Scientific expertise and volunteer power in the Cook County forest preserves

“We need all hands on deck as we strive to continually improve and expand our park system”

 Chicago Park District (2021)

“We need your help growing and sustaining a greener New York City”

The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC Parks) (2021)

In the United States, agencies mandated to protect urban natural resources make clear their reliance on volunteers. The Forest Preserve District of Cook County, a local government responsible for nearly 70,000 acres in the county that encompasses Chicago (see Figure 1), likewise depends on volunteer labor to restore ecosystems throughout its holdings. According to the district, “thousands” of Cook County residents who work at 90 different sites provide “tens of thousands of hours of service” annually (FPDCC, 2021b). Their activities include “removing weeds and invasive vegetation” ¹ and “collecting or spreading native seed” (FPDCC, 2021a).

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Figure 1.

The Cook County forest preserves span nearly 70,000 acres in the county that encompasses Chicago. This image illustrates the entire system's extent and highlights specific locations discussed in the article. Map by Scout James.

Scholars have interpreted the rise of volunteerism as symptomatic of the neoliberal era, in which governments cut public spending and devolve their responsibilities onto civil society (Muehlebach, 2012, 2013; Prince and Brown, 2016; Redfield, 2016; Rosol, 2012). In this analytical framework, volunteer programs exemplify a “roll out” of governance strategies that work in tandem with the “roll back” of direct government services characteristic of the welfare state (see Peck and Tickell, 2002). In the context of urban green space, Krinsky and Simonet observe that volunteers and low-cost workers “staff otherwise-decimated public services” in New York City Parks (2017: 25). In Berlin, Rosol notes that local officials became enthusiastic about volunteer-run gardens after “severe cuts in public spending for open green spaces” (2010: 557).

Most existing ethnographic accounts portray volunteers as poor substitutes for paid workers, citing their hesitancy to engage in difficult tasks as well as their sporadic, temporary presence (Borland and Adams, 2013; Eliasoph, 2011; Muehlebach, 2012). Additionally, ethnographers describe volunteers as apolitical, even as they operate in politically charged fields (McLennan, 2014; Rozakou, 2012). Eliasoph observes that volunteer program managers avoid politics, by sidelining conversations about what causes the inequality evident at service sites (2011: 93). Muehlebach goes further, classifying volunteerism in Italy as a kind of “ethical citizenship [that] operates as a depoliticizing tool” (2012: 169). In the existing literature, then, volunteers come across as ineffective in their tasks and disinterested in political change.

In this paper, I explore the political potential of volunteerism in urban natural resource management through a historical case study. Given the ubiquity of neoliberal policies in urban government, volunteerism is already widespread in metropolitan green spaces and shows no sign of retrenchment. It is worthwhile, then, to discuss how volunteers can exert political power, in contrast to the crowd of studies dismissing their efforts as perpetuating neoliberal dystopias.

To a large extent, the example of volunteer stewards in the Cook County forest preserves runs counter to the arc commonly encountered in the literature described above: namely, the delegation to unpaid labor the tasks deemed essential to a government's mission. Rather, in Cook County, volunteer stewards succeeded in bringing attention and resources to priorities that they set. Starting in the late 1970s, volunteer stewards cultivated authority in the forest preserve district by becoming recognized experts in the science of ecological restoration. In the Cook County forest preserves, restoration practitioners (including volunteers) still aim to recreate ecosystems characteristic of Pre-European settlement, and have cited First Nations practices to legitimate their activities. For example: in order to convince forest preserve leaders that prescription burns would be necessary, volunteers referred to nineteenth century accounts of tribal nations setting fires on Illinois prairies to trap game (Stevens, 1995: 118). One can understand ecological restoration as the district's most recent attempt to recreate the American frontier, and I am pursuing related research on how settler colonialism has structured the Cook County forest preserves since their establishment, with unacceptable consequences for First Nations and their enrolled members.

While ecological restoration is consistent with the district's founding ideology, it does represent a break with forestation—the district's longstanding land management policy. For over 30 years, volunteer expertise in ecological restoration exceeded that of most forest preserve district employees who were bound by institutional constraints, including the effects of political corruption and the district's prevailing view that only forestation fulfilled its legal mandate. By drawing on scholarship from science and technology studies, notably on the role of citizen science in activist movements, this article analyzes how volunteer stewards built-up and wielded their expert credibility to change, over several decades, the district's natural resources strategy. In the process, volunteers brought lasting change to the inner workings of this governmentl agency.

Citizen scientists, with no formal training in their areas of study and practice, conduct scientific research as amateurs in a variety of contexts and to a variety of ends: they teach themselves medical science to improve their treatment options (Epstein, 1995, 1996); they use bucket monitors to measure air quality, as they build cases against neighboring polluters (Ottinger, 2010, 2013). In the Cook County forest preserves, volunteer stewards have practiced citizen science by restoring ecosystems, (see also Helford, 1999, 2000) an endeavor that necessitates an understanding of botany, ecology, and the newer science of ecological restoration.

While this case suggests that volunteers may cultivate scientific expertise to influence the institutions where they work, it also shows that volunteer expertise—like that of all citizen scientists—is often under attack and a tenuous source of power. In the mid-1990s, other Cook County residents successfully discredited the volunteer movement by challenging the scientific validity of ecological restoration, and therefore the knowledge of volunteers, leading to a moratorium on ecological restoration in 1996. In response, volunteers reclaimed their expert credibility through systematic political advocacy. Largely due to volunteers’ persistence, forest preserve leaders began prioritizing ecological restoration as official policy in the early 2000s. And yet, this achievement had the surprising effect of diminishing volunteer power. District leaders hired their own experts with academic training and professional experience in ecological restoration. In turn, these staff ecologists succeeded in asserting their authority over the volunteers who they labeled amateurs.

The example of ecological restoration in Cook County may be less instructive for other citizen scientists seeking to influence the institutions where they donate labor. The volunteer stewards with whom I worked were predominantly white, middle-class, and highly educated residents of the suburbs. In projecting their authority, they had to overcome fewer obstacles compared to environmental activists of color, particularly those from under-resourced communities, whose expertise and experiences are regularly diminished, and outright ignored, by government officials (Coburn, 2005; Hurley, 1995; Cohen and Ottinger, 2011; Ottinger, 2010). Citizen scientists also face greater hurdles in effecting change when their findings challenge the research of scientists working in powerful industries, like the energy sector (Kimura, 2016; Ottinger, 2013). While my research suggests that volunteers in underfunded public agencies may exploit neoliberal polices to cultivate their own authority, neoliberalism disempowers citizen scientists in other contexts, as when a nation's pursuit of economic prosperity trumps public health concerns and when industry scientists successfully reassert their credibility through corporate social responsibility programs (Kimura, 2016: 5; Ottinger, 2013: 22–26).

