I’ve been thinking so much about what to say in my last column that I’m beginning to identify with Neil Armstrong. Neil had to come up with something memorable to mark his landing on the moon, and even though my audience is a bit smaller than his, I did feel a need to deliver something extraordinary to mark my departure after ten years of writing Field & Street. But so far all my ideas are about as striking as “Gee, it’s great to be here on the moon.” So I think I will just offer a little look back at the past decade and skip the exalted phrases.
But here I am in Seattle. And houses are so expensive we may have to move again. My expectations are that I will finally come to rest somewhere around Nome.
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Of course we don’t want everything to change. Ten years ago we were fighting to preserve the last of the Calumet marshes. A lot of people thought we were wasting our time, and a lot of active environmentalists didn’t even know there were marshes hidden among the steel mills on Chicago’s southeast side.
The concerns of both parties in this coalition broadened as time went on, and when Daley announced his airport proposal both environmental groups and neighborhood organizations were able to speak out quickly and effectively with a high degree of unity. Everybody knew everybody else, and people had been gathering information for some years–information they could now put to use against the airport. The airport idea is apparently gone now, but the coalition endures.
Today the North Branch Prairie Project is a sort of all-volunteer conglomerate. Gangs of 50 or more show up for workdays. Others are monitoring populations of plants, butterflies, and birds. A gardening project designed to provide a continuing supply of seeds involves hundreds. A growing stream of publications pours from North Branch presses, and the group also sponsors large conferences on prairie and savanna restoration.
However, I will be in Seattle. All Seattle thinks it’s way ahead of the rest of the country in environmental protection, but the fact is you can’t spit without hitting a Superfund site. Boeing pretty much runs the place, and nothing happens in the area of pollution control unless they want it to. They are constantly threatening to move their operations out of the area, so the politicians are fearful of offending them by suggesting it might be nice if they obeyed the law. Public agencies save face by carefully avoiding the collection of too much data. Meanwhile many of Puget Sound’s shellfish beds are closed by pollution, and the salmon runs get smaller and smaller.
