Suburban Amber

A Walk in Suburbs

As most of you know, I’m not from Chicago. I’m not even from Illinois. Every weekend, without fail, you’ll see me lugging my suitcase around waiting anxiously until I can cruise home to the suburbs…in Indiana- Hammond, Indiana to be precise. Seems horrible right? Not really. This Memorial Day weekend, I was sitting at home in my stifling, sweaty house because “it is NOT air conditioning season for God sakes! It’s still May! I’m not turning on the air in May!” (That’d be my sweet mother talking). Due to the oppressive feeling in the house, I decided to go for a walk to look at trees now that I actually know some. I started in the backyard, successfully identifying two silver maples, a pine tree that would be fantastic come Christmas, a burning bush, and what I think is a green ash tree. There is one tree in my yard that I can’t identify, but whatever it is, it’s dying. I moved out from my yard. I decided to weave my way as far into the residential areas as I could without getting turned around on our twisty, confusing streets. Sometimes I could almost forget I was in Indiana and not Chicago. There are a lot of the same species around here- maples, ashes, some scattered lindens, and what I thought was a cockspur thorn, but I wasn’t willing to climb Mr. 174th Place’s fence to find out. There are a lot more coniferous trees in my area than Chicago. I think it makes sense since in a city like Chicago, you don’t want to plant a tree that’s going to get huge and crowd out a sidewalk the way the fat bottom of giant pine could. Most of the conifers I saw were in people’s yards.
My main lament is that there are scarcely any elms where I live. I love elms. They’re one of my favorite trees. I love their little seedlings, the teeth of their leaves, the grain of their bark, their trunks that go on and on before splaying out, and the twisting branches that look like veins. I know many elms were lost in the suburbs when Dutch Elm Disease, but I’m not sure if they were ever in my neighborhood. There are very few trees that look extremely young. Most of the trees have been planted in our area for as long as I can remember. There’s a big happy catalpa dripping with pods down the street from my house. There are also some birch trees (mostly in yards) and the occasional sycamore. I wish I could have gone and visited the apple tree at my old house in Hammond- it had the perfect seat for reading books nestled where the branches split from the trunk. The best thing about the walk was getting to see the city I’ve lived in for almost my entire life in a different way. I saw things I’d never noticed before. I never realized how rich our suburban forest was. And by the end of it, I didn’t care that it was hot or that I was sweating or that my house was only going to make the problem worse. It was really great. It felt better to be outside where it was hot and the trees were than to be inside. I think there really is a therapeutic quality to being outside, even if the most natural place you can get to is the city you live in. It’s neat to look at and be concerned with something outside of yourself and the people-oriented world you live in. It was a good walk

Amber evolving

Just a thought

So today in my evolution class, we started talking about definitions of a species. It sort of went on in the same vein as we’ve been- trying to figure out what nature and wilderness mean, trying to figure out that perfect definition that nails it right on the head and encompasses every last aspect of the words and concepts. Then my professor brought up these two scientists. Their names were Mishler and Donahue. At the time of this species debate, they wrote a paper about defining what constitutes a species. Their paper addressed the issue of plurality- that the species concept can be thought of in phylogenetic terms, in morphological terms, in biological/reproductive terms, and so on. The most important thing about their work is that they just said that even though the words mean different things in different concepts, everyone recognizes that they’re talking about the same thing. It was a practical, simple approach to addressing a very complex problem. I know that we really want to figure out the perfect definitions for wilderness and nature and ecosystem and all that. However, it’s important to recognize that when we say those words, everyone understands what we’re talking about. Have you ever said the word “nature” and had someone stare at you blankly waiting for explanation? How about the word “city”? I’m guessing not. I know the field is still going to continue to grapple with the possible definitions of these terms and concepts, but I think Mishler and Donahue’s idea is pretty valid. We all have an inherent sense of what these words mean. I just thought that was a neat thing I could take from another class and apply to this one. I doubt it will make a lot of difference in our quest for the words, but I thought it was interesting.

Amber in wilderness!

