By Harold Henderson
If it were a child, the Indiana Dunes Environmental Learning Center wouldn’t be out of diapers yet. But since it opened on October 5, 1998, more than 3,000 students from 32 schools–roughly 300 of them from Chicago–have participated in its programs. The vast majority have been fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders who spend two and and a half days there. The center has a big dining room and ten heated and air-conditioned cabins with eight beds each, so full capacity is two sessions a week of 70 kids and 10 adults. A high school program, more buildings, and heavy-duty fund-raising are in the works. One-third of the center’s $600,000 annual budget comes from the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore–the national park in which it’s located–one-third from student fees, and the rest from private contributions.
Fourteen thousand years ago
Good environmentalists pay close attention to where they are. (Before students come to visit, the learning center asks them to draw a picture of a familiar outdoor place from memory in their journals, then visit it and add details they left out.) The duty to pay attention applies whether you’re in a spectacular place like Yosemite or a seemingly barren place like the dunes. Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore–at 15,000 acres, less than one percent of the size of Yellowstone–is one of the smallest national parks. Nevertheless it ranks seventh in number of native species, because many plants here are at the extreme north, south, east, or west end of their ranges. The dunes are rich in history too: it was here that University of Chicago botanist Henry Chandler Cowles did the research that helped define the discipline of ecology in the late 19th century and led him to publish “The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan” in the Botanical Gazette in 1899.
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But the learning center has an even more compelling reason to stick close to home. Northwest Indiana exemplifies the mainstream environmental lesson the center seeks to pass on–that green money and green nature can find ways to live together.
For decades Chicago and northwest Indiana advocates of a “quality environment” duked it out with the advocates of a “quality economy.” The grassroots environmentalists–led by the Save the Dunes Council since 1952–used lobbying, picketing, publicity, land purchases, local ordinances, and lawsuits to try to stop industrial development of the dunes. If they hadn’t done so, the entire southern shore of Lake Michigan, aside from a few pricey residential enclaves, would now be as industrialized and inaccessible as the lakeshore in downtown Waukegan. Even now, just 13 of the 45 miles of Indiana coast are parkland.
If Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore is the lengthened shadow of Paul Douglas, the Environmental Learning Center is the lengthened shadow of Botts. She could pass for your white-haired grandmother–provided that your grandmother is an indefatigable policy wonk who seems to know everybody and who revels in telling stories about past skirmishes, such as the time in 1981 when, as a lame-duck federal appointee, she was able to give a gathering of Michigan editors the scoop that James Watt, Reagan’s secretary of the interior, was about to try to deauthorize four national parks, including Indiana Dunes and Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes.
