For some, vacant lots are eyesores. For Robert Betz, growing up in Chicago, vacant lots were patches of wilderness in a too-ordered city. He imagined them as the vast prairies he had read about, but never seen. On July 6, 1959, Betz, by then a biochemist in his mid-30s, finally saw his first real prairie when he visited what is now the Santa Fe Prairie Nature Preserve in Hodgkins with botanist Floyd Swink. “The plant variety astounded me,” Betz said. “That first visit with Floyd Swink made me decide to dedicate the next 35 years of my life to prairies.” The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway…

Arguably one of the most important historical sites in our country’s history lies little noticed and largely forgotten in a forest preserve a few miles south of Burr Ridge. No signs inform visitors entering Red Gate Woods that it contains a historic site and no directions are offered to the two stone markers that commemorate the important scientific achievement that occurred there nearly 70 years ago. Red Gate Woods originally was called Argonne Woods, after France’s Argonne Forest, where American forces took part in the final Allied offensive of World War I. The Argonne National Laboratory, …