Scientific expertise and volunteer power in the Cook County forest preserves

Abstract

Through a historical case study, this paper explores the political potential of volunteerism in urban natural resources management. As governments continue to rely on unpaid labor to perform essential services, volunteerism has proliferated in urban protected lands during the neoliberal era. It is therefore worthwhile to study the power that volunteers may wield at their service sites, alongside the scholarly attention already paid to the inefficacy and the inadequacy of volunteer labor. By drawing on science and technology studies literature, especially concerning the role of citizen science in activist movements, this article analyzes how volunteer stewards influenced natural resources policy in the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. A local agency, the district is responsible for nearly 70,000 acres in the county that encompasses Chicago, IL. For most of the twentieth century, forestation constituted the district's official land management policy, as leaders sought to match its ecologically diverse holdings to the agency's name. In the late 1970s, volunteers won permission from the district to begin restoring prairies in the forest preserves. Working autonomously, volunteer stewards cultivated expert credibility in the science of ecological restoration. Over several decades, they drew on their scientific authority to convince forest preserve leaders to adopt ecological restoration as the district's primary land management policy, a process culminating in the early twenty-first century. The paper also explores the fragility of volunteer authority rooted in scientific expertise, by tracking how an anti-restoration movement and, later, forest preserve staff members successfully undercut volunteer expertise in ecological restoration.

Expertise, trading zones and the planning system: A case study of an energy-from-biomass plant

“…The Community Science Trading Zonewhere regulatory science is troubled This is the trading zone where the place-based expert knowledge that exists in communities interacts with environmental science and in particular the intermediary organisations that seek to bridge the gap between the esoteric-but-universal world of the scientific community and the mundane-but-contextualised world of the local community (Vena, 2023). It is for this reason that we classify it as a fractionated trading zone.…”

“…By using the idea of trading zones to characterise the different sites of interaction, and the typology of expertise to categorise the kinds of expertise available within each, we are able to show that place-based, local actors (cf. Vena, 2023) have the potential to improve the planning process and move on from the serial failures in public engagement efforts that are all too often witnessed in planning and environmental governance systems (Zakhour, 2020; Alfasi, 2021). The argument proceeds as follows.…”