My first visit to the Calumet marshes was in the summer of 1982. My guide for the trip was Larry Balch, an expert birder who is now the immediate past president of the American Birding Association.
I volunteered myself as a delegate for the Chicago Audubon Society to the Lake Calumet Study Committee, a coalition of conservation organizations that had been put together by Dr. James Landing, a geography professor at Circle. Jim had started the committee even before Waste Management bought the big marsh, and he has tenaciously stayed with this issue ever since.
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Meanwhile, Waste Management had applied to the Army Corps of Engineers for a permit to convert the big marsh into a landfill. I couldn’t get Chicago Audubon members out to demonstrations, but writing letters is traditionally something that middle-class environmentalists are good at, so we got a large number of comments submitted to the Corps.
And after all these years and all our battles, things did seem to be looking better. Clem Balanoff, who made the state of the local environment a major focus of his campaign, beat out the forces of Vrdolyak for state representative from Calumet, and even Vrdolyak’s people saw the light and came out against more dumps. Last year, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District agreed to provide at least temporary protection for marshlands it owns east of Lake Calumet. Waste Management even offered to preserve its land at the big marsh at 116th and Torrence. The city made a rather tentative move in the direction of recycling, and a new ordinance may push it further in that direction and thus reduce the need for new landfill space. Cleanup operations began at the Paxton Lagoons, the most horribly polluted of the old dumps. As I say, things were looking up.
