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In fact, it is the global significance of these remnant communities that has caused the Nature Conservancy to name Chicago one of its last great places. The communities that are probably of most significance globally are remnant tall-grass prairies and open oak savannahs. Actually, previous to settlement, 50% of Illinois was tall-grass prairie. Now there is less than one-tenth of 1% of prairie remaining in the Prairie State. And the savannahs that remain in northern Illinois are even lower in number than the prairie. It is in these local communities that over 181 endangered and threatened Illinois species exist. The picture that you see here is of a prairie remnant on the southern outskirts of the city. It is a 150-acre parcel, with over 385 documented plant species -- which is a tremendously high level of diversity.

Chicago Wilderness is, in fact, a one-of-its-kind collaborative endeavor -- one of its kind, as far as we know, at least. Its ultimate goal is to make Chicago a sustainable city: sustainable economically and sustainable environmentally. It is headed by a council. There are currently 34 members (72 as of December 1998). The council is composed of the directors of the 37 institutions that make up Chicago Wilderness These partners include major landowners in the metropolitan area -- landowners like the Cook County Forest Preserve District, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, other local forest-preserve districts. It includes federal agencies, such as the EPA, the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It includes research organizations, such as the Field Museum, the Morton Arboretum, the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Brookfield Zoo; and members focusing on policy and strategy, such as the Northern Illinois Planning Commission and Open Lands Project. These organizations signed a memorandum of understanding. It took about a year and a half to work out the language of the memorandum, but these organizations and their boards have all agreed to work together to restore and reestablish biodiversity in the Chicago area.

We announced our existence approximately a year ago -- April 10th, 1996, at a gala affair at the Field Museum -- and celebrated our first anniversary last weekend -- when the Field Museum hosted a symposium on biological invasions in local biodiversity, in conjunction with the first anniversary of Chicago Wilderness. It was a three-day event called "It's Wild in Chicago," with many exhibits in the main hall of the Museum. And it was actually marketed to school groups, to teachers and to the general public.

So what is this Chicago Wilderness? It's over 200,000 acres of natural areas that still exist, basically in a crescent from southern Wisconsin to northern Indiana -- through the six-county area beginning at Lake Michigan and extending, if you know Illinois geography, to the Fox River, which is basically from the lake to the agricultural parts of Chicago.

So if we look at this map ... what you see over here is Lake Michigan -- this being Wisconsin, this being Indiana. Basically Chicago Wilderness extends from Chiwaukee Prairie on the north, which is in southern Wisconsin, through Lake, McHenry, DuPage, Cook, Will, and Kane counties, and then into northeastern Indiana. It encompasses parts of the Indiana dunes -- and the Indiana Dunes State Park and the Indiana Dunes National Lake Shore.

One of the probably more interesting questions is why this area, or at least some of it, remained undeveloped; and part of it was due to good planning. You've heard about Frederick Law Olmsted's influence on New York City -- Frederick Law Olmsted had a great influence on Chicago, as well. And Olmsted and Daniel Burnham, in the early 1900s, planned, laid out a master plan -- both for the city of Chicago and the County of Cook -- that included vast open spaces, connected parks, and a forest-preserve system that skirted and bordered the city of Chicago.

In addition to good planning, the purchases of over 66,000 acres by the Cook County Forest Preserve Districts in the early 1920s, and the fact that a lot of the Chicago metropolitan area pre-settlement was wet and not desirable for development, all helped to preserve some open space in and around the city.

And so what we have now, due to this good planning and due to the purchase of some of this property, is our natural areas that have persisted; some degraded natural areas that provide seedbanks for restoration. We have expectation on the part of the public for open space, which is very advantageous to the project, as well as other forest-preserve districts that are bordering the city now that are beginning to purchase property.

Why biodiversity in Chicago? Chicago sits on an ecotone, and I'm sure many of you ecologists are very aware that any edge of that sort is extremely rich. To the east of the Chicago area is the deciduous forest; to its south and west is tall-grass prairie. In between sits Chicago, which provides areas that are both tall grass, that are forest, that are woodlands, that are savannahs, and lots of wet areas, as well. And, in fact, I think someone previously was speaking of the Indiana dunes. Indiana Dunes National Lake Shore and State Park have the third-highest species diversity of any of the national parks in the United States, which is an indicator of what the diversity of the metropolitan area was like pre-settlement.

What we also have in place in Chicago, besides these natural areas, is a very, very large volunteer effort -- really heralded and begun by the Nature Conservancy, called the Volunteer Stewardship Network -- over 5,000 volunteers in the six-county metropolitan area engaged in restoration work; I think a leading model of its kind. This is a site near the metropolitan area that has been, in fact, restored by volunteers. And being close to Lake Michigan has provided us with what's called a "swell and swail topography".... And that kind of dip and swell and swail has also provided a lot of habitat, and a tremendous amount of plant diversity and, as a result, animal diversity.

