In his 1909 Plan of Chicago, the architect Daniel Burnham advocated the creation of five peninsulas along the Chicago lakeshore for public parkland. Due to lack of funding, only one was built — Northerly Island, which parallels the lakeshore downtown for about three quarters of the length of Grant Park (ninety-one acres in all), from the museum campus at 12th Street to McCormick Place, enclosing Burnham Harbor. If you didn’t realize Northerly Island was a park, you shouldn’t feel too bad, because it hasn’t served as one since 1946, when the Chicago Park District leased the property to the Chicago Department of Public Works for an airport. The lease was to last fifty years, at $1 per year. The airport became known as Meigs Field.
When the lease expired in 1996, Mayor Daley suggested closing Meigs Field and converting Northerly Island to parkland. Unfortunately, then-governor Jim Edgar had other ideas, and sued the city to keep Meigs from closing (two of the main groups who use Meigs Field are government officials flying to and from Springfield and private pilots). Various organizations weighed in on both sides, including the state legislature; tempers flared, and a lot of ink was spilled. In early 1997, Daley and Edgar reached a compromise: Meigs would remain open for five years, and after that, the state would agree not to interfere with the city’s plans for Northerly Island. Daley said he’d stick with his park plans even if they had to be delayed: "I’m not going to change my mind.... I am firmly committed to having more open space in Chicago and on the lakefront."
Less than a year from now, the final curtain is due to fall on Meigs Field. Given that the airport has been losing passengers for years — the number of passengers using Meigs Field declined by 42 percent from 1980 to 1996 — few people other than highly-placed state employees and wealthy pilots who own their own planes will shed a tear when it closes. Given the scarcity of open space in downtown Chicago, and Northerly Island’s proximity to the museum campus, Daley’s right that it makes sense to convert the peninsula to parkland.
But what sort of park should we build on Northerly Island? Daley’s plan, endorsed in 1996 by the City Council and the Chicago Park District, involved building a park around the themes of earth, water, and sky, with educational exhibits constructed in concert with the neighboring Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, and Adler Planetarium. The exhibits, playgrounds, and an Art Park would ring an open meadow; 12th Street Beach would be doubled in size; and a lagoon would be created for year-round fishing. Daley’s plans also called for the creation of a seventeen-acre prairie, which would serve as the site for overnight camping trips for inner-city kids, and for a garden that would be accessible to all visitors (drawing on the Chicago Botanic Garden’s award-winning Enabling Garden), including those with mobility or vision impairments. Even sound would be a part of the new park, with wave noises piped in from the lake.
Last month, the Lake Michigan Federation (LMF) released its own vision for a Northerly Island park. They called their proposed park "Sanctuary Point" because it would provide a peaceful haven not just for Chicagoans looking to escape the hubbub of the city, but for native plants and animals and migrating birds as well. The name also harks back to Burnham’s call for the lakeshore to be "a haven — an urban sanctuary — for people and nature."
In the LMF’s vision for Sanctuary Point, "the land and waterscape is composed of wetlands, prairies, and dune ridges that mimic the ecosystems before Chicago’s settlement. The different habitats attract fish, birds, and small mammals. Plantings are primarily native to the region and provide high-quality habitat for these creatures to forage, spawn, nest, and find shelter, while requiring little maintenance.... Visitors from around the world ramble over wetlands by way of suspended boardwalks, causing no damage to the florae and faunae, or wander on inviting pathways with occasional information kiosks and benches. Small harbors are provided for children and adults alike to snorkel and see Lake Michigan fish, mussels, and other aquatic organisms. Students, researchers, nature enthusiasts, and anyone looking for solace or to understand Chicago’s most magnificent resource before the city existed — the lakefront — revel in these remarkable surroundings."
The current airport terminal building would be reused for a Lake Michigan Museum, featuring exhibits on Great Lakes nature, weather, and shipwrecks. Because the park is located so close to the museum campus, and not far from several world-class universities, it would serve as both the perfect outdoor education area for the museums and as a site for cooperative research projects on restoration and ecology. Perhaps most importantly, it would be a true nature sanctuary — the only one of significant size along Chicago’s lakefront — sheltering native plants, animals, and fish (including specially constructed underwater fish habitats), and also providing a much-needed refueling point for some of the more than five million songbirds that pass through the Lake Michigan flyway each year on their migrations south.
"Chicago can show the world that nature can thrive in a world-class city," said Carrie Davis, co-chair of the Lakefront Task Force, the LMF’s volunteer group that drafted the Sanctuary Point plan. "The plan builds on Mayor Daley’s 1996 plan to establish Chicago’s prominence as the leading waterfront nature city on the globe." If you like the LMF’s vision for Northerly Island, and want to help make it a reality, you can contact the LMF, Mayor Daley, and the Chicago Park District (see Resources below).
Good News on Clean Air, and a New Opportunity
When the Supreme Court agreed last fall to review a federal appeals court ruling on the Clean Air Act together with a related countersuit, environmentalists feared the worst. Over the past couple of years the conservative-dominated court has seemed increasingly inclined to limit Congress’s authority over the states — its recent ruling that workers cannot sue states for discriminatory practices banned by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act is an excellent example. If the court decided to follow this same trend by gutting the Clean Air Act’s standard-setting procedures, the consequences could be dire for almost every federal environmental law on the books.