Professor Heneghan asked us for a discussion of wilderness, especially after our individual exploration of the Art Institute. Throughout several courses with Heneghan, I’ve always had a really hard time coming up with an answer for this and for the definition of things like “nature” and more recently “city”. While I still don’t have an exact answer, nothing that every last person could decisively agree on, it seems a bit clearer to me after visiting the Art Institute for our assignment. As I walked my straight line down the cool, dim halls, I tried to select paintings that immediately fired the word “wilderness!!!” in my brain. I didn’t want to think about it and analyze. I didn’t want to be logical and rational about it. I just want pictures that registered as being wilderness instinctually rather than cognitively. The history of human life has been deeply entwined in nature. I hoped by letting the most primal parts of my mind identify wilderness for me, I might actually be able to understand what it is. I found myself over and over choosing paintings that depicted wild, sometimes violent scenes. Wilderness to me seems like the parts of the natural world that man can not tame. They may be savage and terrible but there is still deeply embedded beauty in a thing that can’t be bridled or subdued, like a wild horse or a storm cloud.
Some of the scenes showed people at the mercy of wilderness, often cowering and tucked away in the corner, like painting “The Eruption of Vesuvius”. I guess I chose them because they weren’t peaceful, idyllic scenes with people picnicking in the grass with a clapboard sided house in the background. Wilderness is wild. It commands respect and it does not bow to people that feel the need to control and regulate their environment. Wilderness has its own regulations, even if they seem messy or violent. I loved paintings of churning, stormy waters tossing boats around. Even if people were present in the paintings I choose, they were at the mercy of their environment. They could no more control the boat they were on than the waves themselves. Wilderness was their sea captain. The paintings I identified as wilderness often weren’t even what most people would call beautiful. Sometimes it was jagged, rocks rising still and stoic from a frothing gray sea, as in “Rocks at Port”. Wilderness is not necessarily classically beautiful; its beauty comes in its wildness. I think it may be why we’re often drawn to people who seem free, passionate, and “wild”. It reminds us of something that tugs at outskirts of our mind from a long time ago when we were imbedded in the wilderness, when it controlled our fate. I like the independence of wilderness, and its demand for respect. I like the idea of savage beauty and something that man can’t control or harness or break. I’m still not precisely sure what wilderness is, but these are the things it made me think and feel when I thought I saw it.

Amber blogging

Tree Book
I decided recently that since I’m going to be doing this kind of stuff for the rest of my life, I should probably get serious about learning local species. For my birthday, a friend of mine made me this little journal with blank, unlined pages in it. I’m going to take that journal and fill up the pages with drawn pictures of all the common local trees and some that aren’t as common but still show up. Maybe I’ll throw in a few rare ones, in case I run into them. I’ll probably draw the general leaf shape and make-up (simple, compound), something about the bark, the general shape of the tree, and any identifying characteristics like a trademark smell or flower or seedpod. I’m also going to try to learn the scientific names as well as the common names. Finally, I also want to try and learn some of the common invasive and exotic species in our area. I feel like the only things I could identify right now are buckthorn and garlic mustard. So I’d like to learn the basic invasive species. It’d be even better if I could have a general idea of what a tree might look like if it were diseased or infested with pests. Heneghan tells me this is a skill that takes years to learn, but I’m hoping that I’d be able to identify a tree crawling with Asian longhorn beetles or ravaged by some kind of blight. I’m pretty excited about this little project. Summer is a good time to do this and I feel like I’ve already got a head start on it because of what we’ve learned in class. Once finals week is over, my tree book project will move fully into action. Yay!

From Amber:
The Good City

When I was walking to a test early yesterday morning, I realized how peaceful it was outside at that hour- the way the light fell through the leaves, how quiet everything was, the lazy way everything, even the traffic, seemed to move, and the smell of damp grass and wet earth from the sprinklers. It was all so calm and lovely. It made me think about how much I love this city. I know with my constant weekend excursions to Indiana it may seem like I can’t wait to get out of here, but I really do love Chicago. After reading Jeff’s post from awhile back about what constitutes a good city, I started thinking about my own personal reasons for finding Chicago “good”. While I appreciate things like clean water, adequate, and garbage disposal, those aren’t the things that bring me to define this city as good. What it is, what it’s always been for me, has been the diversity of the city. Everything about this city is diverse- our people, our architecture, our wildlife, our hinterlands, our neighborhoods. And that’s the way it is in the natural world as well. You categorize the healthiest, best, most desirable landscapes as “good” when the have a large, extremely diverse native biomass. I’ve been to other cities, Philadelphia, New York (just in passing through), Dover, Cincinnati, and they all left me feeling fairly cold. Of course, I may just be partial to the city I grew up so close to, but Chicago really does have a different feeling than those other places. It just feels more diverse to me, it feels more natural. And I think we’re a city that doesn’t forget the wild. We’ve done a good job on incorporating green life and wildlife into our urban world. It just seems to me that everywhere I’ve gone has had the same building (same heights, same materials) crowded over and over into a barren space lined with concrete and asphalt and steel. Chicago almost reminds me of a climax community. There are so many “species”, species of plants, animals, buildings, people, landmarks, neighborhoods. Our city really does feel alive. I think that’s why this place always felt so good to me, I liked living in a city that lives and breathes and grows. It’s not static, just as a climax community is not static. It’s good.

poison ivy

If you haven't had the misfortune to hear me drone on about my current poison ivy run-in at Kloempken Woods last Sunday, I apologize for crashing in on your sanctuary with my further ranting. I can't help but share the information, because the sum of all my poison ivy experiences is developing into a personal mission.

