The Buffalo Grove Prairie is a typical Illinois natural area: a long, narrow strip of native black-soil prairie sandwiched between the Soo Line tracks on the east and the bare clay of a construction site on the west. Overhead, supported on two rows of steel towers, two Commonwealth Edison high-tension lines run the length of the prairie. Along the western edge is a third line supported on wooden poles.
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But last Sunday morning, the most remarkable sight on the Buffalo Grove Prairie was a group of about 50 people armed with rakes, shovels, and wheelbarrows spread out along a narrow strip of bare earth that marked a gaping wound running the length of the prairie. The wound was the result of Commonwealth Edison’s latest assault on this splendid remnant of our natural landscape, and the people were volunteers helping to heal the wound, donating a Sunday of hard labor to a midwestern equivalent of cleaning the oil from the fur of Alaskan sea otters.
The trouble had begun a couple of weeks earlier, when a contractor working for the utility had entered the prairie with a backhoe and dug a trench right through the heart of the area. Not satisfied with this bit of destruction, the contractor compounded the problem by dumping the spoil from his ditch on the prairie, burying populations of at least two endangered orchids, the small white lady’s slipper and the prairie white fringed orchid.
In order to dig on village property, Com Ed needed a permit, which they did not have when they started digging. When I talked to William Darling, district superintendent of the northwest area for Com Ed, he first told me that the street had been vacated and the land now belonged to the electric company. When I told him that what he was saying was contrary to what I had heard, he backed up a bit and said that while the deal was not completely worked out, the street “will be vacated in the near future.”
The Nature Conservancy first suggested a protection plan for Buffalo Grove in 1982, but so far nothing has been worked out. Com Ed has had the conservancy’s latest proposal in hand for the past 18 months and has not responded to it. Maybe this latest incident will generate enough bad press to spur the utility into some kind of resolution.
