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In 1916, the Forest Preserve District of Cook County began acquiring land to create a natural retreat for Chicagoans in that booming metropolitan region. Since district officials acquired many properties along county streams, water pollution soon interfered with their mission of creating an urban wilderness for recreational pleasure. To address the problem, in 1931, county leaders appointed the Clean Streams Advisory Committee that collaborated with forest preserve staff members to pressure polluters to clean-up their operations and to persuade enforcement agencies to prosecute ongoing offenders. They also lobbied the Public Works Administration to earmark New Deal funding for sewage treatment in Cook County. Their efforts suggest that early activism against water pollution in American cities emerged not only from efforts to ensure clean drinking water, but also struggles to protect nature. The interwar campaign to clean forest preserve streams anticipated the goals of the federal Clean Water Act (1972) to make all American waterways fishable and swimmable. The movement also preceded the burst of anti-pollution activism that historians have documented in U.S. suburbs after WWII and laid the groundwork for postwar efforts to mitigate water pollution in Cook County.

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Through a historical case study, this paper explores the political potential of volunteerism in urban natural resources management. As governments continue to rely on unpaid labor to perform essential services, volunteerism has proliferated in urban protected lands during the neoliberal era. It is therefore worthwhile to study the power that volunteers may wield at their service sites, alongside the scholarly attention already paid to the inefficacy and the inadequacy of volunteer labor. By drawing on science and technology studies literature, especially concerning the role of citizen science in activist movements, this article analyzes how volunteer stewards influenced natural resources policy in the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. A local agency, the district is responsible for nearly 70,000 acres in the county that encompasses Chicago, IL. For most of the twentieth century, forestation constituted the district's official land management policy, as leaders sought to match its ecologically diverse holdings to the agency's name. In the late 1970s, volunteers won permission from the district to begin restoring prairies in the forest preserves. Working autonomously, volunteer stewards cultivated expert credibility in the science of ecological restoration. Over several decades, they drew on their scientific authority to convince forest preserve leaders to adopt ecological restoration as the district's primary land management policy, a process culminating in the early twenty-first century. The paper also explores the fragility of volunteer authority rooted in scientific expertise, by tracking how an anti-restoration movement and, later, forest preserve staff members successfully undercut volunteer expertise in ecological restoration.