Will Indiana Dunes Be A Climate Change Casualty?

By JoshMogerman in News on Nov 18, 2012 10:00PM

Just outside Chicago’s South Side, tucked amidst one of the nation’s most intense industrial landscapes, sits a 15-mile strip of National Park Service holdings that protect a vanishing, globally-unique mishmash of natural systems. The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore hugs the narrow band of Lake Michigan between Gary and Michigan City where a mind-bending mix of oak forest, rugged Cape Cod-esque living dunes, wetlands and open prairie come together. It is a stunning reminder of the utterly unprecedented landscape that existed in this region centuries ago. Metra’s South Shore Line makes the park one of the greatest, and easiest, natural escapes available to Chicagoans...

At least for now...

The unique nature of the Lakeshore’s mishmash of environments also makes it incredibly vulnerable to the ravages of climate change. An article in the Post-Tribune reminds us that those impacts are already underway. And as earlier reports have highlighted, Northwest Indiana summers could eventually feel more like Florida---a change that would bring a wave of invasive species likely to completely wipe the Park’s characteristic biodiversity away and scour its dunes into nubs as winter Lake ice protection evaporates. That has had many sounding the alarm:

"The changes we face with the accelerated rate of global climate change that our human activities have caused don't allow millennia or even centuries for adaption; the changes now will take place in only decades without time for nature to adapt," said [Dale Engquist, president of Chicago Wilderness Trust and a former superintendent of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore]. "We need time to adapt."

The smoke pouring from smokestacks surrounding Mount Baldy, the Lakeshore’s biggest dune, remind us that time may be running out, so make that trip soon!