It may not be the habitat of the endangered Coho salmon or the site of a proposed hydroelectric dam, but the Chicago area’s Fox River has gotten someone’s attention. The dubious distinction? The Fox was named one of America’s ten most threatened rivers by the Washington-based river advocacy group American Rivers.
While small rivers don’t usually get the attention that larger western rivers get, the Fox is fairly typical of what the group considers to be a threatened river. Six of the ten rivers on this year’s list are threatened primarily by suburban sprawl; environmentalists say that what is putting the Fox at risk is a combination of this unchecked suburban growth and what they consider to be state regulatory inaction.
One hundred and fifteen long and flowing miles, from southern Wisconsin through northern Illinois, the Fox is the centerpiece and raison d’etre of towns such as Elgin, St. Charles, and Geneva. More than eight million people live within 100 miles of it and it’s the source of drinking water for more than 200,000 people.
It’s easy to forget that even within this century, a body of water such as a river was crucial to the development of a town. Houses were built along the Fox for reasons other than the scenic view and recreational opportunities. The Fox meant not only drinking water and water to bathe in, but also electric power and transportation. It meant refuge from the city for those seeking a quieter life. And the uses flowed with the cycle of the seasons. In the winter, ice for the refrigeration of meats and dairy products from area farms was cut out of the river and stored in insulated sheds, where it remained frozen throughout the year.
Today the Fox is one of the most heavily used recreational areas in the Midwest. The bicycle path that winds along the Fox from Crystal Lake to Aurora is one of the most popular bike paths in the state. Fishing enthusiasts cast their lines from its banks and crossing bridges, catching carp and other fish. In Illinois, the Fox flows through the Chain of Lakes, various nature preserves and forest preserves, and other protected areas.
A trip to the Fox today betrays the idea that this is a dying or even threatened river; and even environmentalists admit that the Fox is in better shape today than it was 30, or even 20 years ago. In the 1960s, it was a dumping ground for sewage and industrial waste. The Clean Water Act set standards for the discharge of sewage and industrial pollutants, and "the Fox River really benefitted," says Rob Moore, executive director of the Prairie Rivers Network, a Champaign-based river advocacy group.
The Fox is not alone in this regard; other nearby urban rivers like the Des Plaines and the Chicago show similar improvements.
Jim Park, Chief of the Bureau of Water at the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA), wonders why, if most agree that the Fox has cleaned up in 20 years, the river was listed.
"I’m not sure why they singled out the Fox River because it is a very high quality waterway and it has been improving in the face of suburban development," he says. "If anything, I think it’s a poster child for how you can maintain high water quality in the face of urban development."
"It’s not so much that at the present time there’s something wrong with the Fox," says Moore, whose group was among others that nominated the Fox for inclusion on the list. He explains that the threat to the river is not based on its current condition but on indications that it may be returning to its degraded past. His group sees "problems on the horizon as a result of urban sprawl and a rapidly growing population."
In the last 20 years, the population of the Fox watershed has increased by 30 percent and the amount of wastewater discharged into the river has increased even more than population, by 57 percent. As the western Chicago suburbs continue to expand, wastewater treatment plants will have to treat even more waste water than today, 50 percent more sewage by the year 2010 than they were responsible for in 1990.
But the threat does not come from the population increase alone. If the additional people lived in the same way as those who lived there in the past, the increase would not be as big a threat. But the way the area is used has changed.
The suburban sprawl of the past 20 to 30 years has meant cars, lots of cars; the amount of auto traffic in the past 20 years has outpaced the population growth by two and a half times, increasing by 75 percent. For every mile driven in the suburbs near the Fox River in 1979, two and a half are driven today.
More driving means more paved roads, more parking lots and less area that can soak up rainwater when it falls. What used to be farm fields are now inhabited by strip malls, apartment complexes, and subdivisions. These areas are usually landscaped with standard lawns, which act like a thin sponge; a lawn is quickly saturated. Subsequently, it repels rainwater, which is often contaminated by fertilizers and chemicals.
"When we cover the earth with cement and grass — our outdoor rug — we essentially turn what used to be an absorption system to repelling the water," says Nancy Williamson of the river advocacy group Friends of the Fox River. "We’re depleting our discharge areas but we’re also sending the water that we do get directly into the rivers in a very polluted state." Moore adds that a population increase means a "hardening of the watershed, in which open space or farmland is paved over."
