In 2023, artist Lindsay Olson became TWI’s first artist-in-residence, using a 3,000-year-old floral collar as inspiration. A year later, 2 rare marsh birds returned to Calumet

What if a landscape destroyed by decades of industry could be rebuilt—not simply by planting trees, but by bringing back the water, wildlife and natural cycles that once defined it?

That is the challenge unfolding across the Calumet region, a sprawling wetland landscape at the southern end of Lake Michigan, stretching across Chicago’s Southeast Side and Northwest Indiana.

Calumet region is surrounded by some of the unmistakable signs of the industrial Midwest today: highways, railways, levees, power infrastructure and remnants of heavy industry. But underneath that industrial landscape is something very different.


A lost wetland.

And scientists, ecologists, engineers, and conservationists are working to bring parts of it back.

A wetland landscape was transformed

The Calumet region was once dominated by wetlands. But the Industrial Age brought rapid and extensive changes to the landscape, including the filling and alteration of wetland areas.

What remains today is fragmented.

Instead of one connected wetland system, the region contains scattered parcels separated by roads, infrastructure, development, and other human-made barriers. The original hydrology—the natural movement and cycling of water through the landscape—has also been disrupted.

That creates a difficult question for restoration teams: How do you make a wetland function again when the landscape around it has been fundamentally changed?

The answer is surprisingly hands-on.

The restoration began with water

Lindsay Olson, an artist who became the first artist-in-residence with The Wetlands Initiative, experienced that process firsthand.

On her first day working with the group, she found herself ankle-deep in mud along the West Branch of the Little Calumet River floodplain corridor, helping the team install water gauges.

The goal was not simply to make the area look greener.

It was to restore a more natural hydrology.

The restoration team removes invasive plants, plants native species and uses water-control structures to raise and lower water levels. In some places, the landscape itself is reshaped, even with bulldozers, to recreate conditions that allow wetlands to function more naturally.

It is part ecology.

Part engineering.

And part patience.

Nature begins its work

Once the right water conditions are restored, something remarkable happens.

The ecosystem begins rebuilding itself.

One of the habitats restoration teams are trying to create is known as a 'hemi-marsh—a marsh with roughly equal portions of open water and emergent vegetation.'

This balance provides habitat for a wide range of organisms.

But humans are not the only ones shaping it.

Muskrats become unexpected architects.

They cut down marsh vegetation to create homes and feeding platforms within the aquatic landscape, helping produce the characteristic mixture of open water and vegetation that defines a hemi-marsh.

Beavers play their own role, creating deeper channels that they use for movement and sometimes cutting canals across land to reach food or materials.

The restored landscape is therefore not simply something humans build.

It becomes a system in which wildlife begins doing some of the engineering.

A comeback is already visible

The changes can be seen in the animals returning to the landscape.

Restoration efforts in the Calumet region have begun supporting plants, pollinators, amphibians, fish and birds, including secretive marsh species such as the Illinois state-endangered common gallinule and the black-crowned night-heron.

Native plants are also returning.

At one restoration site, species including rattlesnake master, hybrid cattail, hard-stem bulrush, pickerel weed and sweet flag were thriving after invasive vegetation had been removed.

But restoring these wetlands is not as simple as removing invasive plants and waiting for nature to return.

The problem is bigger than the marsh

The remaining wetlands are often disconnected from one another. Ownership of individual parcels can also be complicated, while highways, levees and other infrastructure crisscross the region.

Even the ground beneath restoration efforts can tell the story of the area's industrial past.

At Indian Ridge Marsh, The Wetlands Initiative is restoring wetland habitat over a layer of slag, a rock-like waste material left behind by the industries.

Yet even in these heavily disturbed landscapes, restoration is producing visible changes in biodiversity.

Plants and animals are beginning to return.

It can take decades

Perhaps the most surprising part of the restoration story is how slowly it unfolds.

Wetland restoration is not an overnight transformation.

The work can take decades, and some of the results may not be fully visible within a single person's lifetime.

That makes the project fundamentally different from a typical construction project.

There is no simple finish line.

Instead, humans repair the conditions that allow a natural system to function—and then the ecosystem begins responding.

That response can involve plants taking root, insects returning, birds establishing themselves, fish and amphibians moving back in and animals such as muskrats and beavers altering the habitat in their own ways.

An industrial landscape gets a second life

For Olson, the experience became more than a scientific study.

She translated what she learned into textile artwork, using patterns, shapes and materials to represent the fragmented wetlands, water-control structures and ecological processes involved in restoration.

One of her works was inspired by a 3,000-year-old floral collar buried with King Tut.

The connection was symbolic: the ancient collar represented birth, death and rebirth, while her wetland artwork explored restoration as another cycle of destruction and renewal.

The idea fits the Calumet landscape remarkably well.

A place once dramatically altered by human industry is being given another chance.

Sometimes restoring nature does not mean building something new.

It means repairing the conditions that allow nature to start building again.