Where Ecology Was Born

The dunes along the southern shore of Lake Michigan look, at first, like a landscape defined by absence: just sand and water and wind. But in eighteen ninety-nine, a University of Chicago botanist named Henry Chandler Cowles published a paper about this exact shoreline that launched an entirely new science.

Cowles had spent years walking the dunes and noticing something remarkable. As you moved back from the water's edge, the plant communities changed in predictable sequence, from bare sand to grasses to shrubs to forest. The dunes were not a static desert. They were a living archive of time, each band of vegetation representing a different stage in a centuries-long process of ecological development. Cowles called this succession, and the paper he published in the Botanical Gazette introduced the concept to science. He is now remembered as the father of plant ecology in North America.

The same landscape that gave Cowles his idea also gave rise to one of the longest conservation fights in American history. By the early nineteen hundreds, heavy industry was pressing in from Gary and Chicago, and conservationists led by landscape architect Jens Jensen and Cowles himself began pushing for protection. Stephen Mather, who would go on to become the first director of the National Park Service, was among those who held early hearings on a Sand Dunes National Park back in nineteen sixteen. It took another century to make that designation official.

In two thousand nineteen, Congress redesignated Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore as Indiana Dunes National Park, making it Indiana's first and only national park and the sixty-first in the country. The park preserves fifteen thousand acres of dunes, oak savannas, bogs, marshes, prairies, and fifteen miles of Lake Michigan shoreline.

Biologically it is extraordinary. More than eleven hundred flowering plant and fern species have been recorded here, giving Indiana Dunes one of the highest concentrations of plant diversity in the entire national park system. It is a place where the tropics and the tundra overlap, where species that should not share territory somehow do, in a strip of sand along a freshwater sea.