A Natural History of the Chicago Region
By Joel Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 595 pages, $40
Joel Greenberg’s elegiac natural history starts with an image that borders on biblical. When seven French explorers, led by Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet, proceeded up the Illinois River in 1673 and became the first known Europeans to reach the Chicago region, they looked out on a scene of limitless abundance.
” ‘We have seen nothing like this,’ ” Marquette wrote, launching into a breathless catalog of fertility. He listed ” ‘prairies and woods . . . cattle, elk, deer, wildcats, bustards, swans, ducks, parroquets, and . . . beaver.’ ” Even the river, Joliet noted, is ” ‘abounding in catfish and sturgeon. . . . [O]xen, cows, stags, does, and turkeys are found . . . in greater numbers than elsewhere. For a distance of eighty leagues, I did not pass a quarter of an hour without seeing some.’ “
This is fecundity in overdrive, though today, of course, the Frenchman couldn’t go a quarter of an hour without passing a few strip malls and Starbucks. What makes the vision of a heartland cornucopia so remarkable–and such a fitting beginning for Greenberg’s crucial book–isn’t just its sheer beauty but the explorers’ own perception of it. If they were dwarfed by nature, they accepted their own puniness without a fight. The New World Garden of Eden seemed safe because they conceded their own small space in it.
The concession, though, wouldn’t last long, and neither would the catalog of abundance, or even the interest in keeping one. In fact, the real power of Greenberg’s “A Natural History of the Chicago Region” goes beyond the inevitable catalog of loss that becomes the wilted counterpoint to the Frenchmen’s scrolling list. What Greenberg documents is a chilling revolution in Americans’ sense of their landscape and their environmental duties, and he does this by keeping his focus limited.
“The Chicago region,” he writes, “as defined in this book encompasses the following nineteen counties: Cook, DuPage, Grundy, Kane, Kankakee, Kendall, Lake, McHenry, and Will in Illinois; Jasper, Lake, La Porte, Newton, Porter, and Starke in Indiana; Kenosha, Racine, and Walworth in Wisconsin; and Berrien in Michigan.” By fixing on that single, concrete ecosystem and exhaustively recording its devastation, Greenberg is able to tell, in microcosm, the larger story of what the whole country has squandered, state by state. The result–despite the book’s dry title–is nothing less than a dogged chronicle of the way a world disappeared and the way we let it go so easily.
And it was no slow slide, Greenberg reports. Among the many jaw-dropping revelations in this book is just how quickly the Frenchmen’s vision came undone. The examples of quick extinctions are legion here, but none surpasses the way the original 31,294,000 acres of prairie blanketing Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin got misplaced. In the early 19th Century, Greenberg writes, the black-soil prairie was so lush that “a rider on horseback in late summer could disappear from view as the curtain of lowland grasses closed behind him.” How do you make a whole prairie disappear in turn? As settlers moved into the area, the grasslands got plowed. If the prairie once swallowed up the settlers, they in turn swallowed up the grasslands. The few scraps left behind sprouted in cemeteries, which provided tiny reserves for prairie organisms. An understated writer, Greenberg doesn’t spotlight the obvious irony, but he doesn’t have to. In a few decades the prairie had turned from a blooming field into its own eternal burial ground, growing beside other corpses.
This kind of devastation takes a certain mindset, and the other theme that threads through “A Natural History of the Chicago Region” is the psychology–partly indifferent and partly cruel–that drove it. A lot of our natural environment vanished, Greenberg notes, through simple, unwitting carelessness. When migrating birds started slamming into the John Hancock Center in the 1970s, for instance, one conservationist counted 1,000 avian corpses lying at the base of the skyscraper after a single night. Birds that migrate at night use the moon and stars to orient themselves and can be confused by other lights. Simply drawing blinds and turning off lights, Greenberg notes, would have saved these birds, along with the estimated 1 billion birds killed every year by smacking into glass windows.
