knew that the buckthorn was outcompeting other plant species," said Seth Magle, director of the Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute and author of one study currently in publication. "But no one had looked at the mammal community to see if they’re affected.
Although county lines parcel out the southern shore of Lake Michigan like garden plots, the environmental issues that unify people from Michigan City, Ind. to Chicago do not respect political boundaries.
Nor do most economic issues. Industrial decay and depopulation have left communities throughout the greater Calumet region with some common problems, as well as shared opportunities.
That was the message from the inaugural Calumet Summit, a conference convened this week in Gary, Indiana’s lakefront Marquette Park by the Calumet Stewardship Initiative.
The summit follows some major moves in the Calumet area, not least of which is the Millennium Reserve initiative, dubbed the nation's largest "open space" project.
In the debate surrounding the United States' natural gas resources, it is often noted that methane, the primary component of natural gas, is 21 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. There are two main issues with that statement, although that is the figure used by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Carbon dioxide, whose concentration recently reached a long-feared milestone, remains the most important greenhouse gas trapping heat in the atmosphere.
The glitzy towers of downtown Chicago are filled with offices that boast impressive financial returns, but their biggest cash flow may be one they all share: the Chicago River.
A new report commissioned by Friends of the Chicago River and Openlands says each dollar invested in the river provides a 70 percent return.
As conventioneers pack up their model turbines and fly home from the 2013 Windpower exhibition at McCormick Place, they have the wind at their backs.
That’s because the nation’s largest convention center announced this week it would purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs) to offset 100 percent of its energy use with wind power. The three-year arrangement with Atlanta-based Sterling Planet will procure credits worth some 331,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, according to McCormick Place, or about as much as 69,000 passenger vehicles each year.
The cavernous conference center uses about 130 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, but its plan to buy RECs doesn’t mean wind turbines will now be wired to McCormick Place.
The White House Council on Environmental Quality honored 12 teachers with a Presidential Award for environmental education Tuesday, but in Chicago a band of green-minded volunteers added more than 700 new students and teachers to an environmental organization present in every one of the city's 50 wards.
The Chicago Conservation Corps' student program has graduated roughly 6,500 students and teachers who have devoted some 150,000 hours of service since the program begin in 2006.
