Environment Illinois 2025 Program Agenda

With our supporters, Environment Illinois is celebrating nature and sharing a vision of an Illinois with clean water and air, more clean energy, healthy wildlife and more habitat that wildlife need to thrive.

Clean water

Ryan Heuer | Unsplash.com

In the spring, male Illinois chorus frogs can be heard calling across some of Illinois’ wetlands searching for a mate. In summer, Illinoisans swim and boat in our beautiful rivers and lakes. Autumn brings the overhead call of sandhill cranes as they migrate south and the flash of orange and black from monarch butterflies’ wings. And in winter, the oldest trees in Illinois glisten under a blanket of snow.

From Lake Michigan to the Shawnee National Forest, Illinois’ environment is special. With our supporters, Environment Illinois is celebrating nature and sharing a vision of an Illinois with clean water and air, more clean energy, healthy wildlife and more habitat that wildlife need to thrive. In 2025 we will continue to highlight solutions to the environmental problems we face and work to protect the nature that makes the Prairie State such a great place to call home. Check out some of the topics we plan to work on this year.

Lucy Haza | Used by permission
Two Great Lakes piping plover chicks at Montrose Beach in summer 2024.

Support clean water

Protect Illinois’ wetlands

Healthy wetlands support the clean water of Illinois’ rivers, lakes and streams where we boat, fish and get our drinking water. Wetlands act like nature’s sponges, storing water in their soils and filtering pollutants that would harm the health of our rivers and lakes.

Wetlands also help to mitigate flood risk in our communities by storing surges of water and releasing it slowly. This can help to limit erosion as well as protect homes and buildings. And wetlands are important for wildlife, providing vital habitat for birds, turtles and fish including threatened and endangered species.

But despite the many benefits, many of Illinois’ wetlands are not protected from degradation or destruction from human activity and development. We support protecting these special places for the future.

Get the lead out of drinking water

Lead contamination of drinking water at schools and child care centers is a widespread threat to our children’ s health. There is no safe level of lead in our drinking water. And yet, many of our schools and child care centers, where our kids go to learn, have drinking water contaminated with lead.

Illinois’ schools and child care centers should immediately start addressing this threat by replacing fountains with lead-filtering water bottle stations, and installing filters certified to remove lead at all other taps used for cooking and drinking.

Reduce pollution

Everyone deserves clean water to drink. Our rivers, lakes and streams shouldn’t be polluted, but contamination from PFAS “forever chemicals,” runoff pollution in our cities and from factory farms and industrial sources of pollution threaten the health of our waterways.

To make our waterways safe for swimming, boating, fishing and for wildlife, we should limit toxic pollution at the source, clean up contamination in our water and communities, and to hold industry accountable for damage they have caused.

Celebrate Illinois’ wildlife and wild places

Connect Illinoisans to nature

People need nature – we need to get away from our screens and our office chairs. We need to be able to reach out and touch trees, to hear birds sing, to see butterflies and bees pollinating flowers, to run on the grass or a beach and jump into a lake. National parks and wonders of the world like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone are great, but you shouldn’t have to go far from home to experience nature.

Taking a bird walk through your local forest preserve or a paddle on the stream in your backyard can help provide that connection. We want more of us to experience and celebrate the natural world.

Courtney Celley/USFWS. | Public Domain
Blanding's turtles are a state endangered species in Illinois due to loss of marsh habitat.

Save the bees

Bees are dying off at an unsustainable rate, with serious consequences for our natural world. Our native bees play a vital role as pollinators, and losing them would have a devastating ripple effect across all ecosystems. A UN report found that 90 percent of wild plants and 75 percent of all food crops need animal pollinators and of those pollinators, bees are nature’s best. That’s why we’re working to restrict the use of bee-killing pesticides.

Save Illinois’ wildlife

We share our state with numerous incredible creatures from the yellow-throated Blanding’s turtle to the orange-winged monarch butterfly. But the sad reality is that America’s wildlife is on the decline. At a time when we’re running short on nature, we need to do everything we can to protect it.

We envision an Illinois where wildlife is able to thrive and is supported by the healthy habitat they need. We’re working to protect threatened and endangered species from irresponsible human activity and we’re working get funding for the Illinois DNR’s state wildlife action plan. It’s up to us to protect endangered species and the habitats they call home.

