This issue’s sun-splashed cover image, taken in September, shows a clod of plant life that cropped up, quite unexpected, near where a US Steel plant once blazed and roared.

I won’t spoil the backstory, which you can discover for yourself in “The Beauty of Slag,” by contributing editor Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93. It was a few years ago that Carrie, possessor of a deep-green thumb and an indiscriminate curiosity, became interested in the Indiana Dunes and the Calumet Region where they sit. Her fascination was infectious.

The University of Chicago’s entwinement with the fate of the dunes begins early in our history, with Henry Chandler Cowles, PhD 1898. Coming to the University as a graduate student in 1894, Cowles left only for the briefest time. You can trace his career in the library’s digitized campus publications archive.

In the 1890s, his name pops up in the program for his convocation ceremony. In the 1900s, the Cap and Gown records his faculty positions as instructor, then assistant professor. By the 1910s, The Chicago Maroon was sharing news of his travels—now as a scholar in full bloom—to document the world’s flora.

In January 1917 this magazine reported that Cowles had addressed the US Department of the Interior as a representative of a group that was working to get the Indiana Dunes, with their extraordinary variety of plants, preserved for recreation and study. That battle continued for more than a century, until 2019 when the area was at last designated a national park. (For decades it had been a national lakeshore, due in great part to the untiring advocacy of another UChicago faculty member, the economist and later senator Paul Douglas [D-IL].)

If Chicago is the “city in a garden” (its motto: Urbs in horto), the dunes provide a garden by the city, and more than that. The University continues to teach undergraduates there during the College’s Calumet Quarter. Still holding surprises for scientists, the dunes are much the plein air classroom Cowles hoped for.