Not that we'll be working in the same area when we head out to Kloempken on Wednesday, but I considered the option of not going back since getting through my worsening Rhus Dermatitis is of super urgency right now compared to just about anything. But I think I'm more interested in facing my nemesis. I at least have little business taking ay opportunities to practice identifying the various sneaky morphologically different forms of the plant.

I found this site last night and enjoyed the variety of photos featuring the all the cheating modes used by poison ivy. There's also a helpful quiz which emphasizes recognizing the ivy when it's nearby and mimicking other plants. One funny aside: in the advanced i.d. quiz, one of the trickster plants is jewelweed, which I'm assured is native and very abundant in disturbed areas. Hence the reason it can be misidentified when trying to locate poison ivy. The funny part is that I've twice discovered recommendations of jewelweed as a remedy for the poison ivy itch. So if you know of any jewelweed let me know and I'll try some homeopathy.
http://www.blogger.com/login.do

I also think I may spotted some potential plants in my neighborhood so let me know if I've got it right or have misidentified it:

I think this plant is faking me out - the leaves arent's quite a threesome

The three-leaved beast on the right edge is the suspect.

Apparently the plant loves the edges of habitats and roadsides. Last Sunday the group worked in area that was a forest edge along a roadside! Clearly I'm idiot for not paying attention to some of blatant warning signs.

Some other interesting facts about the urushiol - the chemical in the plant's oil that initiates the dermatitis response:

• Urushiol, once absorbed into lower layers of skin, becomes bound in dermis cell membranes and if left alone would cause no health problem. The entire chain of events of having poison ivy is an unwanted immune mechanism that is apparently overzealous and misguided (which = allergy)!

• Urushiol has been investigated and approved of research concerning chemical warfare. http://www.centerwatch.com/patient/drugs/dru606.html

• Poison ivy is in the taxonomic family Anacardiaceae containing relatives such as pistachio, cashew, and mango. Incidentally, the "poison-ivy mango connection" is a research topic of interest about people who are sensitized to urushiol and then handle mangoes and incur Rhus Dermatitis. Apparently mango contain urushiol:

Contact Dermatitis. 2005 Jan;52(1):3-5.
Exploring the mango-poison ivy connection: the riddle of discriminative plant dermatitis.
Hershko K, Weinberg I, Ingber A.
Department of Dermatology, Hadassah University Hospital, Faculty of Medicine Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91120, Israel.

A relationship between sensitivity to poison oak or poison ivy and mango dermatitis has been suggested by previous publications. The observation that acute allergic contact dermatitis can arise on first exposure to mango in patients who have been sensitized beforehand by contact with other urushiol-containing plants has been documented previously. We report 17 American patients employed in mango picking at a summer camp in Israel, who developed a rash of varying severity. All patients were either in contact with poison ivy/oak in the past or lived in areas where these plants are endemic. None recalled previous contact with mango. In contrast, none of their Israeli companions who had never been exposed to poison ivy/oak developed mango dermatitis. These observations suggest that individuals with known history of poison ivy/oak allergy, or those residing in area where these plants are common, may develop allergic contact dermatitis from mango on first exposure. We hypothesize that previous oral exposure to urushiol in the local Israeli population might establish immune tolerance to these plants.

***The above abstract was all I could access of this article since DePaul is not known for their adequate journal subscriptions, so I wanted to see what other research has been published in the journals we can access:

A Comparison of Nutrient Concentration in Two Poisonous and Three Nonpoisonous Species of Sumac (Rhus spp.)
Kathleen C. Weathers; Thomas G. Siccama

Compares N, P, K, Ca, Mg, Na, Zn, Cu, and Pb levels and finds that poison ivy (and other poisonous species) do have higher levels of N and P in fruits, but that these elements are not present in urushiol and contribute nothing direct to the poisonous traits.

Host Preferences of Rhus Radicans (Anacardiaceae) in a Southern Deciduous Hardwood Forest
Sharon M. Talley; Robert O. Lawton; William N. Setzer
Ecology, Vol. 77, No. 4. (Jun., 1996), pp. 1271-1276.

Abstract

Rhus radicans, a root-climbing liana, is not distributed randomly among potential host tree species in old-growth mixed mesophytic forest on the southern Cumberland Plateau of north Alabama, USA. Vines are more abundant than expected on Carya ovata and Quercus rubra, but less abundant than expected on Juglans nigra, Acer saccharum, and Sassafras albidum. Seed germination and early seedling growth in the presence of bark extracts suggest allelochemical interactions may influence the observed host preferences.

Foods of White-tailed Deer, Odocoileus virginianus, in Martin County, Indiana
Dennis J. Sotala; Charles M. Kirkpatrick

Besides some botanical/identification book reviews, that's all the research that I found on JSTOR using an exact phrase search for poison ivy and key wording urushiol. Sounds like a ready-made research intersection for collaboration between research and land management! Anyone up for the challenge...let me know.

