Shawnee

Why should it be a National Park?

The last glaciers stopped in southern Illinois. Everything north of that line was flattened into the farmland the state is known for; everything south of it was left alone, and what was left is a country of sandstone bluffs, box canyons, and hardwood forest between the Ohio and the Mississippi. The Shawnee National Forest covers about 289,000 acres of it, the only national forest in Illinois. The Garden of the Gods is the place people photograph, a ridge of sandstone worn into towers and fins, with a quarter-mile flagstone trail along the top that the Civilian Conservation Corps laid. Elsewhere there is the Little Grand Canyon, Jackson Falls, Bell Smith Springs, and the Lusk Creek Wilderness. Cave-in-Rock is a cavern in a bluff above the Ohio that river pirates used in the 1790s to ambush flatboats. The Trail of Tears crossed here in the winter of 1838 and 1839, and Cherokee people died waiting for the ice on the Mississippi to break.

Since about 2022 a coalition has been pushing to transfer the whole forest from the Forest Service to the Park Service as a Shawnee National Park and Climate Preserve. The climate part is the novel argument: end commercial logging and let the forest accumulate carbon, with hunting and dispersed recreation continuing. Carbondale's city council endorsed it. No bill has been introduced, and county boards and timber interests are opposed. It is the only campaign in the country proposing a National Park primarily as a carbon reservoir, which makes it either ahead of its time or a category error, depending on who is asked.