Review: Everything You Never Knew about Chicago and Nature, City of Lake and Prairie
- Epidemics: It took three deadly epidemics of cholera in 1832, 1849, and 1866 before Chicago officials started to take action to address the city’s water quality. Even so, it wasn’t until the 1920s that fewer people died of outbreaks of contagion—cholera, smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough, tuberculosis, pneumonia, typhoid and dysentery—than chronic illnesses, a key measure of a fully modern city. (“Cholera and the Evolution of Early Chicago,” Keating and Brosnan)
- Flooding: Chicago is built on a flat landscape close to the water table, leading to a tendency to flood. Between 1945 and 1965, that flooding grew to epic proportions for two reasons—the beginning of a wetter period of climate and two decades of suburban sprawl that put buildings, highways and other structures in a newly developed space of 450 square miles. That was as much space as had been developed in this location over the previous 150 years. “In fulfilling the American Dream, suburban sprawl has the unintended consequence of turning a prairie wetland into a disaster zone on a regional scale.” (“Too Much Water,” Harold L. Platt)
- Hidden risks: A spot along the Chicago and Sanitary Ship Canal at Romeoville, 35 miles southwest of Chicago, is the disguised and hidden intersection of three environmental risks to the quality of Lake Michigan water—a binational crude oil pipeline that rises out of the soil to soar over the canal, an electric fish barrier system to protect the lake from two fish species known as Asian carp (“a school of aquatic bullies”) and the canal itself through which, in a controversial way, still disputed by Canada, diverts water away from the lake. Together, they form a disguised infrastructure that “hides intentional environmental and economic risk-taking.” (“Water, Oil, and Fish,” Daniel MacFarlane and Lynne Heasley)
- Forest-shapers: The Chicago region’s majestic Cook County Forest Preserve District was built and shaped during the Depression by low-paid workers under a variety of federal and state programs. “In the decade just before World War II, thousands of poor and working-class men materially changed land on the outskirts of Chicago, and in the process realized local leaders’ plans for an urban retreat capable of absorbing visits from the city’s 4 million residents... These city dwellers made the Forest Preserves...” (“Work Relief Labor in the Cook County Forest Preserves, 1931–1942,” Natalie Bump Vena)
- Pollution: “In stark contrast to the present, smoky skies and dirty water dominated much of Chicago’s physical environment from the 1940s to 1970s.” In other words, just half a century ago, the city’s air was bad to breathe, and its waters were routinely poisoned. (“Air and Water Pollution in the Urban-Industrial Nexus,” Steven H. Corey)