Field & Street: The Reader's Nature and Environment Archive 

Make Friends With Brown
Nance Klehm wants humans to reconnect with the soil—in part by composting their own bodily waste. (4/16/09)
By Anne Ford

"Green Jobs" and How to Get Them
First Ward alderman Manny Flores has a hard row to hoe as a voice for sustainable enterprise in the City Council. (4/16/09) By Mick Dumke

Green and Long Green
Daley's environmental commissioner on making business as usual eco-friendly (6/5/08)
By Mick Dumke

What Are You Doing Here?
Cougars are moving into the midwest—and they may be here to stay. (5/1/08)
By Stephen J. Lyons

Have a Green Day
Twenty-four ways you can help the planet, from how you wake yourself up in the morning to how you get drunk at night. (4/17/08)
By Mick Dumke

Water Color
Lee Tracy makes a plea for the environment with a vast curtain stained by the world's rivers. (1/3/08)
By Jeff Huebner

Bad Apples
The story of the untended orchard at Cook County Jail (11/22/07)
By Martha Bayne

A Map Is a Voice
And in the case of the Green Map System, your local environmentalists are doing the talking. (11/15/07)
By Harold Henderson

Mount Carroll, IL: The Big Picture
By farming trees, Michael Johnson sustains the landscape he's made his name photographing. (5/17/07)
By Dennis Rodkin

The Carp Are Coming
Forget multimillion-dollar barriers and pesticides, says river activist Chad Pregracke - let's just eat 'em. (4/20/06)
By Abbie Reese

They Need It. We Waste It.
The powers that control the Great Lakes are fortifying the ramparts for the day the west runs out of water. The Chicago River is the chink in our armor. (1/12/06)
By Michael Miner

A Secret Visitor
Why you didn't hear a peep about the first whooping crane to land in Chicago in more than a century. (6/30/05)
By Stephen Longmire

That's No Dog
Coyotes and foxes are quietly moving into the city. (4/7/05)
By Ryan Chew

How Much Green Does It Take to Go Green? This obsessive environmentalist rehab has cost $1.5 million so far, but it's powered by thinkng that can adapt to almost any budget. (3/17/05)
By Harold Henderson

The Vanishing Mother Lode of Mazon Creek
One of the planet's best deposits of prehistoric fossils is getting trashed, and no one seems to care but a small group of fanatical collectors. (7/1/04)
By Mike Sula

Your Mayor Could Clean Up This Mess
Just about every industrial poison you can name is seeping out of the Lake Calumet Cluster Site. What's keeping Daley's people from giving the thumbs-up to the obvious solution? (6/17/04)
By Kari Lydersen

Death From Above
Small birds and rodents are learning the hard way that the Cooper's hawk is back in town. (4/25/04)
By Ryan Chew

Back From the Brink
Peregrine falcons have adapted to city life, but species without the star power are still languishing. (4/22/04)
By Harold Henderson

The Extinction Express
While Madagascar teeters on the edge of an ecological catastrophe, Field Museum biologist Steve Goodman does what he can to save the remains. (2/12/04)
By Harold Henderson

Up on the Farm
Renee Randall's Long Strange Journey From Citified Single Mom to Bona Fide Earth Mama (6/5/03)
By Ethel Hammer

The Crave to Pave
At the far end of Irving Park Road, developers eye a lone patch of undeveloped land and dream of Home Depot. (12/5/02)
By Ben Joravsky

What Have We Done?
Joel Greenberg's book on the natural history of Illinois chronicles the unavoidable clash between those who seek to save the wilderness and those who seek to subdue it. (11/14/02) By Harold Henderson

The Call of the Wild
For five decades city boy Ralph Frese has introduced landlubbers to the joys of canoeing and helped bring local waterways back from the dead. (7/25/02)
By Dennis Rodkin

Our Drinking Problem
The freshwater of the Great Lakes can't be replaced. With ever more distant towns clamoring for access, how much do we want to share? (5/23/02)
By Ted Kleine

Hot and Bothered
Who needs winter? We do. And the occasional burst of cold or snow? Doesn't count. While TV weatherpeople gush about the mild temperatures, the nasty truth is waiting to spoil the party. (3/7/02)
By Ted Kleine

Vote Kestrel!
Neither waxwing, nor kingbird, the best candidate for official bird of Chicago is right under our noses. (10/7/99)
By Jerry Sullivan

Fall Flora
Real knowledge of goldenrods is one of the key distinctions between those who actually know things and those with only a superficial acquaintance with the natural world. (10/17/99)
By Jerry Sullivan

Healthy Communities
Ecologists often talk of the health of natural communities. I think you can gauge the health of a community by asking three questions. (2/27/99)
By Jerry Sullivan

Henry Chandler Cowles
Celebrating the 100th anniversary of a major step in the young science of ecology. (11/6/98)
By Jerry Sullivan

The Dead Zone
Below the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico is choking to death, and midwestern farmers are the prime suspects. (7/30/98)
By Harold Henderson

Cherries
In a fragmented landscape black cherries are as mobile as birds, a fact that gives them a competitive edge over many other species. (7/11/97)
By Jerry Sullivan

Green Gray Areas
Environmental historian William Cronon says we've got to stop thinking pristine wilderness is the only nature worth saving. (12/7/96)
By Harold Henderson

Love That Dirty Water
Cruising on the Debris Control I (4/4/96)
By Scott Berinato

Coyotes In The City
We might as well accept coyotes, since centuries of attempts to destroy them have been absolute - and expensive - failures. (2/2/96)
By Jerry Sullivan

Surveying Illinois
I have been studying what was here before we current inhabitants of Chicagoland arrived, what lived on the land before we transformed it into cornfields, pastures, Norwood Park, Floodplain Manor, the Ford assembly plant, and the Proviso rail yard. (6/21/96)
By Jerry Sullivan

Mourning Doves
Our lonesome mourning dove was the sole representative of North America in either the flora or the fauna of our community. It was the only living thing here now that would have been here 200 years ago. (3/24/95)
By Jerry Sullivan

The New Face of Environmentalism
The new environmentalists don't live in upscale neighborhoods. They don't drive Volvos. Most of them probably don't own backpacks. But their activism is transforming the movement. (3/3/94)
By Jerry Sullivan

The Last Prairie Chickens
In 1912 there were healthy populations in nearly every county in Illinois. In the spring of '89 fewer than 100 birds remained. (6/20/89)
By Peter Friederici

Where Has All the Flora Gone?
The Effort to Catalog and Protect Illinois' Endangered Plants (4/14/88)
By James Krohe Jr.

The Ditch That Made Chicago Happen
A Journey Along the Illinois and Michigan Canal, a Hundred Miles of Hope and History (10/29/87)
By Peter Friederici