At issue were the EPA’s 1997 National Ambient Air Quality standards to regulate ground-level ozone and fine particles, which are the prime ingredients in smog and soot, respectively. The EPA had tightened these standards based on the latest scientific research, which showed that doing so would protect the health of up to 125 million at-risk Americans, including 35 million children, as well as prevent approximately 15,000 premature deaths and 350,000 cases of aggravated asthma per year. A coalition of industry groups and three states (Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia — all heavy air polluters) sued to prevent the rules from taking effect, and in 1999, a federal appeals court ruled in industry’s favor, saying that the EPA had interpreted the Clean Air Act "so loosely" that it had unconstitutionally usurped Congress’s legislative power — an analysis known as nondelegation, which hasn’t been used in legal circles since the time of the New Deal. The EPA appealed the nondelegation ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which also agreed to hear a countersuit from the same industry coalition alleging that the EPA had unfairly neglected to consider the costs of compliance with its new smog and soot rules when setting the standards.
On February 27, the Supreme Court unanimously sided with the EPA on both the nondelegation and cost-benefit issues. Writing for the court, Justice Antonin Scalia (a man who is not known for his liberal views) said that the Clean Air Act "unambiguously bars cost considerations" from the process of establishing clean air standards, "and thus ends the matter for us as well as the EPA." The ruling wasn’t a total victory for the EPA, because the court did rule that the agency’s ozone implementation rules violated 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act in "unreasonably" trying to give heavily polluted parts of the country less time to clean up their air than other areas. This means the EPA will have to develop revised ozone implementation plans before the new ozone standards can be enforced.
But on the whole, the court’s ruling was "a home run for public health and the environment," as the Natural Resources Defense Council put it. EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, who had allowed her state to submit a brief in the case on the side of the EPA when she was governor of New Jersey, called the decision "a solid endorsement of EPA’s efforts to protect the health of millions of Americans from the dangers of air pollution."
In other good news for clean air, Whitman announced last month that the Bush administration would enforce new diesel pollution regulations adopted during the final days of the Clinton administration. The rules require refineries to reduce the sulfur content of diesel fuels by 97 percent between 2006 and 2009 — from the current levels of 500 down to fifteen parts per million. They also require auto manufacturers to produce new diesel engines for trucks and buses that will produce 90 percent fewer soot emissions by model year 2007 and 95 percent fewer nitrogen oxide emissions by model year 2010. The EPA estimates these new standards will prevent as many as 8,300 premature deaths and 17,600 acute cases of bronchitis in children every year.
Striking while the iron is hot, a coalition of environmental groups has submitted a petition to the EPA requesting that the agency use the Clean Air Act to regulate the emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides, and hydrofluorocarbons from new cars, light trucks, and other engines. The groups argue that because these greenhouse gases contribute to global warming, which poses a substantial threat to the environment and public health, they should be regulated as air pollutants just like smog or soot. The EPA is accepting public comments on the petition through May 23 via e-mails sent to A-and-R-Docket@epa.gov (be sure to mention you’re commenting on Docket No. A-2000-04) or regular mail, preferably in triplicate, to EPA Air and Radiation Docket, Attention Docket No. A-2000-04, Room M-1500 (Mail Code-6102), 401 M Street, SW, Washington, DC 20460. Click here for more information.
Illinois Action Project: "Activism Made Easy"
In terms of statewide legislative issues, concerned environmentalists face two big challenges. First, how do we find out what the key issues and bills are? And second, how can we contact our elected officials to voice our opinion on them in a timely fashion? The Illinois Action Project (I-ACT), a collaborative tool developed by twenty participating local organizations, has a solution: e-mail/fax action alerts that are individually tailored to each voter who’s signed up for this free service.
Here’s how I-ACT works. People first register at the Web site, www.illinoisaction project.org. At least once a month, and possibly more often when the state legislature is in session, they will receive an e-mail about an issue or bill. They can then opt to act on the e-mail by going to I-ACT’s Web site, signing in, and using I-ACT’s fax system, which will automatically send a fax to the relevant elected officials for the particular issue in question. Users don’t need to know the names or contact information of their representatives for the system to work; the registration process assures that I-ACT will automatically direct the faxes to the right people. Participants can choose to send the template e-mail as is, or modify it however they wish.
The e-mail/fax system is a key advantage of I-ACT over traditional action alerts, according to Hans Detweiler of the Environmental Law and Policy Center (one of the organizations participating in I-ACT). He describes I-ACT as "activism made easy," because you don’t have to be a political junkie or have hours of free time to use it. I-ACT’s faxing system also works better than e-mailing elected officials, because many politicians do not place as much weight on e-mailed comments as they do on calls, letters, or faxes.
Perhaps even more important than its ease of use, however, is I-ACT’s behind-the-scenes vetting process. Each of the twenty participating organizations sends a representative to I-ACT’s steering committee, which decides which issues to include in the action alert e-mails. Therefore, when you receive an alert from I-ACT, "you’ll know it’s a consensus priority issue of the leading environmental organizations in the state," according to Detweiler. An added bonus is that when you register, you can indicate which organization you’re a member of — that way you’ll only receive promotional mail from that organization, and not from all the participating groups. So you don’t need to be afraid that signing up for this service is going to sign you up for a heap of junk mail too.
Resources
Chicago Park District, 312-747-2644,
Environmental Protection Agency
Illinois Action Project, info@illinoisaction project.org
Lake Michigan Federation, 312-939-0838
Mayor Richard M. Daley, 312-744-3300, MayorDaley@CityofChicago.org