Methodology

I used ethnographic and archival methods to understand the history of volunteer stewardship in the Cook County forest preserves. I interviewed 71 people, including volunteers, district staff members, retired forest preserve employees, and elected commissioners serving on the forest preserve board. For my participant observation, I attended meetings about land management with volunteers, district employees, as well as their partners in non-profit organizations and federal agencies. Alongside volunteers and district staff, I performed ecological restoration, by serving on prescribed burn crews, removing invasive species, and collecting the seed of valued plants. I carried out the majority of this ethnographic research over the twelve-month period between February 2012 and February 2013.

My archival research took place primarily in the Forest Preserve District of Cook County Collection in the Richard J. Daley Library Special Collections (located at the University of Illinois at Chicago). This collection contains correspondence between volunteer stewards and the forest preserve district dating to the late 1970s, as well as newsletters and reports that volunteers produced. I obtained other documents directly from interview subjects as well as through requests under the State of Illinois's Freedom of Information Act.

Histories of forestation and prairie restoration

In restoring prairies, and later other ecosystems, volunteer stewards revived the original vision for the district that would become the Cook County forest preserves. In the early twentieth century, the City Council of Chicago feared their growing industrial metropolis lacked sufficient recreational space, and hired architect Dwight Perkins to compile a report for an enlarged park system in 1903 (see Vena, 2020; 2021; Cronon, 1991 for discussion of the Chicago region's dramatic transformation during the nineteenth century). While Perkins focused on expanding the number of playgrounds and small parks in already populated areas, he asked landscape architect Jens Jensen to suggest properties for an “outer belt park” on the predominantly agricultural, and otherwise undeveloped, outskirts of the city. In recommending land to acquire for this greenbelt, Jensen included forests, wetlands, and his great love, prairies, which formed “the predominate character of the landscape around Chicago” (Jensen, 1904: 83). In 1904, Perkins and Jensen published their findings as the Metropolitan Park Report, and the famed Plan of Chicago (1909) contained its recommendations for the outer belt park.

In 1913, the Forest Preserve District of Cook County finally organized under legislation that recast Jensen’s outer belt park as a system of “forest preserves” in order to avoid charges of double taxation. ² The law empowered the forest preserve board of commissioners to “hold lands containing one or more natural forests or parts thereof, for the purpose of protecting and preserving the flora and fauna and scenic beauties within such district” (Senate, 1913). Despite the law's focus on forests, drafters hoped the original intention to protect all of Cook County's flora and fauna would persist. One advocate recalled, “The original prairies of Illinois contained a great variety of flora which was fast disappearing, and it was hoped that through this Act a few, at least, of the native flora could be preserved for all time” (Moulton, 1931).

This nuance was lost on the district's early leaders who produced forests as the system's preeminent landscape, even as they acquired other ecosystems to amass acreage. In his annual message of 1920, the first board president described district holdings as Cook County's “woodland reaches,” stating “the end sought by the Forest Preserve law” was “the preservation of the forest land for the people's playground” (Reinberg, 1920). But given the limited number of woodlands in Cook County, the board had to purchase many prairie remnants and agricultural tracts. To match this land to the agency's name and statutory mandate, the district fabricated forests on the properties. In the process, they elided other ecosystems, especially prairies, which the University of Illinois's Prairie Research Institute estimates “covered about 73 percent” of the Chicago area before European settlement (PRI, 2014: 22). Tree planting accelerated with the availability of relief labor during the New Deal, as district staff led workers in planting hundreds of thousands of shrubs and tree seedlings by hand. To protect these plantations, relief laborers fought wildfires and constructed firebreaks throughout the forest preserves, dramatically altering the region's fire-dependent ecosystems (Vena, 2020). After World War II, district leaders continued to prioritize forests and asserted in 1956, “The forest is most important, first, last, and always” (FPDCC). In the 1960s, district foresters began using tractors to produce machine-made woodlands on corn and soybean fields. The district was still turning farmland into tree plantations in the early 1990s (personal interview).

An interest in prairie restoration, however, blossomed in the forest preserve district's nature centers that the its department of conservation opened in the 1950s and 1960s. With the mission of teaching Cook County residents about the region's flora and fauna, nature center staff members (known as “naturalists”) began restoring prairies in the early 1960s to complement other live exhibits. Their work coincided with a growing regional commitment to protect and to restore prairies. Floyd Swink, an expert on regional botany, worked in the department of conservation in the 1950s before joining the Morton Arboretum in neighboring DuPage County. ³ Swink introduced forest preserve naturalists to Bob Betz, a biology professor at Northeastern Illinois University, and to Ray Schulenberg, a horticulturist at the arboretum. With Betz and Schulenberg, district naturalists scoured the Chicago region for prairie remnants in nineteenth century cemeteries and alongside railroad tracks. They sowed collected seed at restoration projects, such as Crabtree Nature Center's prairies, which naturalists began managing in 1965. Schulenberg broke ground on the arboretum's prairie restoration in 1962 (FOFTFP and FOTP, 2002: 14). Betz started restoring a prairie at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab in 1975 (Fermilab, 2021).

In the Cook County forest preserves, prairie restoration remained limited to the small acreage next to the nature centers. Department of conservation naturalists simply did not have the power to influence district-wide land management policy, even though they were the only trained biologists in the organization. One naturalist, who joined the district in the late 1960s, told me that he and his colleagues referred to the administration as “the powers that be.” In making decisions, they said to one another: “The powers that be don’t want you to do that” or “You have to check with the powers that be.” They could not challenge forest preserve leaders or even communicate with them directly. At a meeting for naturalists in April 1967, their supervisor “requested that no staff members write letters directly to the President of the board [of commissioners] or to any members of the board,” after one naturalist had asked them to protect an intermittent stream from pollution (McCann, 1967). Moreover, forestation policies impeded efforts to restore even the nature center prairies. District staff rarely burned these prairies in the 1960s because of what one naturalist described to me as “political pressures.” The burns that did occur were secret, with one remembering a supervisor advising them to “keep quiet,” in order to avoid sanctions.

The forest preserve district's political structure exacerbated the marginalization of prairie restoration and scientific land management more generally. Following the terms of the district's enabling statute, the Cook County Board of Commissioners also serve as the Forest Preserve District of Cook County Board of Commissioners. Therefore, in addition to the forest preserves, the board oversees institutions as diverse as Cook County's Health & Hospitals System and the Cook County Jail. While Cook County had a budget of $6.9 Billion in 2021, the forest preserve district's budget, excluding the Brookfield Zoo and the Chicago Botanic Garden, was $96.3 million (Preckwinkle, 2021: 1, 2020: 10). Given that fiscal disparity, politicians leading the forest preserves have devoted the majority of their time to Cook County business. For most of its existence, the forest preserve district only received attention from commissioners when they wanted to place political supporters in government jobs, a central function of Chicago's Democratic Party machine.