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And finally, for the least-helpful identification award, I present for your consideration U.S. governmental work (USDA)...

Poison Ivy

http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/796_ivy.html

• Grows around lakes and streams in the Midwest and the East - could this be any vaguer, not to mention misleading? Why do they not mention woodlands, where no water is present, parking lots, vacant lots, etc?
• Woody, ropelike vine, a trailing shrub on the ground, or a free-standing shrub - this tip I actually find superbly helpful and can vouch for the presence of specimens matching this description perfectly at Brookfield Zoo in the tree stands between Ibex Island and Habitat Africa (so don't offroad around the zoo; and by the by, my last Rhus Dermatits event was from contact with poison ivy mixed in with grapevine permeating the parking lot fences at the zoo)!
• Normally three leaflets (groups of leaves all on the same small stem coming off the larger main stem), but may vary from groups of three to nine - I'm sorry, three to nine?!?! That's quite a range.
• Leaves are green in the summer and red in the fall
• Yellow or green flowers and white berries - apparently most sources agree that you'll never see the flowers due to their tiny size.

Restoration news in review

So I used my free time this weekend to read all the news articles that I usually can't spend time perusing. News can be such an addicting thing, but I found so many headlines that brought class discussions to mind. So I just compiled the following weekly review style collection of headlines from last week to share.

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Article Link: Barrington Hills restoration conflicts
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/nearnorthwest/chi-0605170282may17,1,5116431.story?coll=chi-newslocalnearnorthwest-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
This piece of news is not only another local example of how people who all have similar environmental goals can experience miscommunication on how those goals are defined. I find the particular notion of trees as icons of ecosystem health that must stem from the concept of ecosystems on a trajectory that culminates with the growth of woodlands. I also can empathize with the neighbors in the article. They see the old trees coming down and it likely affects their Jay Appleton-type sensibilities: once a forested shady picnic grove now a bare and wide open grassland.

Article Link: Montana combines restoration and economy
http://www.greatfallstribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060513/NEWS01/605130302/1002
This article outlines a symposium being held as part of a gubernatorial program to actively translate nature’s value into currency! I find it exciting that the concept we've discussed in class is being actively pursued by government. I know it's no new thing for state's to pump natural resources for capital, but it is does seem novel that environmental and economic goals are being pursued in tandem from the beginning of policy development and that the governor is pushing for resource development in sustainable ways - rather than the ye old capitalist tradition of bleeding resources dry as quickly as possible. Montana's new focus rings of a lesson that Cronon's Chicago, with its flare-up markets, could've used.

Article Link: Unto the City the Wildlife Did Journey
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/29/nyregion/29animals.html?ex=1149566400&en=00b43bb4ca84b48e&ei=5070&emc=eta1
I missed it if this article at all connected urban wildlife mishaps with urban sprawl. I feel some letter-to-the-editor potential in this article.

Article Link: Pimp My Grill
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/fashion/sundaystyles/28GRILLS.html?ex=1149566400&en=d7e4892f54bb83c2&ei=5070&emc=eta1
What would Kuntsler think of this!?!?! It's like wasteful suburban values exemplified!

Article Link: Europeans urged to act on climate
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5026094.stm

Article Link: A River Cuts a New Course, Leaving a New Hampshire Town High and Dry
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/29/us/29river.html?ex=1149566400&en=4770e574b13b95cc&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Wow. This story reminded me of Cronon's discussion of how Chicago fought so hard to reshape water resources in with river and lake. I think it would be fun to work with the crew investigating where the leak occurred and why!

Article Link: Animals 'devastate' UK songbirds
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5026222.stm
Another conflict of human habitat design. How do we reconcile our insistence upon domesticated non-native animal breeds and the desire for native wildlife? I hate that my cat can never go outside - her skills are so unused and she seems unfulfilled a la Desmond Morris. Yet, I feel a greater responsibility to the flourishing bird population that settles in the neighborhood.

Urban weeds

Look out for this one: cleavers (also know as Bedstraw) - it is 'sticky' and its seeds will cling to your clothes.

random spring photos

Ever since working on my city walk assignment I've been carrying the camera more. I wanted share a shot I snapped of Canada geese chicks. Every year that I've lived in Chicago I've seen them and every year I say to myself "I should get a photo of this;” I'm excited that I finally got the picture.

I also saw a squirrel with an unusually light-colored tail:

adding to Jeffville

Building off of the characteristics that Jeff has provided, I think one way that U.S. cities have tended to achieve attractive traits (i.e. having adequate employment, education, and resources) is through strong markets. Certainly all traits of any city are well interconnected (and important to consider) but economy is likely a central driving force simply due to the larger U.S. economy that depends on a mixed economy. Strong markets seem to be ones that are diversified allowing utilization of different financial resources available in a mixed economy. I’ve enjoyed the way Cronon has highlighted Chicago's own past love affair with the various markets.