It’s the typical sprawl scenario that has crept across the country — old, historic downtowns crumble while malls thrive; homes near the downtown center decay while subdivisions and their shiny new homes, garage-face forward, are sold-out before completion. Distances between home and work, home and friends, home and the grocery store have increased. This development causes significant problems for water quality.
In a way the river’s serenity and beauty have become its own undoing. Too many people want to get away to live near its banks or near the fading rural character of its watershed. Some of the nation’s best farmland is being sold in small lots for subdivisions and industrial parks. The irony is that those who move there may be destroying what they moved there for.
"Essentially it’s a lack of any kind of planned growth," says Williamson, who has lived in the city of Crystal Lake for 25 years.
Growth affects the river in many ways. Take one unintended consequence of the seemingly innocuous suburban lawn. Lawn fertilizer applied even some distance away eventually makes its way into the river, harming fish and other aquatic animals. When fertilizer runs off lawns after a rainfall, it feeds the river’s algae. This algae growth cuts off sunlight to the bottom, which in turn kills the plants that generate the oxygen that fish need to breathe.
Dams along the river complicate the situation. Dams make for better boating and recreation by slowing the flow of the river. But in causing the flow of the river to slow, they aid the growth of algae, which grows best in still water. In many places the river acts less like a river and more like a chain of small lakes, which in some ways is what it has become.
On a sunny Sunday afternoon in early May, recent rainfall gave the Fox the kick it needs to behave quite river-like; white water foamed at the bottom of the Carpentersville dam where about half a dozen fishermen ritually cast out and reeled in their lines, some catching something, most not. After the dam, the river flowed quickly, though not quite in reckless abandon. Later in the summer, however, the water level will drop, and the dam will slow the river substantially; if there’s not enough rain, it will stop and indeed form two separate bodies of water.
Moore says that because of the way that the Fox is dammed for recreational use, certain standards that apply to still bodies of water such as lakes but not rivers should apply to the Fox.
One such standard the Fox would exceed if applied is the phosphorus standard for lakes. Phosphorus is another nutrient that feeds algae. Moore says that such a standard should apply to the Fox because it "is one of the most heavily dammed streams in the state [and] behaves more like a series of lakes than a flowing river."
Moore gives the Illinois EPA credit for doing a "good job of cleaning up some of the state’s more polluted waters. You could point to the Des Plaines, the Chicago, the Illinois River, they’re in much better shape than they were 20 years ago."
"What the Illinois EPA has not done a good job of," says Moore, "is protecting the state’s highest quality streams, protecting those streams that have seen significant quality improvements, and maintaining that high degree of water quality."
Park denies any charge that his agency is not protecting the state’s waterways. "What I’m concerned about is the language I’m hearing from American Rivers and other groups that say the Fox is deteriorating, that the state, local, and federal entities are not doing their jobs," he says. "I think that’s clearly not the case. The data clearly shows that it’s not true."
Moore says the Illinois EPA needs to develop a plan for a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) of pollutants not only for the Fox but for many other water bodies as well. A TMDL watershed study first identifies water bodies that are not meeting water quality standards or are otherwise impaired. TMDL developers then look at the pollutants or sources of impairment for that water body and find the sources of pollution entering that water body.
They quantify how much pollution is coming from each source and assess a maximum amount each landowner and municipality is allowed. They also offer an amount by which each needs to cut back on pollutants in order to meet water quality goals.
But Park disagrees that a TMDL study is needed for the Fox. "TMDLs are requirements at the federal level, we have to develop those for river systems and lakes that have significant impairment of their designated uses" he says. "The Fox does not have such impairments of its uses so TMDL calculations are unnecessary for the Fox River."
Can water quality measurements tell the whole story? Can they say whether a river is at risk or still making a vibrant comeback? With fewer and fewer open spaces left, bodies of water like the Fox River that used to offer a place of solitude become crowded; the sound of children on bicycles now mingles in the ear with the din of cars and semi-trucks along Route 31. To those peddling subdivision homes and industrial sites, a strip of "nature" like the Fox River becomes another entertainment option, sold in the same sentence as a multiplex theater or the newest strip mall.
If the Fox is threatened, it’s threatened in the same way as the land around it is threatened. In a rush for development, the Chicago suburbs that hug the banks of the Fox River are giving up the last vestiges of open, Midwestern land that made them unique. They are now a part of the metropolitan economy. That puts them in danger of becoming a slice of "Generica," a land of highways in which farms have been shuttered and water quality reduced to measurements in parts per million.