Social Democracy, The Roots Of Ecology, And The Preservation Of The Indiana Dunes

Abstract

O nce stretching the entire length of the southernmost Lake Michigan shore, the Indiana Dunes, a 'capricious landscape of shifting sand hills, tamarack swamps, oak forests, and cacti, gained a reputation at the turn of the century as the "birthplace of ecology" in the United States. Using the Dunes as a classic laboratory of ecological succession, men like Henry C. Cowles and W. C. Allee transformed the study of vegetational communities from a static, descriptive discipline into an investigation of processes and dynamic relationships. This famous landscape is now largely confined to the 2,000-acre Indiana Dunes State Park and the scattered jigsaw-puzzle pieces of the authorized 11,000-acre Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Cut in half by a deep-water port and steel mill complex, including the largest blast furnaces in North America, and interspersed with highways, railway lines, shopping centers, and housing developments, the Dunes are only a tiny remnant of their former glory. Given the region's history, however, it is a wonder that any of the original landscape remains. If the "normal" course of economic development had been permitted without intervention, the Indiana Dunes might now be completely settled and industrialized, and the megalopolis of the Midwest would extend unbroken from Chicago across to the Michigan line. The movement to save the Indiana Dunes, one of the longest running environmental battles in American history, richly illustrates the imaginative interplay of culture, science, and landscape in the emergence of a social movement dedicated to preservation of the environment. The battle for the Dunes was a blend of the ideal of "social democracy," the special natural and historical features of the landscape itself, and the distinctive principles of the science of ecology developed at the University of Chicago in the early decades of this century. The struggle to preserve the Dunes would not have occurred-certainly it would not have had the character that it did-had not these three factors converged at the beginning of the movement. Nor would the history of the science of ecology in this country have been the same without them.' At the turn of the century, a small band of Chicago reformers, artists, and scientists, joined by a few sympathetic Hoosiers, began the struggle to save the Indiana Dunes. Among their number they counted settlement house workers Jane Addams and Graham Taylor, landscape architect Jens Jensen, national parks advocate Stephen T. Mather, poets Harriet Monroe and Carl Sandburg, artists Frank Dudley and Earl Reed, geologist Thomas C. Chamberlin, and plant ecologist Henry C. Cowles. These were the creative spirits of the Chicago renaissance, men and women embued with the philosophy of the progressive movement. In succeeding years they added new lights to their ranks-nature writers Donald Culross Peattie and Edwin Way Teale, "Father of Indiana State Parks" Richard Lieber, and Senator Paul H. Douglas of Illinois. Together with the public-spirited citizens who joined them, they created a movement that in 1916 ambitiously tried (but failed) to establish the first national park by government purchase. By 1923 they succeeded in establishing one of the crown jewels of the Indiana state park system. The movement culminated in 1966-after a long and bitter struggle with a powerful coalition of utilities, railroads, banks, steel companies, and state politicians-in establishment of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore-the first unit added to the national park system against the opposition of the congressional district in which it is located. The movement continues today, repeatedly spurred to action by new threats to the Dunes. In 1981, for example, it helped bring about a landmark decision by the Northern Indiana Public Service Company to abandon its nuclear plant under con-