One concern from the Cronon stories of Chicago's grain and lumber markets: If the economy behaves according to our universal rules for matter, and if the assumption about matter behaving in same ways at all spatial scales holds, is the entire capitalist mixed economy of the U.S. doomed to inevitably crash in on itself without external intervention/management? And if so, I wonder how well economists are doing in their struggle to further their knowledge of economic structures and process, not to mention translating any knowledge into successful management policies. I figure they must struggle similarly to those working in restoration and challenged with the same issue of translating tested research into viable management.

Specifically for this country I see another version of one of Cronon’s chapters being played out with the current oil controversy. This article was in the NYTimes today and once again I find myself stunned at how our government has put all eggs in one gigantic oily basket.

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Vote in House Seeks to Erase Oil Windfall

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

Published: May 19, 2006

WASHINGTON, May 18 — In an attempt to revoke billions of dollars worth of government incentives to oil and gas producers, the House on Thursday approved a measure that would pressure companies to renegotiate more than 1,000 leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The measure, approved 252 to 165 over the objections of many Republican leaders, is intended to prevent companies from avoiding at least $7 billion in payments to the government over the next five years for oil and gas they produce in publicly owned waters.

Scores of Republicans, already under fire from voters about gasoline prices, sided with Democrats on the issue. Eighty-five Republicans voted to attach the provision to the Interior Department's annual spending bill. The measure would require adoption by the Senate, which is less reflexively supportive of the energy industry than the House, and will almost certainly provoke intense opposition from oil and gas producers.

In a raucous debate on the House floor before the vote, Democrats argued that energy companies were shortchanging taxpayers at the same time that soaring prices for crude oil and natural gas had pushed industry profits to record highs.

"Oil companies want to play Uncle Sam for Uncle Sucker," said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who co-sponsored the amendment with Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat of New York. "Today, we must put an end to these senseless giveaways."

Republican leaders, who had hoped to avoid a vote on the issue, agreed that companies should not be getting lucrative incentives in times of high prices. But they insisted that the government had no right to reopen valid leases that it signed years ago with offshore drillers.

"These leases were valid legal contracts signed between the government and these companies in good faith," said Representative Mike Simpson, Republican of Idaho. "The Congress and the government should keep their word when they sign a contract."

In a separate defeat for energy companies, the House voted 279 to 141 to reject a provision that would lift a 25-year ban on oil drilling in coastal areas outside the western Gulf of Mexico.

Lawmakers also voted 217 to 203 to continue the prohibition on drilling just for natural gas.

The lopsided vote to rescind royalty incentives, which surprised many of the proposal's own sponsors, came three months after The New York Times disclosed that companies drilling in publicly-owned waters of the Gulf of Mexico were set to escape royalties on about $65 billion worth of oil and gas over the next five years.

The windfall stemmed in large part from a major error in about 1,000 leases that the Clinton administration signed with energy companies in 1998 and 1999.

To encourage drilling and exploration in water thousands of feet deep, the government offered to let companies avoid the standard royalties, usually 12 percent or 16 percent of sales, for large quantities of the oil and gas they produced.

But the incentives, which have been expanded in recent years by the Bush administration and by Congress, were supposed to stop as soon as prices for oil climbed above $34 a barrel and prices for natural gas climbed above $4 per thousand cubic feet.

For reasons that are now being investigated, the Interior Department omitted the restriction in 1,000 leases it signed in 1998 and 1999. In addition, the Bush administration offered extra "royalty relief" to companies that drilled very deep wells in very shallow water.

The lost royalties are just beginning to hit the government's bottom line.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, estimated in March that the royalty incentives could cost the government $20 billion over the next 25 years.

On top of that, at least one oil company, the Kerr-McGee Corporation, has sued the Bush administration in a test case to expand the "royalty relief" far more. If the Kerr-McGee lawsuit is successful, the G.A.O. estimated, the government could lose a total of $80 billion over the next 25 years.

The amendment approved on Thursday would try to force oil companies to revise their contracts and agree to pay full royalties when energy prices climb above the "threshold levels."

To give the government bargaining power, the bill would also prohibit the Interior Department from awarding any new leases to companies that refuse to revisit their leases.

The industry is itself divided on the issue. Some of the big integrated oil and gas companies, like Exxon Mobil, have already declared that they see no need for incentives in today's environment of high prices.

But many smaller producers are determined to retain their incentives and to fight for even more.

"Forcing renegotiations of contracts would be changing the rules in the middle of the game and would raise serious questions about contract law," said Dan Naatz, vice president for federal resources at the Independent Petroleum Association of America, a trade group that represents independent producers. The Bush administration did not take a position on the House measure, though senior officials have repeatedly said they were powerless to change valid contracts.