What we have in terms of endangered species, you see here, is [prairie white-fringed] orchids. We have a lot of rearing of native and endangered plants taking place by the Center for Plant Conservation ... a center in collaboration with the Morton Arboretum and the Chicago Botanic Garden. We have a lot of monitoring of all of these sites going on by volunteers, who are monitoring for birds, for butterflies, so that we know, as we restore areas, what we're restoring them to is, in fact, biodiversity-increasing. And we are reintroducing species -- a lot of butterfly and insect species, specifically -- to native habitats, where, in fact, those insects are found, and where we can, in fact, rear them.

So, the question for the 34 organizations became: How can we begin to coordinate our efforts, and how can we begin to use our resources in order to take the natural areas that still exist and improve their quality and improve their health? We were looking at a lot of parcels that had become fragmented -- a lot of areas that had become degraded -- and what we wanted to do was begin to look at this in an integrated, systematic and systemic way, so that we could manage the Chicago metropolitan area as a system and not a group of individual parcels.

The answer is being found in a number of programs that we began to introduce -- like seed-collecting, hand-pollinating of plants (where the insect pollinators no longer were part of our landscape); prescribed burning, which was a big part of the native landscape of the metropolitan area pre-settlement. What you're going to see here is -- well, this is obviously a prescribed burn. This is an area that has been burned and not burned. I'm not here to give you the entire plant list of what we're managing for, but invasive species have become a major problem -- nonnative species in the metropolitan area.

So to summarize, these are Chicago Wilderness' goals. These are the kinds of things that we want to achieve. And we've organized ourselves, through these 34 organizations, into the council, which I mentioned to you before. A subgroup of those 34 directors forms a steering committee that meets more frequently -- four to five times a year -- to begin to make some decisions. And the work of the organization is done through teams .... Education and outreach, policy and strategy, science and land management. I chair the education and outreach team, and that's basically what I'm here to talk to you about this afternoon -- what we're doing educationally -- but I thought it needed to be put into some context, because this effort is vast and not easily understood.

The work of the project is a collaboration, so we don't have an office, we don't have a place. We have people whose institutions either volunteer their time, or find resources to give of their time, to head up the effort. And we have been generously supported by the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to date. And each of the teams set up goals ... proposals are then accepted by the proposals committee and projects funded as a result. So far, in our one year of existence, 76 collaborative proposals have been approved by Chicago Wilderness and 45 have been funded, many of them in education.

So now I'm going to move on and talk to you a little bit about some of the things that we're doing educationally, and it's been an interesting progression. The education and outreach team, which is comprised of the 34 organizations and educators from those organizations, actually has been in existence for a little over two years. Even though we formally announced our existence as an organization a year ago, we were formulating ourselves long before that. And I want you to really notice in there the words to "diversify public participation in the understanding of our region's biodiversity." We're really interested in having to focus on local issues, understanding and learning about local biodiversity.

We're using the kind of resources and research that the World Wildlife Fund has provided us, the Biodiversity Project has provided us -- that indicates to us that over 92% of the American public have no understanding of biodiversity, and the majority of those 92% are not predisposed to learn about biodiversity. In a metropolitan area of 8 million people, that, as a quick calculation, leaves us as a team with about 7.2 million people to convince that this is an important issue. And we decided to focus on that piece of the pie.

So this is the mission of the team. And here are the goals. And, as you can see, what we're wanting to do is to increase our levels of programming about local biodiversity; to develop a long-term process to evaluate how effective we've been, after we've been in existence for a while; to increase and diversify public participation in our activities, in stewardship and in support; and then to develop mechanism for the professional development of the educators in the 34 organizations. So we're talking about external education as well as internal education.

What we did the first year of our existence was focused on those things that we thought we could achieve well and quickly: We formed telecommunications; we set up a World Wide Web site; we featured the diversity programs of each of the institutions that are part of Chicago Wilderness .... We put that on our Web site, so that anybody that wanted to know about local biodiversity programming within the six-county area could pull up our Web site and find out where those programs are.

We did a needs assessment, and our needs assessment was based on the work of the World Wildlife Fund, as well as the Biodiversity Project. And we came up with two local documents -- one called "Roadblocks to Understanding Biodiversity," which talks about local levels of biodiversity understanding, and another called "Chicago Wilderness: Assessment of Chicago Community-based Outreach Environmental Education Programs." What we found through this assessment was that most of the people doing outreach were doing them to the same audiences -- that there were vast parts of the metropolitan area that were totally untouched, that this is where we needed to focus. So if we're talking about coordinating the efforts of 34 organizations, we needed to know where we all were. So our needs assessment was one early step.

