Whether or not the White Sox move to The 78, where the South Branch of the Chicago River flowed until 1929, commitments to a substantial amount of free publicly accessible open space and natural areas must be part of any new agreement.
This 62-acre site is an enormous opportunity to work with nature and the river to build resiliency for Chicagoans through nature-positive design solutions that reduce air and water pollution, cool our city, promote biodiversity and provide a place for families to play.
We call on city leaders to be forward-thinking in their planning for this site, just like any of the other remaining open riverfront sites which all require thoughtful nature-focused design and planning.
Margaret Frisbie, executive director, Friends of the Chicago River
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Stop being sweet on sugarcoating Trump supporters
I am writing in response to Mona Charen’s recent column (“The silver lining in Donald Trump’s Iowa win”). Ms. Charen seems to imply that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s ”hush-money-for-porn-star case,” as well as the other indictments against Trump, somehow galvanized his MAGA supporters to rally around him.
I’d like to offer a different opinion. The reason that many of Trump’s diehard supporters continue to rally around him is because they are racists, misogynists, xenophobes, homophobes and just generally awful people. If you ain’t white and Christian, then you don’t belong here.
It’s time to stop tiptoeing around these folks and time to call them out for who they are and are not. They’re not patriots. They’re not pro-law enforcement. And most importantly, they’re not Christian.
They’re followers of a man who thinks he was chosen by God to be president; paid an adult movie star to keep her mouth shut; stole top-secret documents and stored them in his bathroom; urged his followers to storm the Capitol to overturn a free and fair election; says that immigrants are “poisoning” the blood of our country; made fun of John McCain’s physical disability that was a result of torture during his time in a POW camp; said that because he’s famous, he’s allowed to grab women by their genitals; and is an adjudicated sex offender. He told a reporter that if Ivanka wasn’t his daughter, he would date her.
So, to all those Trump diehards out there: Sorry if this hurts your feelings, but you’re bad people and it’s time for it to be called out.
Susan Lovell, DeKalb
Another vote to transfer Joliet Training Area to Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie
As the recent Joliet water deal demonstrates, Illinois must not continue to take our access to fresh, clean water for granted. For this reason, Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC) endorses the Jan. 5 op-ed by leaders of Openlands, the Wetlands Initiative, and Sierra Club-Illinois. Their argument underscores that investing in nature through the transfer of the Joliet Training Area (JTA) to the U.S. Forest Service at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie is an investment in the health and sustainability of our region.
For 90 years, MPC has championed thoughtful planning and inclusive growth policies that build equity in the environment. Permanent conservation and restoration of JTA is just one of the many actions to establish an equitable, climate-resilient future for Joliet and the Chicago region, but we should not let the scale of collective action cause us to miss this generational opportunity.
How would transfer of the JTA support our region’s access to freshwater? The industrial development that surrounds this vital landscape has propelled the region’s economic growth. However, this growth has also forced Joliet and neighboring communities to face an existential crisis first identified in the 1950s: depletion of local groundwater from the sandstone aquifer below. This crisis led to the creation of the Grand Prairie Water Commission and a 100-year, multi-billion-dollar deal to secure Lake Michigan water from the City of Chicago for the region.
While that deal is an important fix for Joliet, it does little to address the underlying problem for the region: groundwater that once bubbled from the surface has been depleted far beyond sustainable levels, in some areas to more than 800 feet below the surface. Action by Congress to steward the transfer of this land to Midewin reinforces the efforts of local leaders who have worked so hard to keep the taps flowing.
MPC urges Congress to support sustainable growth of the region and transfer the JTA to the U.S. Forest Service at Midewin. It’s easy to forget after two federally declared flood disasters struck the region last year, that Illinois started the summer with widespread drought conditions. With projected temperature increases, every investment we make in nature-based climate solutions, gets us closer to reaching the goal of ensuring equitable access to clean water and realizing a climate-resilient future.
Ryan Wilson, senior manager, Metropolitan Planning Council, Chicago