These patronage workers enjoyed job security because of their loyalty to elected officials, not out of their dedication to the district's core mission of natural resource protection. Arthur Janura served as forest preserve general superintendent when the volunteer movement began, and his term overlapped almost perfectly with that of George Dunne, who served as forest preserve board president and Cook County board president from 1969 to 1991. The Chicago Tribune called Dunne “one of the machine’s “last loyal power brokers” (Ford and Sjostrom, 2006). John H. Stroger, Jr., forest preserve board president between 1994 and 2006, hired members of the Democratic machine for high-paying administrative positions and awarded them “huge pay raises” after they contributed to his political campaigns (Gradel and Simpson, 2015: 105, 107, 110). A district naturalist recalled that, in the 1990s, most administrative staff members “had virtually no concept of what the district was or what the district's role was.” Only in 2013, did a federal judge find the Forest Preserve District of Cook County had sufficiently eliminated politically motivated hiring (FPDCC, 2013).

Cook County prairies languished under this patronage system. In 1985, Jerry Sullivan, a journalist who later worked for the district, described a prairie in Jurgensen Woods forest preserve: “A fancy sign by the roadside identifies it, but the sign is surrounded by a dense woodland so heavily festooned with vines that it could be Tarzan's summer home. Nothing remotely like a prairie is anywhere to be seen” (Sullivan, 1985).

The seeds of volunteer stewardship

For decades, internal efforts to protect prairies flagged under corrupt and disinterested leadership. In the late 1970s, Steve Packard, an anti-war activist equipped with a B.A. in Anthropology and Social Psychology from Harvard University, first approached the district about restoring prairies on a volunteer basis. His girlfriend had lent him a book entitled The Prairie: Swell and Swale, a small volume of color photographs capturing flowers characteristic of the Illinois tall-grass prairie, with an introduction by Bob Betz (Korling, 1972). Inspired to recover this disappearing ecosystem, Packard began to search for prairies around Chicago.

Packard found some remnants in varying stages of neglect in the Cook County forest preserves. In southeastern Cook County, he observed brush overtaking one in the absence of fire. He visited a nearby forest preserve maintenance building, and tried to explain the situation to a staff member, who responded, “Prayers? What are you talking about, prayers?” In northeastern Cook County, he rode his bike to Bunker Hill forest preserve. Amidst the “thickets of brush,” Packard managed to match some plants to images in Swell and Swale (Stevens, 1995: 48). He subsequently discovered six other remnant prairies underneath garbage and woody invasive species along the North Branch of the Chicago River (NBPP, 1978).

Packard's quest occurred during a period of high-profile struggles to save ecosystems from industrial and residential development in the Chicago region. In the early 1960s, May Thielgaard Watts, who ran the Morton Arboretum's educational programs, led a movement of fellow suburban women in transforming an abandoned railroad route into the Illinois Prairie Path in 1966 (Barnett, 2020: 268). Outside of Gary, IN, the Save the Dunes Council began organizing to prevent industry from destroying Lake Michigan's dunes in the 1950s, culminating in the federal government dedicating the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in 1972 and expanding it in 1982 (Engel, 1983: 281–285). Like other postwar suburban environmentalists, activists in the Chicago region were animated by “ecological awareness” and “authentic nature seeking” (Sellers, 2012: 5). Barnett asserts that one of the defining features of the Illinois Prairie Path campaign was “its focus on nature education and ecology” (2020: 259). The Save the Dunes Council wanted to protect that ecosystem for recreation, but also for “scientific study” (Hurley, 1995: 70). Likewise, volunteer stewards in the Cook County forest preserves wanted to learn how to recover disappearing ecosystems endemic to the region.

As is true of citizen science in other political contexts, prairie restoration implicitly challenged the district's prevailing scientific paradigm—forestation (see also Kimura, 2021: 594–595). Therefore, to secure permission to restore prairies, Packard set out to build a constituency. He gave tours of North Branch prairies and spearheaded a letter writing campaign, advocating for volunteer restoration. Under pressure, forest preserve administrators eventually allowed Packard and other volunteers to cut brush with loppers and to gather and sow seed at five North Branch forest preserves. The first “workdays” happened in 1977, and in 1979, North Branch volunteers received a written permit “to remove woody plants, transplant and seed prairie plants at various locations” (Stevens, 1995: 53; FPDCC, 1979).

After the burgeoning volunteer movement demonstrated political strength (in part through a strongly worded letter supporting prairie restoration from the president of the Women's Bar Association of Illinois), district leadership acknowledged their findings that forest preserve prairies had suffered without active management. The experiences of the volunteer stewards mirrored that of lay experts in other activist movements. Epstein, for instance, has outlined how AIDS treatment activists used political tactics — including “large, graphic, well-executed and well-publicized demonstrations” in front of federal agencies —in order to make government bureaucrats “pay attention when activists spoke” about clinical trials (1995: 416). Similarly, cultivating expert status became a central means through which the forest preserve volunteers further consolidated power.

The role of privilege in volunteer credibility

Volunteer stewards’ relative privilege contributed to their ability to establish scientific credibility and, eventually, authority in the Cook County forest preserves. In the United States, volunteering is an opportunity often only available to the privileged, with social scientists describing American volunteers in parks and afterschool programs as predominantly white and middle class (Krinsky and Simonet, 2017; Eliasoph, 2011). Most volunteer stewards in the Cook County forest preserves fit this profile. College-educated suburban residents, they possessed the time and resources to study ecology, restore ecosystems, and organize politically. The volunteer movement's racial homogeneity also reflects the history of racial segregation in the forest preserves. Most district holdings are located in predominantly white suburbs, where Black Chicagoans, for instance, have historically feared racist aggression. During the 1930s, district officials segregated their holdings, arguing they needed to protect Black visitors from white ones who would “not tolerate interracial contact” and who sometimes threatened physical harm (McCammack, 2017: 161, 195). Such violence persisted in the district, with 40 people injured during a racially-charged conflict in 1969 (Gaines, 1972).

