(WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Environmentalists have lost an 18-month court fight with the Chicago Rockford Airport Authority over a piece of prairie land that a federally endangered bumblebee calls home.
Work was underway to tear up part of the Bell Bowl Prairie for a road that will service a new airport cargo facility.
Activist Robb Telfer says prairie can only be destroyed once.
“It represented some of the 2, 100 acres that we have left in Illinois of original prairie,” he tells WBBM Newsradio. “It’s not like we can go in there and build with Legos or 3-D-print what an 8,000-year-old prairie looks like.”
Telfer says Illinois has less than 1/100th of 1 percent of native prairie land that once covered the state.
He questions whether the endangered Rusty Patch Bumblebee and other species of bees, native plants and other wildlife will survive.
The airport authority says this is about progress and jobs and notes that 6 acres of the prairie will remain.
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