Our Heritage of Hills

Less than 80 miles as the crow flies from my doorstep in Carbondale are the ruins of a once-thriving prehistoric city of up to 20,000 American Indians known as Cahokia Mounds. Cahokia was among the most complex, sophisticated societies of prehistoric North America. At its population peak around 1150, researchers say, the city covered nearly six square miles.

Cahokia was designated as a World Heritage Site in 1982 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It is one of twenty World Heritage Sites in the United States.

Several theories exist for the demise of the ancient civilization. One theory suggests that Cahokia was abandoned because of environmental abuse: over-hunting and deforestation. Another suggests that political collapse was the primary reason for the site’s abandonment.

Cahokia is under new environmental and political threats today. The nation's largest garbage hauler, Houston-based Waste Management, which owns the towering Milam landfill in nearby Fairmont City (Madison County), wants to expand to floodplain land adjacent to the world heritage site. How big is the Waste Management company? It has over 22,000 collection and transfer vehicles - the largest trucking fleet in the waste industry.

The company would expand its existing landfill and use its trucks to build a decidedly different kind of mound - one of buried garbage that would be constructed within 2,100 feet of the Cahokia Mounds and close to Horseshoe Lake State Park. The 222-acre expansion area for the landfill would also inundate 18 acres of wetlands in the floodplain.

Two environmental groups (Illinois Sierra Club* and American Bottom Conservancy) have filed an appeal with the Illinois Pollution Control Board to stop the construction on the site. Kathy Andria, president of American Bottom Conservancy said

"I think it's unconscionable, so disrespectful to the site, to the American Indians living today who would see garbage put on top of a site they consider sacred."

Each day an average of 400 truckloads (about 3,000 tons) of trash are deposited in a mound to a height of almost 170 feet height at the existing landfill site in Milam.

Approval for the site must be granted by both the Army Corps of Engineers and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.

If the landfill is completed, the City of Madison would receive $1 million a year from the landfill; Madison County would also receive approximately two million dollars annually in tipping fees.

(* Disclosure: I serve on the governing board of the Illinois Sierra Club.)