Like the AIDS treatment activists noted above, volunteer stewards could establish credibility with scientists and policymakers, in part because their ranks were filled with “white, middle-class, well-educated men” who could “parlay their other social and personal advantages into new types of credibility” (Epstein, 1995: 418). Many volunteer stewards were also women, but since they worked alongside men, the movement did not face the gender bias endured by predominately female citizen science initiatives (see Kimura, 2016 on assumptions that women have comparatively less expertise in technoscience). With their advantages, volunteer stewards, like AIDS treatment activists, had “an unusual capacity to contest the mainstream experts on their own ground” (Epstein, 1995: 415). Volunteers worked in a variety of professions, including teaching, engineering, and pharmacy. One served as an administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Volunteer stewards also faced fewer obstacles than AIDS treatment activists, as they tried to change government policy. Most pressingly, volunteer stewards were not living with a highly-stigmatized disease. Furthermore, volunteers sought to influence one local government agency headquartered within easy driving distance of their homes and to whom they had been visible constituents. AIDS treatment activists, on the other hand, had to travel to Washington, D.C. to influence two different federal agencies with far larger constituencies: the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration (Epstein, 1995, 1996).

When citizen scientists lack the kind of privilege that the volunteer stewards wielded, they have greater difficulty influencing environmental policy outcomes. As Ottinger observes, “a significant and obvious obstacle to citizen scientists’ efforts to shape scientific policies and practices are the often extreme disparities of wealth, education, and power (among others) between them and those they seek to influence” (2010: 248). For instance: in the 1970s “white suburbanites” in Miller, IN had greater success in achieving environmental protection than did their Black neighbors in Gary, IN, because they were “well connected to scientific and academic circles” and had greater comfort with the “bureaucratic regulatory process” (Hurley, 1995: 173).

Volunteers cultivate scientific expertise

Buoyed by social privilege, volunteers became recognized experts after first learning about prairie restoration from established local practitioners. Packard, for instance, regularly asked Betz for guidance (Stevens, 1995: 102). Volunteers also attended “slide-ins” at the Morton Arboretum, in which Schulenberg projected photographs of plants and quizzed students on their common and Latin names. Some Cook County stewards gained field experience by first volunteering at the arboretum's prairie restoration. Later, volunteers attended conferences alongside land management professionals, like the Northern Illinois Prairie Conference (1989 & 1991) and the Midwest Oak Savanna Conference (1993) (Ross, 1994: 57). In these encounters, volunteers gained substantive knowledge, but they also “learn[ed] to act as experts,” a function of what Carr terms “socialization processes, such as training and apprenticeship” (2010: 19). Carr and Epstein view fluency in specialist language as an essential means of projecting expertise and therefore influence (Carr, 2010: 19; Epstein, 1995: 417).

In pursuit of ecological restoration, volunteers also learned the field's specialist language through studying texts routinely consulted by professional land managers. In order to estimate each site's basic soil structure and landscape before Chicago's explosive growth, they referred to nineteenth century public land surveys as well as the surficial maps that University of Chicago Geologist J. Harlen Bretz made in the 1930s. Volunteers then researched ecosystem-appropriate plant species by consulting Floyd Swink's Plants of the Chicago Region (1960).

Volunteers also cultivated expert credibility by developing their own techniques. They gradually “gain[ed] power and authority by obscuring the line between the expert and layperson” in the field of ecological restoration, as Brown argues health activists have done upon receiving guidance from medical professionals (2007: 31–32). The characteristics of ecological restoration made their innovations possible. It is what Epstein calls “an applied science,” and therefore more accessible to laypeople than lab-based fields (Epstein, 1996: 38). In the 1980s, ecological restoration was still considered new, making it especially malleable. In 1989, one volunteer described a workshop where the “participants kept coming back to the stark reality that restoration is a new experimental field” (Masi, 1989).

North Branch volunteers wrote about their restoration methods and findings in academic journals, further instantiating their status as experts. In Restoration & Management Notes, a journal published by the University of Wisconsin Press, Packard outlined a novel strategy for restoration (Packard, 1988). As he documented, volunteers had initially followed Betz's advice for prairie restoration: either distribute seed on plowed land or transplant greenhouse seedlings into unplowed earth. Since they lacked authority to plow in the forest preserves, they tried the latter approach and as Packard wrote, “Results were dismal” (Packard, 1994: 33). So, he and other North Branch volunteers innovated what they called “successional restoration.” The term was a play on ecological succession, in which one association of plants gradually replaces another. In successional restoration, the North Branch volunteers first removed invasive brush from the target site. Then, they broadcast or raked prairie seed into the ground. Packard argued their approach, as it caused less soil disturbance, produced better prairie restorations than plowing (Packard, 1994: 35).

In another article in Restoration & Management Notes, published in 1988, Packard argued that ecologists had mistakenly categorized the oak savanna as a combination of prairie and woodland, when it in fact constituted a distinct ecosystem:

The standard conception of the savanna as a ‘prairie with trees’ is profoundly misleading. In many ways the savanna is as different from prairie and forest as these communities are from each other…In contrast with the results of earlier studies, savannas do include a considerable number of distinctive species—that is, species that predominate in savannas but not in prairies or oak forests (Packard, 1988: 13).

Packard drew on his field experiences at North Branch sites to support his argument. He recounted how he and other volunteers learned that prairie species failed to thrive in the soil of oak openings. To identify species that might persist in those places, Packard searched for plants that grew at the oak edges of North Branch prairies. During the winter of 1985–1986, he discovered an inventory of plants that grew in “barrens” (another term for open fields with some trees) that was published in an 1846 bulletin called The Prairie Farmer. That list overlapped considerably with the one he had already compiled based on his fieldwork (Packard, 1988: 18–19). Helford has recounted how in their quest to redefine the oak savanna, North Branch volunteers presented themselves as possessing expert knowledge rivaling that of academic ecologists, because of their hands-on, intimate relationships with the ecosystems at their sites (1999). And the volunteers prevailed. By the 1990s, they were restoring oak savannas as well as prairies and woodlands across Cook County.

During the 1980s, North Branch stewards became closely associated with institutions that lent further credibility to their projects. Seeking to expand the North Branch volunteer stewardship model, the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission and The Nature Conservancy (a global non-profit organization dedicated to conservation) co-founded the Volunteer Stewardship Network in 1983 (Packard, 1994: 37). Packard eventually became The Nature Conservancy's Director of Science and Stewardship in Illinois. One volunteer recalled first learning about ecological restoration at an outdoor meeting, during which Packard literally stood on a stump and gave a speech. Laurel Ross, the steward at Somme Nature Preserve (a North Branch site), later served as the coordinator for the Volunteer Stewardship Network (Stevens, 1995: 227). After their professional appointments, Ross and Packard continued to volunteer as stewards of their forest preserve sites, further blurring the boundary between lay and expert status in ecological restoration. Citizen scientists generally benefit from what Coburn calls “intermediaries,” such as professional scientists and non-profit organizations, in legitimating their scientific claims (2005: 204). Volunteer stewards continued to seek the guidance and the support of professional scientists, but appointments at The Nature Conservancy signaled that some volunteers had established sufficient expert credibility to become the movement's own intermediaries.