It is unclear whether the Senate will go along with the provision. But Democratic lawmakers have already been pushing.

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, filibustered for five hours last month in an attempt to attach a similar proposal to major spending bill. Senator Diane Feinstein, Democrat of California, has drafted a bill similar to the House measure.

Masting Maple

There appears to be an unusally heavy seed production of Norway maples this year (referred to as 'masting'). You have probably noticed it - keep on eye on this from year to year. Masting events can often be very consequential for the suvival of particular species. One hypothesis regarding the cause of masting is that by having an unusually large seed production in one year, the seeds evade predators - there is simply too many seeds for them all to be consumed!

Garter Snake

Okay - continuing the story that I told in class this morning. To the left if the unfortunate Evanstonian garter snake. I found him/her dead as I came home from work today. Although I did not perform a full autopsy, it looked as if s/he had been trodden on. The sad life of an urban snake. I have discovered that garter snakes can be common in waste areas of cities. This however the first time I have seen one outside of the forest preserves.

wĭl'dər-nĭs

By the time I described my tenth painting from the art museum, some patterns had definitely emerged among the adjectives I was using. My ten landscapes varied in season, number of people, types of habitats, and presence or absence of buildings, but they were all describable by similar terms: serene, peaceful, warm, etc. Really, the common thread throughout the paintings was the fact that all scenes were outdoors. So is that it? Has wilderness always just encompassed anything that exists outside of shelter? The more I think about defining wilderness, the more the term becomes like the “other.” The concept of “other” depends on being undefined – once you can define an entity you tame the entity, don’t you? At the very least you take the entity out of the shadows and shine a little light on it, and once something is no longer unknown the mystique certainly fizzles. Like the domestication of plants, animals, and entire landscapes, anything in those paintings identifiable as components of wilderness were not (as we’ve addressed in class) separate from man. In fact, all paintings depicted scenes of nature quite pleasing to human sensibilities. Surely this trend largely reflects the fact that the scenes are indeed paintings, and that some man (my paintings were all produced by men) had to deem the landscapes worthy of painting in the first place. Most paintings were also of landscapes that had been altered somehow by human use (e.g. erected villages, agriculture, and recreation). Maybe those painters would have seen their landscapes as distinct from wilderness, relegating wilderness to the outskirts surrounding these carved-out spaces of appreciated beauty. If I try to find comparable carved-out spaces in Chicago (little windows of nature that share the inviting and restful qualities of the paintings) I think of the parks and parkways around town. And while the outskirts of these Chicago natural spaces would differ from the outskirts of the landscapes from the 1800’s, I think both could be considered wilderness. Couldn’t a case be made for downtown Chicago being just as wild as the uncharted landscapes of the 19^th century? Stepping out of a quiet city park, back into the urban jungle with the roar of traffic, the almighty cry of automobile horns, the screeches of angry brakes, waves of crowded streets, etc. sure seems as daunting as being lost in a more traditional wilderness composed of plants and animals. So maybe wilderness can’t be defined by using physical distinctions such as vegetation, organic matter, mineral, bricks, or asphalt. I think wilderness is a state of mind, and I’m starting to feel a sneaking suspicion that the term can’t be defined by identifying what it is but instead by defining what it isn’t – like negative space. Or better yet, like the nighttime stars that aren’t visible when looked at directly but can still be seen quite clearly using peripheral vision.

Ecological research can augment restoration practice in urban areas degraded by invasive species – examples from Chicago Wilderness

Since I spent most of my weekend working on this - and it relates directly to our class material, I thought I might share this with you:

In one of the foundational gestures of American environmental action David Henry Thoreau walked out of town: “It is hard for me to believe” he informs us, “that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me” (Thoreau 1862). The wildness towards which Thoreau sauntered is the territory that subsequently and overwhelmingly attracted the attention of the nascent environmental movement and the sciences that ultimately supported it (Worster 1994; Nash 2001). Although wilderness has not been an exclusive preoccupation of ecologists and conservationists in the last century, the attraction of the pristine, the unmanaged, the spatially immense, and the wild can be traced through the development of both ecological theory and conservation practice. The fitful ontogeny of salient theorizing on succession (Cowles 1899; Niering 1987), and the early failure to recognize and adequately incorporate disturbance into ecological thinking (Pickett 1980; Sousa 1984; Hobbs et al. 1992) illustrates the difficulties of constructing a comprehensive and ultimately pragmatic ecological science when researchers are intellectually bedazzled by wilderness. A realization by ecologists concerning the theoretical (in)adequacy of their science (McIntosh 1987) for reasons that include, but not are not confined to those sketched above, was paralleled by a close scrutiny by social scientists and humanities scholars of the rigor, and the potential obfuscations arising from the very notion of wilderness. For instance, Denevan (1992) argued that the ‘pristine myth’ underestimated both the size of the human population and the extent of human disturbance in the Americas prior to 1492. Cronon (1996) and Callicott and Nelson (1998) collect some of this literature which purportedly finds wilderness and the thicket of thinking and practice that emerge from this notion to be intellectually insubstantial.

