Nearly a century ago the people of Cook County voted to establish a forest preserve district to buy and preserve natural land in and around Chicago. Today, the forest preserves cover more than 65,000 acres of the land in Cook County, and contain 300 miles of trails, hundreds of picnic groves—even some golf courses. Urban planners consider these areas a unique and valuable resource, but the Forest Preserves are in trouble. As part of our Chicago Matters: Growing Forward series, Sandy Hausman reports.

For more than a decade, 86-year-old Bob Kelliher and his wife Marian have been coming here to Kickapoo Prairie. This 18-acre forest preserve in south suburban Chicago is an oasis of woods and grassy fields. Bob says he practically grew up in places like this:

KELLIHER: We had a large family of 8 kids, and we used to be out in the forest preserve almost every weekend, summer, winter and so on – in the summer foraging for wild apples and stuff for the kids.

But over the years he’s seen changes in the preserves. Invasive plants like garlic mustard and buckthorn now crowd the forest floor and overwhelm prairies. Benjamin Cox is director of Friends of the Forest Preserves.

COX: We thought that if you buy this land, set it aside, don’t do anything to it, it would be just fine. But what we’ve learned in the last 50 years is that we’ve interrupted a lot of the natural processes that helped to maintain the health of the forest preserves.

The most important natural process was fire. Before this region developed, wildfires would sweep across the landscape. Debbie Antlitz is a forest preserve ecologist working at Kickapoo:

ANTLITZ: So you see the brush has just started to build up over the years and come in and effect the water table and effect the shade levels and gradually the plants just start to die-out because of lack of sunlight.

Scientists in Madison, Wisconsin were the first to write about the need for fire on prairies and in oak woodlands.  In the 50’s they experimented with controlled burns and found that invasive plants were wiped out, while native oaks and prairie plants—with roots deep in the soil—survived. 

PACKARD: In a natural prairie that gets burned on a regular basis as prairies have burned for millions of years, the woody plants just don’t get established. The prairie out-competes them.

That’s Steve Packard, director of Audubon Chicago and a pioneer in the field of ecosystem restoration. 

On weekends, he supervises teams of volunteers, many of them neighbors, at sites like Somme Woods in Northbrook. They cut down buckthorn, pull weeds and burn branches—gather seeds from native plants and sow them across the land they’ve cleared. Joe Walsh, a tall, bearded professor of biology from Northwestern University, is part of the crew.

WALSH: It’s a really rewarding thing to do.It keeps you sane in an ecologically insane world.

Later this year, the sameness of a buckthorn forest will give way to new colors, shapes and textures—about 200 native species like compass plants with tall, green stalks and bright yellow sunflowers, blazing stars with spikes of purple blooms, bright orange butterfly weed and prairie grasses that grow six feet tall.

WALSH: The prairie in the summer time is just knock-your-sox-off gorgeous.

And when he and Packard look up, they see one more reason for hope – a red-tailed hawk circling overhead. Restoration is taking place on less than ten percent of the forest preserves’ property, but populations of rare birds have increased dramatically.

PACKARD: This was a habitat for hawk food—meadow voles, white-footed mice, smooth green snakes, and rabbits. They’ll all increase now that we’ve got these invasives out of the way.

And that’s the goal at 50 sites in the forest preserves—rebuilding woodland or prairie ecosystems from the ground up—making it possible for rare plants to survive and support a diverse population of animals. 

PACKARD: It just makes us feel bad to lose the last of all these beautiful, interesting species, and it doesn’t take very much. It just takes a little care, and people hadn’t known how to do that. Twenty, 30 years ago there was no discipline of ecological restoration. Today, people know how to do it. 

But not everybody likes the changes.

Jackie Boland lives near La Bagh Woods on Chicago’s far north side.       

BOLAND: Look at the stumps! This isn’t all buckthorn that they’re cutting. No. Go over and look for yourself. It’s not all buckthorn!

Boland and two friends show me where volunteers have been working to restore ten acres of oak woodland. In addition to buckthorn, green ash and box elder trees have been cut. Ecologists say those species keep new oaks from growing, but these women don’t want any trees cut down.

BOLAND: You know when mankind comes in and tries to really mess around with ecology, they usually mess it up!

Boland is part of a small group that’s been protesting for more than a decade.  Members question the choice of sites to be restored and don’t like the methods being used. In 1996, their complaints prompted the county board to put a moratorium on restoration. 

Volunteer Marian Kelliher says the results were devastating.

KELLIHER: Prairies where we had worked very hard we were stopped, and it all just grew back in.

The moratorium was gradually lifted. About 1,800 people are now working regularly on restoration projects, but Friends of the Forest Preserves and the Civic Federation say more must be done to assure the future of the forest preserves. They say the Cook County Board can’t manage them properly, so an independent board should be elected to do the job. 

COX: We need folks who can really be dedicated solely to the forest preserve district and held only accountable to that mission I think.

In 1999, Benjamin Cox recalls, the county actually sold two acres of forest preserve land for the Rosemont convention center, and last year it took $13 million from the forest preserve budget to pay other bills. 

Steve Bylina, General Superintendent of the preserves, defends the county board, saying it will buy $13 million worth of new land this year, and he says, the district has attracted thousands of volunteers to help care for the preserves.

BYLINA: And if one were to translate that into the actual savings to the taxpayers of this county, we would be in the millions of dollars.

While the district can’t pay volunteers, there are rewards for their work. Warming themselves by a crackling buckthorn fire, Gleb Belova and his teenaged son Yevgeny agree it’s good for the body and soul. 

BELOVA: I don’t have enough exercise in my life

HAUSMAN: Yeah, but you could be at the gym, being warm.

BELOVA: The gym is boring! City life can get to you—worries—gotta do this, gotta do that, run there, late over here.  Here it’s just like more carefree.

And this year, the forest preserve district will spend half a million dollars on a marketing campaign to attract a new crop of volunteers.