Through the Volunteer Stewardship Network, North Branch stewards in particular became identified as experts throughout the Illinois restoration community. Just as they had consulted Betz and Schulenberg, new volunteer groups now turned to them for advice. They helped start regional steward groups at Poplar Creek, Bluff Spring Fen, and Thatcher Woods Savanna. Emulating the North Branch, each region had its own newsletter. With names like Brush Piles and The Prairie Boomer, these circulars included site updates and workday calendars. The newsletters also analyzed restoration techniques in stories that featured North Branch recommendations. For instance, in the fall of 1992, the Palos newsletter ACORN published a “roundtable,” in which volunteers discussed the costs and benefits of herbicide use. While many Palos stewards avoided herbicides that they called “poisons,” North Branch volunteers described their necessity in restoration. Jane Balaban said, “Like many groups, we first felt that herbiciding was ‘bad,’ but found we needed it to control resprouts” (Bolger, 1992). North Branch volunteer stewards also performed their expertise by offering workshops on an array of topics, such as prescribed fire, grass identification, and prairie gardens.

Expertise is a “citational” practice (Carr, 2010: 19), and volunteers regularly referenced plants growing at restoration sites as proof of their knowledge. Helford has argued that the material production of oak savannas lent credence to that ecological classification: “The very remaking, re-presenting of the oak savanna on the North Branch becomes an important part of the process of creating the classification itself.” Once produced, the oak savanna became “its own public relations officer” (Helford, 1999: 57–58, 75). In 1991, Sullivan described the attractive transformation of North Branch savannas.

The oak savannas along the North Branch have changed the most in the eight or so years since I first visited the restoration sites. Then, they were choked with buckthorn…Now, acre after acre of brush has been cut…And on the ground, the floor of this new savanna, I find false Solomon’s seal, red trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, wild geranium, and hosts of mayapple.

This success also drew national media attention. In 1995, William K. Stevens, a science reporter for The New York Times, published the book Miracle Under the Oaks, which recounts the North Branch Restoration Project's development and highlights Packard's discovery of the oak savanna ecosystem.

As volunteer stewards solidified their status as experts in ecological restoration, forest preserve staff members increasingly let them work independently. While district employees initially supervised prescribed fires that volunteers began setting on North Branch prairies in 1980, they soon allowed volunteers to burn alone. One North Branch steward told me that district leaders “sen[t] out a person with us, and the people were so slow and so dull that they just couldn’t keep up. But they were nice…They would sort of tag along and then say, ‘Well, I think you’re very good at this and I’ve got a lot to do, so you just go ahead.’ And pretty soon we were just doing it.” The district's contact with the North Branch eventually consisted of sporadic meetings—sometimes occurring every four years—wherein naturalists reviewed volunteer-drafted land management plans (Sweeney, 1985). Without district oversight, North Branch volunteers took chances and restored ecosystems as they saw fit. Packard recalled, “We sort of had the authority to do what we could get away with. There was this sort of unwritten agreement: We would do things and get approval in retrospect” (Stevens, 1995: 80–81). A similar arrangement coalesced at Poplar Creek forest preserve, where Crabtree Nature Center naturalists at first supervised volunteers, but as one naturalist recalled, “they quickly took over the project and ran with it.”

In the early 1990s, volunteer stewards leveraged their credibility to increase resources for ecological restoration in the forest preserves. They convinced district administrators to create two new positions: a volunteer coordinator and a land manager. The coordinator trained volunteers and liaised with the district, while the land manager, who had no dedicated staff, had the assignment of maintaining 82% of the forest preserves in a “natural state, with native flora and fauna” (Phelan, 1991). Ralph Thornton became the district's first land manager in 1992. He partnered with Packard and Ross to secure $1.8 million in federal funding to restore 800 acres of prairie, savanna, and forest in the Palos region's Swallow Cliff forest preserve (Sullivan, 1996). These funds supported field crews and the new district position of restoration forester. Even as the district began hiring staff members to restore ecosystems, most forest preserve employees continued to view volunteers as experts capable of working autonomously. In fact, Thornton (the new land manager) did not even know which days the volunteers set prescribed burns, because, as one steward remembered, “He just trusted us.”

The anti-restoration movement contests volunteer expertise

By becoming recognized experts in ecological restoration, volunteers maintained autonomy and exerted influence in the forest preserve district. Scientific expertise, then, was a necessary condition to their authority. Consequently, this authority was put in question when a counter movement of Cook County residents launched a campaign to end ecological restoration in the forest preserves. It is common for citizen scientists to face critics who cast doubt on the data they collect and the claims they make (Brown, 2007: 19; Kimura, 2021: 581; Lave, 2015: 249; Ottinger, 2010: 246). Volunteer stewards first encountered systematic lay critique of their activities in 1996, when residents of Edgebrook and Sauganash began denouncing ecological restoration. Members of these predominantly white, upper middle-class Chicago neighborhoods wanted to stop North Branch volunteers who were removing trees from the forest preserves abutting their homes. The anti-restoration movement found allies in journalists and academics who legitimated and amplified their claims that ecological restoration harmed the environment.

Undercutting volunteer expertise became a central tactic in the anti-restoration campaign (see also Helford, 2000). For instance, during the spring of 1996, one anti-restoration activist appeared on WGN radio and questioned why volunteers, who had no formal education in ecology, were deciding how to steward forest preserves. She singled out Packard, another guest on the show. “You know, it's very annoying that a man who has his degree in social psychology and anthropology is quoting that he knows the best way…who has no background educationally in this kind of management” (WGN, 1996: 8). The anti-restoration movement gained further momentum thanks to a series of editorials that Ray Coffey, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist, began writing in the spring of 1996. In “Forest preserves brass shrugs off tree hit list,” Coffey marveled at the power the volunteers, who he dismissed as “amateurs,” had amassed in the forest preserves, writing, “One of the most curious aspects about the way these public properties are being managed is the degree to which the official management has turned its job over to amateur restorationists recruited as ‘volunteers’” (Coffey, 1996).

