Health+Harvest

An alarming scenario could be brewing for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. The potential nightmare for the state’s pollution fighters doesn’t include visions of corrosive fumes enveloping a town or toxic wastes polluting a local water supply.

Rather than chemistry gone awry, the looming disaster is rooted in the state’s fiscal problems. Simply put, the EPA could run out of money to operate in the new fiscal year, which began July 1.

Joe House is out the door by 3 a.m. in the winter months. He departs each morning to patrol some 30 farms around Princeville, his hometown just north of Peoria, for raccoon. He surveys his traps for four hours each morning, then heads to the local high school to teach agriculture. Each year, he says, he usually catches between 100 and 150 raccoons. In 1997, a great year for him, he caught 350.

Ask central Illinois photographer Larry Kanfer what he can possibly find in this flat and seemingly empty landscape and, like any true Midwesterner, he’ll talk about the history of towns, the cycle of seasons and, of course, the significance of weather.

In awe-inspiring detail. The first thaw? That’s usually January 20 or so, when a bit of black earth shows through the snow and there’s a slight scent of spring in the air. Never mind that February will then seem as unending as the horizon. Spring is a certainty. So are summer and fall.

Farming is as fickle a calling as politics, and every farmer expects a bad year now and then. But 2001 was the fifth in a string of bad years. In April, a bushel of corn fetched $1.87 on the open market and soybeans were bringing $4.23, in both cases much less than it cost to grow them. 

Vermont is a long way from the Mississippi River. But with the right boat and some time, it’s possible to get there, traveling a long and circuitous route up the Illinois River, through the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal, into the Great Lakes and ultimately down Lake Champlain to Burlington. 

Illinoisans had reasons to think of Vermont this spring. That tiny state became the epicenter of a national political upheaval when Vermont’s Sen. James Jeffords renounced the Republican Party in May, thereby switching the U.S. Senate to Democratic control.

On a spring morning in Johnson County, a chorus sings of the southern Illinois that once was. 

As the rising sun sends shafts of light into the deep green of Heron Pond, songbirds twitter, barred owls hoot and pileated woodpeckers provide the percussion. Great blue herons squawk and stretch their wings on branches of bald cypress, looking for all the world like pterodactyls. 

A few weeks back, the mallard made her way to the bay from the hosta bed nearest our house, where she had, improbably, chosen to build her nest. That corner of the garden went unweeded for a month. Then one morning, tiny ducklings crowded close on their mother’s tail for their first swim. I counted five. I won’t count again. The great horned owls had begun, as they always do, searching out nests of their own in late February, sending five-note night calls through the still woods across the lane. They will be a dark presence through high summer, swift and silent in flight.

Kane County

With 10,000 residents moving into Kane County each year, farmers like Randy Klein wonder how much longer there will be room for them amid the subdivisions sprouting on former cropland west of Chicago.

The Illinois Department of Agriculture has it all worked out: First, slaughter all exposed cattle, pigs and sheep within a three-mile radius, then quarantine another seven miles beyond that.

Foot-and-mouth disease hasn't made it to Illinois, or to the United States for that matter, but state and federal officials are nonetheless braced for the worst. They've taken steps to prevent the disease from spreading to this country. And they've prepared detailed response plans should it arrive.

It's courting season for nature lovers in Chicago as they wait for the "City in a Garden" to get over an infatuation with aviation at Meigs Field and commit to a new marriage of urban life and natural history.

Environmentalists are panting over the 90 acres of Northerly Island, where the airport now sits off Burnham Harbor.

Maybe this isn't the best moment to bring up the subject of global warming.

Illinois' best hope of protecting its endangered wetland birds may be to shore up their natural habitats.

Each spring, herons, egrets, blackbirds and terns migrate to this state's wetlands to mate, nest and breed. But these ecosystems, so rich in bird life, also are the most threatened, says Steve Bailey of the Illinois Natural History Survey. In fact, 90 percent of this state's original wetlands are gone. As a result, such species as the black and yellow-crowned night herons and the snowy egret are declining in Illinois.