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By Stephen Pyne
Twice over the past 20,000 years the Illinois landscape has been destroyed and rebuilt. In the first age the agent of change was ice, mounded into sheets and leveraged outward through a suite of periglacial processes from katabatic winds to ice-dam-breaching torrents. The ice obliterated everything, leaving as its legacy a geomorphic matrix of dunes, swales, moraines, loess, great lakes and landscape-dissecting streams. For the second, the agent was iron, forged into plows and then into rails. Coal replaced climate as a motive force, and people pushed aside the planetary rhythms of Milankovitch cycles and cosmogenic carbon cycles as a prime mover. They left behind a surveyed landscape of squared townships.
The first event worked through a geologic matrix; the second, a biological one; and they were equally thorough. All the state went under ice at least once; the last outpouring, the Wisconsin glaciation, pushed south from Lake Michigan and covered perhaps a third. The frontier of agricultural conversion put nearly all of the state to the plow, or where rocky moraines prevented it, to the hoofs of livestock. When it ended, only one-tenth of one percent of the precontact landscape remained more or less intact. Less than one acre out of a thousand held its founding character, and that acre was itself minced into a thousand, scattered pieces.
In both ice age and iron age, however, life revived after the extinction with fire as an informing presence – fire in the hands of people. The biological recolonization of the landscape after the ice had fire in its m ix and expressed itself as oak savannas, tallgrass prairies, and grassy wetlands, stirred by routine burning. Fire was a universal catalyst; in particular, prairie and fire became ecological symbionts. The reconstruction of the second landscape has relied on industrial combustion, fueled by the fossil fallow of biomass.
But those intent on sparing, or actively restoring, the former landscape must appeal to open burning. A fire sublimated through a tractor does not yield the same effects as one let loose to free-burn through big bluestem. The regeneration of such settings is troubling – unstable and scattered, an inchoate genesis still in the making, its reliance on fire both essential and challenged.
The indigenes at the time of European contact, the Potawatomi, were known variously as the people of the place of the fire, or the keepers of the fire, because they maintained the great council fire around which the regional confederation of tribes gathered. But that fire did not stay within the council circle: it spread throughout the landscape, a constant among the diversity of grasses, trees, shrubs, ungulates, small mammals, birds, and insects that congregated around the informing prairie. In time the Potawatomi became known equally as the people of the prairie since the one meant the other. Remove fire, and the prairie disappeared. Remove prairie, and free-ranging fire lost its habitat. Remove the keepers of the fire and both prairie and fire vanish into overgrown scrub, weedy lots, or feral flame.
Restoration is a slippery concept. In some places it means mostly finding ways to preserve and enhance relicts that have survived the battering. In other places it means an outright regeneration, or a reconversion of farmland to prairie. But at its core it involves sparing the pieces and saving the processes that connect them. In Illinois, once the prairie state, now a factory farm, prescribed burning is what connects those pieces, and prescribed burners are the agents that join them.
Kankakee
The unity of the Kankakee sands region lies in one of those convulsive geologic aftershocks of glaciation. As the Wisconsin ice receded, it melted, and the meltwaters ponded behind berms of moraine or lobes of adjacent ice sheets. Eventually those dams themselves melted or were breached, and the impounded waters drained out. This often happened catastrophically in the form of floods or, in local parlance, torrents. At Kankakee the outrush left a scoured landscape of sand dunes and wet swales and incised streams. It became an archipelago of soils and landforms whose connection looks back to events 17,000 years in the past.
Each site took on additional characteristics as the result of its recolonization and, during the second – the settlement - torrent, the ways in which it was farmed, drained, grazed, or subdivided. Historically the lowlands were marshy and grassy, and the uplands more forested. But extensive draining converted the swales into corn fields, while routine burning kept the uplands a woody savanna – the largest remnant of extant oak savanna anywhere. Critically, while grazed, the uplands were not plowed: their soil structure remained intact. And, exceptionally, they continued to burn.
The great northward migration of African-Americans had an echo in a secondary outflow from Chicago, a city some found too alien and job-poor, into subdivided lots around Pembroke. There they settled down amid old habits, including casual fire, and an absence of government services, not least fire protection. The lack of trash collection, in particular, meant they burned refuse, and these fires frequently escaped to kindle the countryside. The surrounding sand ridges burned roughly every 1.5-2 years. An area of extreme economic poverty became, paradoxically, a place of exceptional biotic wealth.
Today that miscellany of missed places constitutes an atoll of natural areas, some 32,000 acres in all, allocated among 33 designated sites, hopefully labeled the Greater Kankakee Sands Ecosystem. The archipelago includes Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area, Des Plaines Conservation Area, Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, Wilmington Shrub Prairie Nature Preserve, Laughton Preserve, Mazonia-Braidwood State Fish and Wildlife Area, Iroquois Woods Nature Preserve, Mskoda Land and Water Reserve, Sweet Fern Savanna Land and Water Reserve, Kankakee Sands Restoration Project, Willow Slough Fish and Wildlife Area, and with those sites a roll call of Illinois conservation organizations that ranges from national agencies to state and county bureaus to NGOs; the U.S. Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, The Nature Conservancy.
In all this - remnants scattered like lithic flakes, restoration projects sprouting from corn stubble, a variety of institutions as diverse and dispersed as their biotic relicts - Kankakee is a cameo of the Illinois conundrum. No single site, institution, or vision contains it all or organizes the pieces. There is no commanding height; not topographically, not institutionally, not intellectually. A federal presence is muted, quarantined on checkerboard hills in the far south. There is no domineering private landowner - no Weyerhaeuser, no Ted Turner – to deform the space-time of land use. There is no counterforce to challenge the industrial plow. What the pieces and players share is a variously defined commitment to nature protection. They are, like the Potawatomi, peoples of the prairie, which means they are also peoples of fire.
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