With support from their local elected officials, the anti-restorationists on Chicago's northwest side successfully pressured John H. Stroger, Jr., then forest preserve board president, to issue a moratorium on all ecological restoration in the Cook County forest preserves in late September 1996 (Fegelman, 1996). Volunteers were shocked. One North Branch steward told me, “It just came down like a crash.” In order to determine whether to resume ecological restoration, the board of commissioners scheduled three public hearings for the end of October. In the first one, Stroger indicated that the anti-restoration movement had already convinced him: “I wasn’t supporting a program that will cut all the trees down. I was supporting a program that would try to enhance our holdings in terms of the trees, to do things that would preserve those trees. And when I heard the trees were being cut down, I went bananas” (FPDCC, 1996a: 5). During the hearings, anti-restoration activists repeated their opposition to tree removal, which Stroger and other commissioners understood as antithetical to the district's mission. The anti-restorationists highlighted their emotional attachment to the woods surrounding their homes, and how they functioned as visual screens and sound barriers. “Prairies don’t serve people in these ways,” one resident said (FPDCC, 1996a: 208; see Helford, 2000 for an in-depth discussion of the anti-restoration perspective).

With their allies, anti-restorationists continued to impeach volunteer expertise. In her testimony, one activist cited studies establishing the toxicity of an herbicide that volunteers often used: “If you do a literature search you’ll find that the herbicide Garlon is a suspected carcinogen and mutagen. It's water soluble and easily gets into the ground water” (FPDCC, 1996a: 134). In his testimony, an environmental scientist at Governors State University recommended the forest preserve commissioners “redirect a substantial portion of its efforts away from active management and into gathering as much baseline data on as many groups of organisms in our existing woodlands as we can before we begin to alter these systems” (FPDCC 1996a: 198). Just before the hearings, a biology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago sent Stroger a letter arguing that volunteers needed to provide more scientific evidence to enhance their work's credibility: “From my perspective as a scientist, this lack of elitism [among volunteers] has a downside in that there has been too little scientific monitoring and documentation of successes and failures of dozens of individual projects” (Howe, 1996). Criticizing volunteers for their lack of data became an enduring tactic in the anti-restoration movement.

Volunteers struggle to reassert expert credibility

During the ecological restoration hearings, volunteer stewards strived to reassert their credibility as experts. A Palos steward cited quantitative evidence to prove much of his work actually saved trees, saying he had planted “more than 9 gallons of nuts and 307 seedlings out of 8 species of trees” at two woodland restoration projects (FPDCC, 1996c: 111). Linda Masters, a North Branch volunteer who previously worked at the Morton Arboretum, referred to “data” collected by credentialed scientists demonstrating that oak woodlands’ survival hinged on restoration. She said, “For years, we thought that all we had to do was to put a fence around the trees and that they would do the rest, after all they had been doing it for eons. Then the data started coming in from people who spend their lives studying trees. In the vast majority of forests, there were no young oaks in their understory” (FPDCC, 1996b: 225–226).

Epstein points out that professionally-trained allies increase the credibility of lay experts (1995: 426), and volunteers arranged testimony from a variety of professional scientists and land managers in favor of resuming restoration, including a biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a representative from the Illinois Nature Preserve Commission. The latter stated that his agency and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources used the same restoration techniques employed by volunteer stewards (FPDCC, 1996c: 170–173; FPDCC, 1996b: 92). In an effort to dismiss anti-restoration alarm regarding herbicide use, a biochemist with a PhD from Northwestern University pointed out that herbicides used in restoration were less toxic than common household items (FPDCC, 1996b: 138–140).

As in other interactions “in which expertise is at stake,” volunteer stewards repeatedly invoked their training during testimony (Carr, 2010: 21). To further allay concerns about herbicide safety, they described taking Illinois Extension Service courses to prepare for the Illinois Department of Agriculture's licensing exam required for herbicide applicators (FPDCC 1996a: 18, 67). Addressing another method that anti-restoration activists called dangerous, a Palos steward listed his qualifications for carrying out prescribed burns: “I have completed the National ‘Fire Fighters Training and Fire Behavior’ course and participated in about 50 controlled burns” (FPDCC 1996c, 31).

Volunteers forcefully performed their expertise at the 1996 public hearings, by capitalizing on the political network they had built, however inadvertently, over nearly two decades of ecological restoration (see also Kimura, 2021: 582). Stewards used their regional newsletters for coordination, with Brush Piles advising readers to present impactful testimony by “bring[ing] 30 copies of your remarks to give to the Secretary for distribution to the Commissioners” (NBRP, 1996). Based on the number of speakers alone, volunteers out-organized the anti-restorationists: 40 people spoke in favor of the moratorium, while 155 people spoke against it. Volunteers flagged this imbalance in their testimony. One Palos volunteer remarked: “I think you should respect the overwhelming public support for ecological restoration management and completely lift the ban on restoration activities” (FPDCC, 1996c: 92).

In spite of volunteer efforts to overcome anti-restoration attacks, the Stroger administration's subsequent policies indicated lasting damage had been done to their expert credibility. On February 4, 1997, Stroger announced that the moratorium would remain in Edgebrook and Sauganash, the epicenter of the anti-restoration movement. While Stroger ostensibly reinstated ecological restoration everywhere else, he imposed constraints that hobbled volunteer stewardship. Volunteers could no longer remove trees at their sites. Furthermore, they had to work under district supervision. Stroger required each volunteer workday to have a staff member present, forcing stewards to cancel workdays that no employees could attend. This happened fairly regularly as the district had only 59 employees able to supervise the 2200 volunteers working in the forest preserves (PCAC, 1997). Stroger also mandated that staff members lead all prescribed burns, specifying fires be set only in conditions with “slightly higher humidity levels, lower temperatures and slower wind speeds” (FPDCC, 1997). With more selective conditions, the district only completed 23% of the burns planned for the 1997–1998 season (FPDCC, 1998). Volunteers soon noticed their sites deteriorating. In early 2001, the North Branch stewards Jane and John Balaban shared data that established “increasing cover and degradation at Bunker Hill,” a site where the moratorium continued in full (PCAC).

Volunteers expressed frustration that these regulations indicated the commissioners viewed the expert credibility of anti-restorationists as matching, and even exceeding, their own. In December 1997, Dennis Nyberg, a biology professor and a Palos steward, wrote, “Because nature is regarded as expendable and is something the commissioners know little about, they have listened to these shrill voices with their pictures of stumps and what-ifs about herbicides.” John Husar, an outdoor writer for the Chicago Tribune, agreed with Nyberg's assessment, saying that Stronger had listened to “a loud minority of ill-informed activists and one brazenly misinformed media commentator [Ray Coffey],” rather than “enjoying the counsel of his scientific community” (FOTFP and FOFP, 2002: 24).