We began a professional development strand and coordinated with the World Wildlife Fund. We did a teacher institute at the Brookfield Zoo last summer; we're doing another one at the Field Museum this summer, with Chicago public-school teachers and 10 educators from Chicago Wilderness. Last February we held a conference. We took the science people from the science team of Chicago Wilderness, and people from the land-management team in Chicago Wilderness, and we put those in conjunction with educators. They co-presented at a conference, content and methods -- so that we had 160 people plus a waiting list from Chicago Wilderness organizations to attend. We find that the majority of the educators in our metropolitan area are equipped to teach about the rainforest, know very little about local biodiversity. And so we need to educate our educators, as well as the public. That was one of our first attempts. Additionally, we identified model programs that already exist within our 34 organizations, and began to highlight those, and share those with other institutions.

So, where are we now? As Judy [Braus] has mentioned, the components of environmental education include awareness, knowledge, attitudes, skills and participation. We found that in Chicago Wilderness, too many of our institutions were focused on awareness, and we had a lot of institutions focused on stewardship. There was very little in between. Our goal was not to have everybody do everything. Some institutions are very good at awareness-building. The Nature Conservancy is very good at stewardship. No need for the Nature Conservancy to do anything other than what it's doing. But how can we unite and overlap and integrate our programs so that we can provide a continuum, both for citizen scientists -- citizens as well as students -- from awareness all the way to participation?

So what we did as a team is, we looked at these components that we needed to have as part of our programs, and we looked at the audiences that we wanted to reach, realizing that we had a pretty vast spread here of 7 million-plus people who weren't engaged in biodiversity. And this is what we came up with ....

... We came to the realization that the definition of "educator" is being expanded. Traditionally, we think about education as K-12 teachers, university. Now we're talking about education in regard to biodiversity, we're talking about doing vast communication networks, and vast amounts of education -- on multiple levels to multiple audiences, in ways that we, as educators, have had very little experience. We're teaming with the policy and strategy team, who are used to talking to city planners, but maybe not in educational ways, about what we're trying to do. And we're just beginning to develop ways to reach these audiences.

Now, how are we doing that? I mentioned previously the proposal process that we have. Money is a powerful motivator, is it not? And so what we've decided as a team is that the proposals that need to be submitted through the education and outreach team need to begin to fill in some of these blanks that we haven't addressed yet; needs to look at some of these audiences that we haven't even tackled. Do we need to continue doing what we're doing? Of course. But we need to expand our efforts. And we're going to be able to do that only through building partnerships with people who know how to do it, through working with other cities and other collaboratives in the United States that have tried things like this. We find that we're all at the beginning here of a pretty significant learning curve, and we don't have much time to learn it. And so we're working diligently at it and are really excited about the opportunity -- and convinced that Chicago Wilderness is going to make Chicago the sustainable city that we all vision it can become.

Francesca Griffo:

We have time for one question, if there is.... Yes.

Audience Question:

(inaudible)

Carol Fialkowski:

Well, the area extends from southern Wisconsin through northeastern Indiana, in six counties, and a quick calculation of that in my mind would say that it's about 70 miles north to south and about 40 miles east to west. And the notion here is to manage that as a system, which is a very difficult thing to get across to people. One of the dilemmas we've had in management is that, as people begin to see certain species disappearing, and certain places, they assume that the management isn't working. For example, someone previously had a lot of cardinals in the woods across from the house. The cardinals aren't there anymore; we must be doing something wrong with burning, because the cardinals aren't there. What we're really interested in is cardinal-ness in the six-county system, not the cardinal in the tree. It's a very, very difficult thing to get across to the community that you're working with, because understanding the six-county area as a system, or understanding ecosystems is a difficult thing.

Francesca Griffo:

Go ahead.

Audience Question:

How do we help convince people to do something about invasive plants that take over?

Carol Fialkowski:

So what has happened is that nonnative plants were brought in 100 or so years ago, have taken over an island, and how do you convince people to do something about it? One of the things that has been very eye-turning in the restoration efforts in Chicago is, if there is a seedbank that still exists there and management occurs, before-and-after pictures are very startling -- not unlike some of those that I showed here with the burn. So to show what an area looked like previously, what the species diversity or lack thereof was, and to document the change that occurs -- not only the change in plants, but the change in animal species, then, that return as a result. It's a long-term project. It may be three or four years before you see change, but that's often very convincing.

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