Ecologist Alison Anastasio visited a former US Steel South Works site in Chicago. She expected to find “all crap plants” — common invasive weeds. To her surprise she spotted little bluestem and three species of native milkweed. She already knew she didn't want a career as an academic scientist. But she came up with the idea of forming a group to study this ecosystem: “a dream team of people I wanted to work with.”

She knew Laura Merwin from the University of Chicago, and later she met Lauren Umek, a project manager for the Chicago Park District. She invited them to brunch to pitch her idea to research plants growing on slag. Not for any obvious career goal. Just from sheer curiosity.

Merwin and Umek were excited to join her project - which she called a “reverse side hustle,” since it involved a lot of work, but didn't make any money: it actually costs money.

And thus the Slag Queens were born.

Their first paper, “Urban post-industrial landscapes have unrealized ecological potential,” was published in Restoration Ecology in 2022. It argues that slag fields don't need to be fixed. They have ecological value in and of themselves. And land managers should forget whatever ecosystem was there before. Instead, they should look to more exotic ecosystems as a guide, like the dolomite prairies of Illinois, where magnesium-rich rock near the surface makes it hard for ordinary plants to thrive. Slag too is rich in magnesium.

The Slag Queens are continuing their revolutionary work even now! For more, start here:

• Carrie Gous, The beauty of slag, https://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/beauty-slag

Some of what I just wrote is a paraphrase of this article.

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@johncarlosbaez @quoidian isn't 'pristine nature' one of those impossible ideals? I'm in Australia where we've had 100m of sea level rise since people arrived so questions like "what would nature look like here" are pretty abstract.

"The Biggest Estate on Earth" is a book asking which bits people made.