By Michael Miner
“Illinois was called the ‘Prairie State,’ and we have so little of the native prairies and open woods left, especially in this region,” she continues. “We should revere them, instead of fearing our prairies, or our wetlands, or our marshes. This is part of our history, and it’s a living history, a still evolving history. We read and we listen to music, but we also go out into nature. We are a part of nature.”
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Chicago Wilderness, the council, was formed about a year and a half ago by 34 public and private institutions wishing to act in concert to protect and restore the region’s natural environment. Major players include the Field Museum, the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Brookfield Zoo, and the Forest Preserve District of Du Page County, whose representatives compose the magazine’s executive committee. Also in the ranks are the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, the Chicago Park District, the Shedd Aquarium, the Army Corps of Engineers–and this past Monday the Argonne National Laboratory in Batavia and the Shirley Heinze Environmental Fund of Michigan City joined, raising the number of members to 56. Will so many comrades find a way to stay united behind more than the broadest principles of conservation and education? We’ll see.
A recent issue of Outside carried a long account of “the most dangerous national forest in America,” Los Angeles’s Angeles National Forest, where “two or three dozen…corpses turn up each year.” A local version of the tale’s not out of the question, but it’s not exactly what we’re about, says Shore, whose lead stories in issue one concerned the “rebirth of the oak woods” and a survey of endangered species. “In the Chicago wilderness, sure there’s some wild and crazy activity that occurs. But one of the biggest threats to biodiversity has to do with years of benign neglect by management agencies and by the general public.
“You don’t get nothing in this world for having an advanced degree,” said Williams, who reportedly “sobbed” bitterly as the deal was reached. “You don’t get nothing but a slap in the face.”
The other reason to let Williams’s quote stand is that it’s a model of communication. There’s no way to read what she said and not know exactly what she meant and exactly how she felt. She made herself crystal clear. The papers should have been half as coherent reporting the climax of the Williams-Taxman story as Williams was sounding off about it.
This AP story ran everywhere of course, and many other papers whose coverage was homegrown said the same. For example, the Los Angeles Times reported in its lead that “a group of black civil rights leaders has agreed to pay [Taxman] more than $308,000 to drop her lawsuit.” Cokie Roberts announced on Nightline that a “white teacher suing for reverse discrimination” was paid off “to get her to drop her case.”
