THE HIGHWAY EXPEDITION From August 2004 to May 2007 I commuted between Bloomington, IL and Champaign/Urbana, IL. The majority of this 50-mile route is along Interstate Highway 74, part of the the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. The commute runs through a region that is dominated by large-scale agriculture. I remain amazed at how completely the landscape in this area has been transformed. From the perspective of my car window, there first seemed to be almost nothing that had been set aside as natural areas. In fact, Illinois ranks 49th out of 50 states (Iowa is 50th) in terms of remaining natural areas, and only a tiny fraction of the state's original prairies, forests, savannas, and wetlands survive today. The highway right-of-way has been, for the most part, left to return to a relatively wild state - one periodically ruptured by mowing and chemical spraying in some areas. The Illinois interstate highway system is the third largest in the nation, with approximately 1,900 miles of roadway corridor and about 135,000 acres of land associated with these corridors. The realization that the highway right-of-way had some of the largest potential natural habitat in this part of the state deepened my interest in finding out what was actually there. The section of I-74 along my commuter route was built from 1958 to 1965. After more than 40 years, it has developed into a unique habitat. I undertook this expedition to reveal, in a more intimate way than is accessible to most highway travelers, some of the specific qualities of this roadside habitat. The first challenge was gaining access to the right-of-way which is restricted to pedestrians. After conversations with scientists from the Illinois Natural History Survey and several letters and emails to the Illinois Department of Transportation, I got permission, assembled my gear, and began the expedition. I eventually walked both sides of the right-of-way between Bloomington and Champaign, exploring a little more than 115 miles in the course of 27 individual trips. What I discovered during this expedition was a strange world filled with a surprising density of native and non-native plants and animals, all living under a constant barrage of traffic noise. In this narrow strip of land where nature continuously attempts to re-establish itself, the inhabitants appear to be adapting to a life squeezed between speeding traffic and the huge expanses of large-scale agriculture. The documents, maps, images and videos on this website, offer a small window into this remarkable marginal habitat. BD Collier |