Reconnecting nature

Our roads, cities, strip malls and more have fragmented the prairie that gives our state its nickname, as well as other habitats that wildlife rely on to roam, migrate, mate and forage. By dividing species into disparate populations, our built environment makes it harder for wildlife to thrive. Further, animals that try to cross roads that cut through their migratory routes cause increased animal-motorist collisions. The solution is to reconnect habitats that we’ve fractured.

Reduce waste

Wildlife over waste

22 million pounds of plastic enter the Great Lakes each year where it harms wildlife and pollutes our environment. Nothing we use for a few minutes should be allowed to pollute our lakes and rivers and threaten wildlife for centuries.

Far too much plastic waste comes from unnecessary sources: single-use items that are designed to be used once and then discarded, or spills of plastic pellets that haven’t even become a consumer product during production and transport.

We have a vision of an Illinois with less plastic pollution. To get there we need to reduce sources of plastic pollution by eliminating unnecessary single-use plastic items, incentivize less and better packaging design in the first place and hold polluters responsible for waste and pollution.

Promote the right to repair

When something breaks, you fix it. That’s just common sense. But manufacturers of everything from phones to appliances to tractors intentionally make things difficult to repair. Americans dispose of 416,000 cell phones per day, and only 15 to 20 percent of electronic waste is recycled.

We are working to tackle planned obsolescence, and make sure consumers and small businesses have access to the parts, tools and service information they need to repair products so we can keep things in use and reduce waste.

Conserve energy and natural resources

Energy efficiency

Improving energy efficiency saves energy, lowers bills, makes homes and workplaces more comfortable and reduces pollution. For all these reasons, reducing energy waste should be the first strategy we use.

Illinois leads the nation for growth in energy savings through electric utility programs since 2013 – but could do more to improve gas utility efficiency programs and ensure appliances sold in Illinois meet the highest efficiency standards.

Preserve our forests

When forests are degraded, habitats are destroyed, which is a leading cause of extinction for many iconic and rare species. Deforestation leads to increased instances of erosion and water pollution, which can lead to infrastructure damage. And it’s estimated that more than 10% of our planet’s carbon emissions are caused by forest loss. We support protecting forests and the trees that have been around longer than many of us have been alive.

U.S. Forest Service | Public Domain

Clean energy

More rooftop solar, less red tape

Solar panels on our roofs give us the opportunity to harness the power of the sun to power our homes and businesses building resilient communities powered by renewable energy. In fact, every year enough sunlight shines on America to provide 100 times more power than we need.

However, today in America, the solar permitting process is often outdated, overcomplicated, and inefficient and that’s creating big problems. With instant permitting platforms we can address these problems and make going solar fast, easy and hassle-free, while improving quality and safety.

Clean energy homes

Federal tax credits and rebates passed under the Inflation Reduction Act makes it easier and more affordable than ever to electrify our buildings. Not only are electric technologies like heat pumps and induction stoves more efficient, they can also be powered by renewable energy like solar and wind rather than fossil fuels.

Save it for later

Harnessing the abundant clean energy from renewable sources like the wind and sun allows us to live greener, healthier lives. Unfortunately, wind and sunlight resources vary by the hour, day, and season in a way that doesn’t always line up with our energy needs. We still need energy at night, when the sun isn’t shining. But, we don’t have to choose between a reliable grid and clean, renewable energy.

Battery storage solutions store the extra energy created at peak generation times so that it can be used later on, at times when those energy sources are less productive. Building out electric battery energy storage in combination with solar and wind will allow us to reap more renewable energy, while also building a more resilient and reliable grid that delivers clean power when and where we need it most.

With our supporters, Environment Illinois is celebrating nature and sharing a vision of an Illinois with clean water and air, more clean energy, healthy wildlife and more habitat that wildlife need to thrive.

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Authors

Emily Kowalski

Outreach & Engagement Manager, Environment Illinois

Emily manages the marketing and public engagement strategy for Environment Illinois's campaigns, including our campaign to protect the Great Lakes from plastic pollution. Emily lives in Chicago where she enjoys knitting and biking.