Occasionally, though, our war against nature has been something more deliberate, and Greenberg’s voice clenches when he documents these flat-out assaults. The most determined massacres make for rough reading. In the early 19th Century, passenger pigeons, by one estimate, numbered from 3 billion to 5 billion birds. But even numbers that epic didn’t offer much protection, Greenberg notes. The pigeon was attacked in “every conceivable way: gunners by the hundreds emerged with the arrival of the flocks; birds were netted; chicks were knocked out of their nests with poles and blunt arrows; cannons were filled with scrap and discharged into the trees . . . ; roosting and nesting sites were deliberately set ablaze; . . . grain [was] laced with strychnine.”
Even this overkill–what Greenberg calls “the greatest act of vandalism ever perpetrated by our species against another”–wasn’t enough. When some pigeons survived the attacks, pigs were turned loose to feed on the maimed. In the end, the 3 (or 5) billion birds were reduced to Martha, the last passenger pigeon, who died in her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo sometime before 1 p.m. on Sept. 1, 1914. But at least she was spared the fate of some recent pet turtles, who reportedly were mutilated by their owners to resemble Michaelangelo, Leonardo and the other Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Maybe that was inevitable. Once nature loses its ability to hold our reverent gaze, it’s easy to turn other species into cheap comic relief, a cartoon of themselves.
Greenberg, though, is no predictable apocalypse chaser, and what saves his book from becoming a simple death watch is his unyielding optimism. What may be most amazing, he notes, is how much of our ecosystem has managed to survive our own worst efforts. A lot of that has to do with nature’s innate tenacity. The prairie dock plant still grows beside railroad tracks because its taproots run 14 feet down. Snakes burrow in trash dumps, under sheets of metal, and some swifts have just moved their homes from hollow trees to hollow chimneys. And then there is the hardy wild onion, which some think bestowed its own Indian name on Chicago. While the gift didn’t offer much protection, the onion proved almost as tough as the namesake city that tried to kill it.
Nature, though, isn’t always that muscular, and the real heroes of Greenberg’s book, alongside the chimney swifts and the prairie dock, are the growing numbers of environmentalists who have each chosen a species to protect. Offering passing profiles of these defenders–starting with Marcy DeMauro, who collected and transplanted lakeside daisies–the book compiles a catalog of the righteous.
All this relative good news adds balance to “A Natural History of the Chicago Region.” What lifts it into a literary realm is something unexpected. If Greenberg’s history maintains a mostly level voice, it sometimes breaks loose, almost spontaneously, into bursts of lyricism, and then the book becomes a passionate homage–part aria, part lullaby–to our landscape. The result is the work’s best catalog yet. The “sand evening primrose,” Greenberg reminds us, “sprinkles the bare soil of the driest dunes with circular clumps of yellow.” In August “wands of amethyst sway to the irregular rhythm of summer breezes while butterflies . . . hang on like rodeo cowboys.” When prairie smoke blooms, “the hillside looks to be in flame [with] the rosy glow of the flowers.” And sometimes names are poetry enough: hog peanut, white lettuce, enchanter’s nightshade, purple joe-pye weed, fire pink, yellow false foxglove and yellow lady’s slipper.
While this pastoral ode doesn’t compete with “Leaves of Grass,” it is still moving and in many ways becomes the real heart of “A Natural History of the Chicago Region” and the best evocation of its message. When he gives in to his literary impulses, Greenberg is really yanking our gaze back from ourselves to our world, and recovering the whole secret garden still sprouting under our feet, barely seen. We may not regain the awe of the French explorers, but if nothing else, Greenberg’s book will induce some renewed respect for a rich, obstinate, parallel universe. And that call for esteem, or at least tolerance, makes the book a little revolution in itself, as beautifully stubborn as the lakeside daisy, the scraps of prairie grass and the wildflowers sprouting, against all odds, beside the railway tracks.