Anti-restorationists continued to attack volunteer expertise in a land management “advisory council” that Stroger created in the winter of 1997 (Becker, 1997). Hoping to steer the district's restoration policies, volunteers lobbied their commissioners for appointments to the council. Anti-restorationists, including Edgebrook and Sauganash residents, also jockeyed for spots. With members polarized, the council served as a new venue for old scientific disputes. During meetings, anti-restorationists said volunteers had failed to provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate ecological restoration's efficacy. When volunteers supplied data showing prescribed burns improved ecological health, anti-restorationists called it “incomplete” and “subjective” (PCAC Technical Committee, 1997). When stewards at a forest preserve in Edgebrook asked for permission to cut brush, an anti-restorationist said she needed “baseline data” and “inventories” to substantiate the claim that their site had declined ecologically since the moratorium (PCAC, 2001). The anti-restorationists’ endless requests for scientific evidence functioned to discredit ecological restoration and hindered efforts to reinstate land management as practiced before the moratorium. And that was perhaps the point: to deplete volunteer resources through relentless demands for data (see also Kimura, 2021: 583–584).

Inside the advisory council, the efforts of anti-restorationists to discredit volunteer stewards, and ecological restoration more generally, failed. Anti-restorationists were simply outnumbered. During an interview, one council member estimated that two-thirds of them supported ecological restoration, so they could easily secure enough votes to approve restoration at individual forest preserves and to reinstate an array of techniques, such as applying herbicide to freshly cut buckthorn. The board of commissioners, however, was slow to act on the council majority's guidance. For the most part, they just received and filed the council's reports (Balaban, 1997). Whether due to the forest preserve board's temerity or incompetence, the anti-restoration movement's ongoing strategy of discrediting volunteer expertise succeeded in curtailing their authority and limiting ecological restoration.

Some stewards felt so discouraged by these new conditions that they stopped volunteering. Before the moratorium, volunteers at Jurgensen Woods forest preserve “had [the condition of the land] really nice,” according to one forest preserve naturalist. But after the moratorium, the volunteer group disbanded, and as the naturalist said to me, “Nobody's burned it for years. Now it sits.” The few district staff members appointed to facilitate ecological restoration also decided to leave. Alluding to the moratorium, Thornton, the inaugural land manager, explained: “I’d probably still be working there if things were different” (FOTFP and FOTP, 2002: 70).

Volunteers strengthen expert credibility with political muscle

After 1997, volunteers increasingly pursued their land management goals through political advocacy. Like the AIDS treatment activists Epstein studied, volunteers relied on “political muscle” in addition to “presenting themselves as credible within the arena of credentialed expertise” (1995: 409). Since volunteers struggled to influence district policy through the advisory council, many lobbied forest preserve commissioners directly. In 1998, as a direct response to the moratorium, volunteers founded the watchdog organization Friends of the forest preserves (FOFP). Through political mobilization, they projected expert credibility, ultimately leading forest preserve leaders to embrace ecological restoration as their official land management policy.

Commissioner Mike Quigley, now a U.S. representative (IL 5^th), became an ally of the volunteers after his election in 1998 to represent the 10^th district, which included contested sites in Edgebrook. In 2002, Quigley's office prepared a report that criticized the ongoing ban on ecological restoration on Chicago's northwest side and that advocated for a return to volunteer independence. The report pointed out, “the requirement that FPD staff directly supervise volunteers has been a hindrance to conservation efforts.” It recommended that the district “increase volunteer programs,” citing volunteer “expertise” in restoration (Quigley et al., 2002: 2, 3, 12). Agreeing with Quigley's conclusions, the board of commissioners allowed accredited “master stewards” to supervise other volunteers during regular workdays beginning in 2002 (FOTFP and FOTP, 2002: 72). North Branch volunteers also helped elect Commissioner Larry Suffredin in 2002, after lobbying him to make ecological restoration a part of his platform. Suffredin's district, the 13^th, encompassed many North Branch sites, and volunteer stewards remained key constituents.

In 2002, FOTFP and Friends of the Parks (FOFP), a group founded in 1975 to hold the Chicago Park District accountable, issued a two-part report calling attention to the dilapidated state of forest preserve holdings. The document emphasized the role of professionals in its production and included a biography of the primary author, Stephen F. Christy, who had 25 years of leadership experience in Chicago-area conservation organizations, including the Lake County Forest Preserve District (FOTFP and FOTP, 2002: iii, iv). Wayne Lampa, an ecologist who had worked at the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County, designed the land audit undergirding the report's central claim that the forest preserves faced ecological peril (FOTFP and FOTP, 2002: 73). The report detailed the audit's methodology, which entailed plant monitoring by “professionals” and “highly knowledgeable volunteers” along 87 randomly selected transects (FOTFP and FOTP, 2002: 73–74). The authors distilled the study's results in statistics: “The natural quality of the land is poor in 68 percent of the District's holdings, fair or good in 22 percent, and high or very high in 10 percent” (FOTFP and FOTP, 2002: 1, 73–74). Ecological restoration, the report concluded, was necessary for improving the “natural quality” of forest preserve land.

As a result of new leadership and greater political pressure from volunteers and their allies, commissioners began devoting more resources to ecological restoration and commissioned their own land audit. In 2003, Deborah Antlitz, a Crabtree Nature Center naturalist, presented the results from her field survey in the report “Ecological Assessment of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County.” She too found that the forest preserve district needed to carry out ecological restoration to save the area's remnant biodiversity (Antlitz, 2003). Also in 2003, the board of commissioners combined the district's department of conservation with department of forestry to create the department of resource management. District leaders tasked the new resource management field crews with performing ecological restoration.

In 2006, volunteers acted within a narrow time frame to persuade Bobbi Steele, the interim forest preserve board president, to lift the moratorium from the Edgebrook and Sauganash forest preserves where it still applied in full. Steele's term was for six months between the administrations of John H. Stroger, Jr., who had a debilitating stroke, and his son Todd Stroger. While the Strogers viewed ecological restoration as a political frustration, Steele had been a teacher, and she liked the field trips that volunteer stewards organized for students in the Chicago Public Schools. When she lifted the moratorium, Steele recognized the expertise of volunteers and the scientific credibility of ecological restoration, by saying, “These practices have been endorsed by land management agencies across the country at every level of government.” After her remarks, three volunteer stewards, including Jane Balaban, publicly thanked Steele at a board meeting (FOTFP, 2006).

