Chicago Wilderness

Illinois Beach State Park                                                                                       Photo: Laura Milkert

ECCo works through the Chicago Wilderness alliance to advance four programmatic initiatives:

Leave No Child Inside	Green Infrastructure Implementation
Climate Change Action	Restoring Local Natural Areas

Chicago Wilderness is an alliance of more than 250 organizations who work together toward conservation of biodiversity in the 6 million acre Chicago metropolitan region.  ECCo was a leader in forming this powerful alliance in 1996 as a strategy that enables our small staff to work effectively toward an enormously ambitious vision for the Chicago Region:

“…a region where people learn to enter back into a respectful and positive relationship with the nature that surrounds them…and where plants, animals, and natural communities are offered a permanent home next to our own—to the benefit of our health and our economy—in preserves large enough to sustain them forever.”

Photos: Laura Milkert (Top, Left), Alvaro del Campo (Top, Right), Doug Taron (Bottom, Left), Leslee Jackson (Bottom, Right)