Provides more information on Nature Centers; Hiking Trails; Day & Weekend Road Trips; Kids Activities; Camping Spots; Birdwatching Hotspots; Bicycling Trails; Kayaking/Canoeing/Boating; Picnicking Spots; Fishing; Spring Wildflower Viewing; Fall Colors Viewing; Running/Exercise; Winter Activities Such as Snowshoeing, Ice Skating, Cross-Country Skiing, Sledding, and Ice Fishing; Local History; Self-Enrichment Classes and Other Opportunities; Geocaching; and other activities in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Also includes articles that provide advice on camping with kids, enjoying a successful snowshoeing adventure, and much more, as well as personal essays about gardening, enjoying nature with one's children, savoring the fall colors, and protecting the environment. Other resources include contact information for forest preserve districts, state departments of natural resources, and environmental and other nature-focused organizations.

The Chicago metropolitan area is home to far more protected nature than most people realize. There's a critical factor of the Chicago Wilderness restoration effort that makes it unique. A grassroots volunteer community, thousands strong, works alongside agency staff to give nearby nature what it needs to thrive in an everchanging urban context. A Healthy Nature Handbook captures hard-earned ecological wisdom from this community in engaging and highly readable chapters, each including illustrated restoration sequences.

In our fast-paced world of technology, where populations are becoming more urbanized and life is increasingly experienced on electronic screens, people are losing their connection to nature. Yet nature is all around us, especially if you live in the Chicago area. Unfortunately, few Chicagoans know it's there.In My Journey into the Wilds of Chicago, photographer and humorist Mike MacDonald takes you on a trip to Chicago's wild side--a verdant, untamed Chicago that has been there all along, just waiting to be explored. Combining breathtaking images and imaginative prose, MacDonald leads you on an adventure into wondrous, enchanted lands located just up the road from home, work, and school. From kaleidoscopic tallgrass prairies to the open canopies of rare oak savannas, from the free-flying expanse of the butterfly to the mysterious world of the coyote, startling photographs of a vast and scenic Chicago evoke astonishment and delight with every turn of the page.MacDonald's contagious enthusiasm and decades of comedy experience are channeled into inventive essays, captions, and poetry that engage the imagination and add richness to your journey. This inspirational volume invites readers to cross the threshold, to get off their couches and abandon their screens, to come out into nature and play.

A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "No one has written a better book about a city…Nature's Metropolis is elegant testimony to the proposition that economic, urban, environmental, and business history can be as graceful, powerful, and fascinating as a novel." —Kenneth T. Jackson, Boston Globe

Spurred by the accelerating destruction of remnant natural lands, one man had the vision and tenacity to transform a loose band of ecologists into The Nature Conservancy and launch the entire natural areas movement.

"In A Natural History of the Chicago Region, Greenberg takes you on a journey that begins with European explorers and settlers and hasn't ended yet. Along the way he introduces you to the physical forces that have shaped the area from southeastern Wisconsin to northern Indiana and Berrien County in Michigan; the various habitat types present in the region and how European settlement has affected them; and the insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds, fish, and mammals found in presettlement times, then amid the settlers and now amid the skyscrappers. In all, Greenberg chronicles the development of nineteen counties in Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin across centuries of ecological, technological, and social transformations."--BOOK JACKET.

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize Winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize “A major work of history that brings together African-American history and environmental studies in exciting ways.” —Davarian L. Baldwin, Journal of Interdisciplinary History Between 1915 and 1940, hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the rural South to begin new lives in the urban North. In Chicago, the black population quintupled to more than 275,000. Most historians map the integration of southern and northern black culture by looking at labor, politics, and popular culture. An award-winning environmental historian, Brian McCammack charts a different course, considering instead how black Chicagoans forged material and imaginative connections to nature. The first major history to frame the Great Migration as an environmental experience, Landscapes of Hope takes us to Chicago’s parks and beaches as well as to the youth camps, vacation resorts, farms, and forests of the rural Midwest. Situated at the intersection of race and place in American history, it traces the contours of a black environmental consciousness that runs throughout the African American experience. “Uncovers the untold history of African Americans’ migration to Chicago as they constructed both material and immaterial connections to nature.” —Teona Williams, Black Perspectives “A beautifully written, smart, painstakingly researched account that adds nuance to the growing field of African American environmental history.” —Colin Fisher, American Historical Review “If in the South nature was associated with labor, for the inhabitants of the crowded tenements in Chicago, nature increasingly became a source of leisure.” —Reinier de Graaf, New York Review of Books