The district further elevated ecological restoration and volunteerism under the leadership of Toni Preckwinkle. Elected as board president in 2010, Preckwinkle ran on a broad reform platform that included eliminating patronage hiring. Her administration embraced ecological restoration and sought to increase volunteerism. In her budget address for the 2012 fiscal year, Preckwinkle's “major objectives” included “continuing to restore our most precious certified natural forests, savannahs and prairies” and “building and leveraging the district's conservation, land restoration and environmental protection work by continuing to grow our volunteer corps.” To realize those goals, Preckwinkle pointed out, “nearly all of the increase in the general operating fund has been dedicated to creating additional positions in our ecology division and our expanded volunteer resource program” (2011). By the time of my fieldwork, between 2012 and 2013, the district had begun fulfilling Preckwinkle's goals by hiring more employees with academic training and professional experience in ecology and ecological restoration.

Volunteer authority decreases as district embraces ecological restoration

The volunteers had always wanted the forest preserve district to increases its commitment to ecological restoration. And yet, as the district hired more experts in this field volunteer authority slowly dissipated. Indeed, the new paid professionals eventually succeeded in presenting themselves as possessing the most knowledge about ecological restoration in the Cook County forest preserves (see also Ottinger, 2010: 263–264).

Expertise is “relational” (Carr, 2010: 22), and by diminishing the credibility of volunteers, district staff members simultaneously shored up their own. They cast volunteers, who lacked professional training, as largely unqualified to make decisions regarding ecological restoration. One district employee told me, “You could have volunteers that are very good and know some very detailed stuff, but could have a gap in their knowledge that they’re totally blind to.” She recounted an instance in which “a guy who's really good at sedges and other stuff and had years of experience” told district staff that he had found a specimen of great white trillium.

Everyone goes and follows him into the woods and he showed them a non-flowering jack-in-the-pulpit. I can see how it was confusing, but I was a little surprised, because he does have so much knowledge and experience. But it's a weekend experience and they learn what they learn, which is good and helpful, but sometimes if they say something is something, you’ve got to think in the back of your mind, you know, have we really confirmed that?

Other staff members also considered the limited hours of volunteer work as insufficient for building requisite knowledge, with one noting, “Workdays only last from 9 am to noon, including a coffee break.”

In everyday land management, staff members increased their supervision over volunteers and became the arbiters of effective and appropriate restoration. They expected volunteer stewards to work under management schedules that outlined the exact work to take place at a given site. When I asked one district staff member to explain the schedules’ purpose, he told me, “It gives you a little bit of oversight is the main thing it gives you.” District employees also set district-wide rules for common restoration practices like burning brush piles of woody invasive species. A forest preserve administrator explained the reasoning behind the measures, “We need to make sure that everybody knows who's working for who, who's on first, who's on second.” In particular, he had trouble with volunteers making their own rules, describing the volunteers’ stance as: “I’m doing it for you but I want to do it the way I want to do it, not the way you want to do it.”

Volunteers resented the district's efforts to manage their activities. One North Branch steward complained that the district's relationship to the volunteers had become “top down,” and he wished the district would “empower” them instead. Another volunteer, in central Cook County, found resource management's new policies for enhanced oversight alienating: “You have to trust people. You have to put trust in the steward of the area. They do that to an extent. It's a little confusing to me right now, frankly. Those are the things I’m noticing—over-regulation.” Others noticed signs of “over-regulation,” too. One volunteer recalled a meeting between stewards and district staff members in which an ecologist circulated a sample management schedule. “I think it was like 20 or 25 pages for this little tiny prairie…It was actually minute, you know, micromanaging.” When volunteers demanded greater autonomy, district staff members said they lacked sufficient knowledge to work independently. During one meeting, a steward wished the district would return to a system in which each management schedule “comes from the steward.” A district ecologist told her that would be impossible, since there existed a “variety of skill levels among stewards.”

Conclusion

Volunteerism has become a ubiquitous form of urban natural resource management in the United States. With the persistence of neoliberal policies, it will likely grow as a solution to the ever-diminishing budgets for protected lands in metropolitan regions. Social scientists have cast volunteers, in general, as apolitical and ineffective. Instead, I analyze the successful performance of scientific expertise as an avenue for volunteer empowerment. If volunteerism continues to proliferate in urban conversation, and if it is indeed becoming part and parcel of civic engagement as governments roll back public services, then it behooves us to try and understand its political potential. Examining the trajectory of specific volunteer movements is one way to do so.

In the Cook County forest preserves, volunteer stewards were instrumental in changing land management policy from forestation to ecological restoration. They accomplished what district employees who practiced prairie restoration could not, hampered as they were by the institution's history of forestation and leaders who served the Democratic Party's political machine. Since the late 1970s, volunteer stewards have cultivated credibility as experts in ecological restoration and have leveraged that status to influence forest preserve policies.

In establishing expert credibility, volunteers have benefited from their relative privilege. As mostly white, middle-class, and highly-educated suburban residents, volunteer stewards already exercised power in Cook County. From this research, it is unclear whether volunteers can successfully leverage scientific authority in situations where they must navigate economic and social inequality, as researchers have documented what is essentially systemic racism impeding under-resourced communities from changing environmental policy (Coburn, 2005; Hurley, 1995; Ottinger, 2010). In other contexts, volunteers may find neoliberal policies too great an impediment to establishing expert authority, particularly when their work challenges economic prosperity (Kimura, 2016: 5). Volunteers in such adverse circumstances may take the lead of citizen scientists who have managed to achieve important policy goals, particularly ones related to environmental health, by partnering with professional scientists in community-led research projects (Coburn, 2005; Hoover, 2017).

This case of the Cook County forest preserves also underscores that volunteer power rooted in scientific expertise is fragile. Citizen scientists often face attacks on their credibility, and in Cook County, a countermovement of anti-restorationists achieved a moratorium on ecological restoration after contesting the expertise of volunteer stewards and the validity of ecological restoration as a whole. Volunteer stewards eventually succeeded in lifting most prohibitions under the moratorium, by combining political advocacy with the performance of expert credibility. In the process, they convinced forest preserve leaders to adopt ecological restoration as the district's official land management policy. The volunteers’ victory had the unexpected effect of diminishing their authority, after the forest preserve district hired professionals who presented themselves as possessing the most knowledge about ecological restoration.

While volunteer power may be depleted, ecological restoration remains the district's primary conservation strategy. Volunteer stewards in the Cook County forest preserves managed to become recognized experts who forced the transformation of land management policies in a local government agency. Their triumph invites further study of volunteers in urban natural resource management and the extent to which they have influenced environmental policies in the course of their unpaid labor.

Highlights

In the Cook County forest preserves, volunteers deployed scientific expertise to change government land management policy

This case challenges the prevailing ethnographic consensus portraying volunteers as apolitical and ineffective

Volunteer authority rooted in scientific expertise is also fragile

In the Cook County forest preserves, a variety of interest groups have undercut volunteer power by challenging their expert credibility