It was on August 16–the Wednesday morning after the family got home from vacation–that Karen Pritchard first heard the sound of trouble: “I got up in the morning, and I heard noises that sounded like the garbage pickup. But then I realized it wasn’t Thursday.”
“The kids know the paths, how to walk through it,” says Karen. “The adults don’t. There’s an island out there where they go camping.” At the end near the golf course is a pond with some open water, and Karen has occasionally seen a rowboat out on it.
When she’s not walking in front of bulldozers, Karen Pritchard teaches remedial reading to first- through fifth-graders at Aurora’s inner-city Hill School. She has just finished taking graduate courses for a master’s equivalency at Northern Illinois University and the National College of Education. She speaks in a precise, self-assured way, and although she’s not physically very imposing, some of that teacherly definiteness must have come across to the men in the bulldozer.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Chances are Pritchard would have checked out the strange noise in any case. But if she hadn’t just joined the Illinois Sierra Club’s swamp squad in May, she wouldn’t have known what to do next. (Other than call the local police, which proved useless anyway: they told her that they had never heard of such a law and could do nothing.) As it was, on the following Friday she went down to the Loop and reported a possible violation of section 404 of the Clean Water Act to the Chicago district office of the Army Corps of Engineers.
If the Corps has had too few people with too much to do, the environmental movement generally has had the opposite problem: too many people with not enough to do. Not everyone can go to Springfield or Washington to demonstrate or lobby, especially as the arguments become increasingly technical. Ken Stoffel was introduced to the movement through the National Wildlife Federation: “But they didn’t have anything local that I could get involved in.”
The first person Karen Pritchard called that Wednesday was Stoffel. He told her that no permit had been applied for in the case of her neighborhood swamp.
When a developer applies for a permit, the Corps sends out a public notice and “the public” has 30 days in which to comment. Although anyone who asks can be placed on the Corps mailing list to get notices of permits applied for and granted, Stoffel has for the time being had them routed to himself to pass along to squad members. So when a volunteer sees suspicious bulldozing, Stoffel is the first person he or she calls, to see if there is a permit. The routine, however, is for Stoffel to send notice of an application to the appropriate squad member, “so that they can go check on it and see if the plan looks good.”