The sense that a preoccupation with wilderness has not provided a fully adequate substrate for ecology, for reasons of its factual sufficiency (areas regarded as wilderness may in a number of instances have been used by indigenous peoples) and its philosophical diffuseness (wilderness as an idea, and not just a place), does not, of course, minimize the importance of historical and ongoing work directed at locations at the lower end of a gradient of human use (whether designated as wilderness or not). However, I suggest that the mesmeric draw of the untrammeled has bequeathed to us an unbalanced spatial preoccupation in our ecological thinking – ecologically healthy lands are always elsewhere, rarely where the ecologist or conservation practitioner lives. The ecology of human dominated landscapes has been therefore been neglected at the expense of wildlands and this occlusion has delayed the emergence of an effective program of research to serve and inspect conservation practice in areas of high human density and land use.

There is now a recognition that this imbalance in ecology needs to be redressed, and a variety of well funded projects are underway designed to provide a firm theoretical and empirical basis for urban ecology (Pickett et al. 2001; Grimm et al. 2004). The importance of this reconfiguration in ecology is not just that it complements and challenges the discipline as a whole, but that it also provides an opportunity to calibrate theory developed in areas of lower human impact for its application in areas of high human density where the designation of land use is more highly variegated. It is worth mentioning that agro-ecology also required a reconfiguration of ecological sciences, deflecting the discipline from its contemplation of wild nature and towards some very specific outcomes, notably the resource efficient enhancement of the productivity of a monoculture (Jackson et al. 1989; Paul et al. 1989). In addition to the utility for the discipline itself of extending its ontological breadth into the novel anthro-habitats of the metropolis, applying the purview of ecology to the city may stimulate fresh perspectives on practices within the city. These include potential contributions to urban design, architecture, resource sustainability but also, and this is the primary focus of the remainder of this study, to urban biodiversity conservation (Jackson 2003). In return, a rigorously conceived urban ecology where the ecosystem and the social system are appropriated annealed may radicalize (and unify) ecology. From this new perspective wilderness may be seen as a special case, rather than the foundational case, against which all is compared and deemed, usually, to have failed. This view of wilderness would remain intellectually generous to the wild, but would be profoundly reorient our views.

Problems and opportunities associated with urban conservation have assumed a growing importance in the consciousness of environmental advocates (Harrison et al. 2002; Rudd et al. 2002; Crane et al. 2005). In some instances conservation in highly fragmented urban areas contributes in quantitatively significant ways to conservation goals. In the case of the larger Chicago metropolitan region, for example, a vigorous ecological restoration movement contributes in quantitatively meaningful ways to conservation in Illinois (Stevens 1996; Wang et al. 2001). This is because many of the higher quality residual fragments of presettlement habitat are preserved in the hinterland of the city, whereas, by virtue of the fertility of its prairies soils the extensive rural landscapes of the state are dominated by intensive agriculture with consequent depletion of biodiversity (Cronon 1992; Warner 1994). Even where the cumulative impact of urban conservation is modest in both its success and its extent compared to conservation in more traditional preserves, the efforts of urban conservations may contribute in an underappreciated way to conservation outcomes. This emerges from the intersection of the social system (individuals, institutions, beliefs, behavior etc.) that motivates and sustains the conservation effort in the city with the ecological system that these conservations seek to protect. Jordan (2003) refers to the multiple values that emerge from ecological restoration as a conservation strategy for both the people and the systems to which they attend. At the very least, urban conservation, even when limited in scale, gives urban dwellers an opportunity to see and to value native communities, and these citizens may subsequently be more inclined to promote support for conservation policy directed at locations distant from the seat of power.

