Highland Park’s Rosewood Ravine. Image: Lloyd Degrane.
By Marie Orttenburger
Created by the same retreating glaciers that carved and filled the Great Lakes, you could say lakeshore ravines are the lakes’ blood relatives.
They share more than just ancestry; their health is interdependent.
Great Lakes ravines face deterioration at the hands of invasive species and pollution, and the impacts of those threats wash right into the Great Lakes. Some communities around the region are working with conservationists to address that.
In this episode of Echos, reporter Marie Orttenburger speaks with Ethan Brown, the resilience coordinator for The Alliance for the Great Lakes, and Rebecca Grill, a natural areas manager with the Park District of Highland Park in Illinois. They discuss the important environmental roles ravines play and how to keep them healthy.