Calumet has a reputation for smokestacks and smog, but with nine steel mills, major chemical plants and refineries closed, the air is better now than it was 20 years ago.

What was left behind, however, are the historical problems left by those industries: primarily compromised soils. There were sites where drums of chemical wastes were dumped on the ground. There was an illegal incinerator. The EPA and the state closed the sites and two landfills were constructed.

Turning those brownfields into a community asset has been the mission of the Lake Calumet Vision Committee, which is chaired by Victor Crivello. Crivello has been working in the environmental field for thirty-five years.

"I worked here when there were a lot of polluting industries," he says. "We have seen solutions to those problems come up in the past twenty years. We can assess the risks and design remedial options. In the 1980s there was no other plan than to save ourselves, but now we've discovered that not only can we save ourselves, but we can also save some very important part of the region."

"Lake Calumet has a pretty high water quality and never had any major industrial discharge," says Crivello. That's the good news. Dealing with soil is the primary challenge. Innovation in the field of industrial and environmental reclamation are being applied in Calumet to make the soil safe for public uses.

Many of the plans currently underway date from the mid 90's. Land has been purchased and cleanup activities begun. Crivello believes that contaminated sites can be cleaned up and designated as an Open Space Reserve, which the public can use with confidence that their health is not in danger.

"The Calumet Open Space Reserve concept is to bring attention to these sites," says Aaron Rosinski, Executive Director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force. "Once the government came along to actually move forward on the effort, they took control of some the processes."

In taking that control, Rosinski says, the Lake Calumet Vision Committee was not excluded from the process. There are still concerns about intermingling truck traffic and tourists passing in their cars, so planning continues as the cleanup moves forward.

"They've kept the community very involved, thus establishing a good partnership between government and community," Rosinski says. "We're still working with groups like the Calumet Industrial Commission and their membership to help them to see the value of this project."

Recreational use of the land is one goal of the reclamation, but Calumet doesn't want to forget its industrial history.

"We have begun a unique partnership with the Acme Coke Plant in hopes of turning the site into a public museum that would highlight the industrial and labor history of the region - the steel history," Rosinski says. "By having them onboard with this concept, keeping this private partnership with industry, we would be able to focus on how new technologies are being developed."

"This couldn't be a better example of the EPA's Three P's concept," says Rosinski. "The Three P's consist of People, Prosperity and Protecting the planet. They are central to what we are doing here. It's in protecting the planet that we bring prosperity back to the ecosystem and have clean, inviting sites for modern industry. We're hoping that this prosperity and protection of the planet will come together and be the reason that people come here to see Calumet in the future."

Rosinski looks at it from a beginner's mind viewpoint. He believes people will come to Calumet and forget about all the things in the past and look at it as the potential for the future.

"All of a sudden, these landfills become mountains," he says. "You can ski down them, you can mountain board, you can do things that you can't do anywhere else in Chicago. We've been able to achieve success by keeping the beginner's mind fresh.

Crivello, too, says he has a very ppositive sense for the future, even though many people had given up on the problems of the past.

"We have the opportunity, if we look around us, to make an impact on the environment, bringing a peace that you can't find anywhere else onto ourselves and the environment. There's great satisfaction in knowing that what you're doing is reestablishing a system that had been destroyed by man's activities, and that with the resilience of nature and technology, we're now going to turn it into open space and public access. It means a lot to me."

"I'm lucky, because in my career, I can work on closing the circle. I'm very optimistic about spending the rest of my career making this plan a reality."

CHICAGO LINKS:
Eden Place
Millennium Park
Mayor Daley's rooftop
Elgin High's service learners
The Calumet Project