Biodiversity in the city – Chicago remains paradigmatic here – is spatialized in ways that we have only in the last generation developed the tools to deal with (practical tools like Geographical Information Systems and theoretical ones like island biogeographic theory, patch dynamics, and metapopulation dynamics). Habitats of conservation value in cities are part of an interstitial ecology, and biodiversity is often where you least expect it: in pavement cracks and crevices (Chronopoulos et al. 2000), along transportation rights of way (Bowles et al. 2003), in disused or abandoned patches (Goode 1989): all invariably representing fragments of formerly contiguous pre-urbanized communities that are now arrayed along a gradient of historical land use and human impact (Kent et al. 1999). Because of the landscape context, urban habitat fragments are confronted with a suite of problems that make their long-term sustainability improbable without management. An analysis of threats to terrestrial habitats in Chicago identify hydrological changes, fragmentation, altered fire regimes, loss of structural diversity, nutrient loading, increased salinity, erosion and increase sedimentation, invasive species, overgrazing by deer, as well a variety of other human impacts (Council 1999). In the face of such problems, conservation strategies that merely set aside land of conservation interest are not destined to success and require, therefore, intervention in the form of management. Although the causes of habitat decline in their urban interstitial locations have been well characterized, and the stresses enumerated above may serve as a point of analytic departure elsewhere, it is clear that these factors are interrelated in complex ways. For instance, habitats that are highly fragmented, nutrient loaded, unburned (where burning is the historical maintenance pulse (sensu Odum (1969)) become vulnerable to exotic species invasion (Rejmanek 1996; Davis et al. 2000). Invaded sites loose structure diversity, become further invaded, and in some case are more susceptible to soil erosion (Crooks 2002). Although the tasks that face the restorationist are many (Packard et al. 1997) and the removal of invaders consumes a significant share of the work in most parts of the world where restoration is undertaken (D'Antonio et al. 2002), it is not always clear that this removal is effective or without unforeseen complications (Gordon 1998; Zavaleta et al. 2001). In particular, many invasive species may impose changes to ecosystem process and the invaded systems remain in resilient altered states even after the structural removal of the invaders (Suding et al. 2004). Ecological restoration has not, arguably, developed a reflexive practice that rapidly accommodates such challenges – where there are no clear goals set for restoration there is little incentive to evaluate outcomes and modify practice in the face of new challenges (Choi 2004). It is not at all apparent, on the other hand, that there has been a willingness by ecologists to draw upon the experiences of managers, a attentiveness to which would undoubtedly enhance development of theory.

With the confluence of the following features (ones discussed in a very preliminary way above): the inauguration of the discipline of urban ecology with its willingness to attend to both new theory and emerging practice, the recognition that metropolitan areas contain habitat that may have a quantitatively or qualitatively important role to play in global biodiversity conservation, the realization that this task requires active management, rather than passive preservation, the establishment of professional cadre of restorationists working on conservation lands, and the emergence of a strong volunteer restoration movement to serve the needs of management goals, one might feel cautiously optimistic about conservation in these circumstances. However, despite these promising convergences there are fundamental obstacles to success – gaps in knowledge about species and processes in urban habitats, inadequate monitoring of the results of management, limited public understanding of the aims of urban conservation, and the poverty of predictive models of invasion. This list, not intended to be exhaustive, is sufficiently ample to underscore an obvious phenomenon, there exists no productive relationship between the emerging science undergirding ecosystem management and the management practice itself. That is not to say that no affability exists between researchers and land managers there is however a pattern of failed engagement between these two constituencies (Huenneke 1995; Underwood 1995). Mary Midgely (2001) illuminates the problem. “The conclusion” she states, “is that problems are not private property. They belong to anyone who can help to solve them. The advance of specialization makes it harder to grasp this these today, but it certainly does not make it less necessary.” Midgely, a philosopher, is in this instance referring to ‘the problem of consciousness’ which she claims “is beginning to worry scholars in a number of disciplines, including those in which, until lately, that word was not supposed to be heard at all…. [S]pecialists will have to try to cooperate over them, hard though that may be.” One does not need to look hard for expression of exasperation regarding the difficulty of tackling inherently interdisciplinary problems even in more immediately applied circumstances. Lefebvre (2003), an urban sociologist, brings the matter closer to home: “This complexity makes interdisciplinary cooperation essential… [However] [t]he illusion of such studies, and the myths surrounding them, have been abundantly criticized. Participants at colloquia…[r]arely … agree on the words and terms they use, and even less rarely on the underlying concepts…. Confrontation and disagreement pass for success.” The challenge that awaits urban ecology and restoration ecology as sciences where these have practical outcomes in mind is to develop an optimal and useful relationship with land managers, conservation volunteers, landowners and policy advocates. The fact that such relationships are difficult ones should embolden us to try harder.
In the remainder of this paper I will develop a case study, that of the impact of Rhamnus cathartica on ecosystem properties in relictual woodlands in metropolitan Chicago. The example demonstrates the degree to which restoration practice can provide stimulating questions for ecological research and how the results of this work may complicate restoration practice. When results relevant to practice emerge from restoration ecology, it is inherently difficult to implement them into practice, for reasons identified above, and further discussed below. I will conclude with suggestions for developing a reciprocal model for moving theory and practice forward, in a manner that may be useful for both sides of the debate. The region in which this research is being conducted is referred to as Chicago Wilderness. The region embraces 200,000 acres of openlands throughout in Southeastern Wisconsin, Northeastern Illinois, and Northwestern Indiana, an area, perhaps surprisingly, with a rich natural history (Greenberg 2002). Chicago Wilderness also refers to the coalition of over 180 organizations (land agencies, museums, universities, arboreta, planning agencies, municipalities, etc.) that work towards preservation in this region (www.chicagowilderness.org)