Monarchs laying eggs on milkweed
June 26, 2026
The common milkweed plants along the edges of Chicago's green spaces are at their best right now. The leaves are broad and flat, dark green, still soft enough to bend without snapping. This is what a female monarch is looking for when she moves low over a patch of vegetation in early summer, and if you watch one long enough, you can see exactly how she decides.She lands on a leaf and drums it with her front feet. This is not random movement. Her feet carry chemical receptors that detect the milkweed's latex compounds through contact, confirming the plant before she commits. She may check several leaves on the same plant, or leave and try another patch entirely. When she finds what she wants, she curves her abdomen under the leaf and deposits a single egg, pale green and ribbed, smaller than a sesame seed, on the underside. Then she moves on. A single female may lay several hundred eggs over the course of her adult life, but she places them one at a time, spread across as many plants as she can find. This distributes the risk. A caterpillar that strips one plant does not compete with its siblings on the next.The milkweed's role here is not passive. The same latex that the monarch detects through her feet is a sticky, bitter sap that fills channels running through the leaves and stems. Most insects avoid it. A young monarch caterpillar, when it hatches, deals with this by cutting a circle into the leaf surface before eating, draining the latex from that section so it can feed safely. Older caterpillars learn to sever the leaf's midrib at the base, blocking the flow to the whole leaf. The plant is not helpless, but the monarch has worked out how to eat it anyway, and the cardenolides in the latex accumulate in the caterpillar's tissues as it feeds, making the caterpillar itself unpalatable to most birds. The monarch does not merely tolerate the milkweed's chemistry; it borrows it.The red milkweed beetle is doing something similar in these same patches right now. It chews a trench around the midrib before feeding, stopping the latex flow the same way the caterpillar does. Both insects have arrived at the same mechanical solution independently, and both carry the plant's toxins in their bodies. The beetle's red and black coloring advertises this to predators just as the monarch's orange and black does. Neither insect is the other's competitor in any serious sense; milkweed patches in early summer can support both, along with the various bees and wasps that come for the flowers, which are just beginning to open on some plants now, the pink-purple clusters heavy and fragrant above the broad leaves.
Public beaches impaired all summer by combined sewer overflows
July 21, 2026
At the height of summer swimming season, nearly every public beach along the lakefront carries an official federal designation as an impaired water body — not a seasonal advisory posted on a sign, but a standing regulatory determination that these waters consistently fail to meet their intended use. The cause is pathogens: bacteria flushed into the lake when combined sewer overflows release during and after heavy rain, pushing untreated or undertreated wastewater through outfalls that discharge directly to the nearshore. This is not an emerging crisis or a newly discovered hazard. It is a chronic, documented failure of urban water infrastructure playing out in plain sight on one of the most celebrated freshwater shorelines in the world.The bitter irony of this moment is inseparable from this city's engineering history. In 1900, Chicago reversed the flow of its river — one of the most audacious hydraulic interventions in American urban history — specifically to stop sending sewage-contaminated water into Lake Michigan. Over the following century, the city built the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan, known as the Deep Tunnel, an underground network of caverns and conduits reaching depths of 300 feet, designed to capture combined sewer overflows before they could reach the lake. That system represents one of the largest and most expensive public works projects ever undertaken in the United States, and yet the problem it was built to solve persists at the public beaches every summer. The engineering was visionary; the operational reality has not kept pace.The regulatory picture makes the gap between ambition and outcome concrete. The Calumet City and Skokie combined sewer systems are both currently in significant non-compliance with their discharge permits, meaning the controls meant to prevent these overflow releases are not holding under real-world conditions — particularly the intensifying rain events that have become more frequent across the Chicago Lake Plain. Combined sewer systems were built when the city was young and storm runoff and sanitary sewage shared a single pipe — a design logic that made a certain kind of sense before the region was paved. Today, even a modest rain event can overwhelm that legacy infrastructure and trigger a release.The lagoons embedded in the city's great West and South Side parks tell the same story with equal persistence. Humboldt Park, Garfield Park, Columbus, Douglas, Marquette, McKinley, Washington, Sherman — nearly every lagoon in that network is officially listed as impaired, and most are still waiting for an active cleanup plan. These lagoons were designed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as civic amenities, places where working-class Chicagoans without access to private green space could experience something of the natural world. Their impairment is not merely an ecological failure; it is a failure of a specific promise about who the city's natural resources are for.
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