Our dear friend, the late Leila “Lee” Botts, was one of the leading environmentalists of the Indiana Dunes and Great Lakes region. Lee passed away in 2019 at the age of 91. Over a remarkable 60-year career, she worked tirelessly and relentlessly for the cause of conservation and environmental education. Shirley Heinze Land Trust is proud to have been a part of her story.
Lee and her husband, Lambert “Bud” Botts, moved to Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood in 1949 so that he could pursue a master’s degree at the University of Chicago. In her twenties, Lee completed a correspondent degree in English and started a family, eventually bearing four children. In the late 1950s, she began writing a column on gardening for the weekly Hyde Park Herald.
Lee’s conservation work began in earnest in 1959, when she joined the Save the Dunes Council (now known as Save the Dunes), a citizen group formed and led by Dorothy Buell to preserve the Indiana sand dunes for a national park. As a member of group’s Board of Directors, Lee managed public relations and was part of the group’s successful efforts to obtain federal authorization for an Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in 1966. The efforts of Dorothy, Lee and several others at Save the Dunes were recognized earlier this year by Congressman Frank Mrvan in a statement and remarks to the U.S. House of Representatives on Women’s History Month and its 2026 theme – Leading the Change: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future.
Lee became editor of the Hyde Park Herald in 1966, but she left the paper in 1969 to take a position at the Open Lands Project in Chicago, where she would be responsible for developing a general environmental education program focusing on Lake Michigan-specific environmental issues. A year later, she helped organize a teach-in event and spoke at a local college as part of Chicago’s portion of the world’s first Earth Day celebration. Similar events were held in various other places, notably Wisconsin, which was the home of Earth Day’s founder, Senator Gaylord Nelson, whom Lee had met.
While on staff at Openlands, Lee founded the Lake Michigan Federation, which today operates as the Alliance for the Great Lakes. The Federation was the first independent citizens’ organization dedicated to the protection and preservation of a specific Great Lake. The new organization persuaded then-Mayor Richard J. Daley to have Chicago become the first Great Lakes city to ban phosphates in laundry detergents, led U.S. advocacy for the first binational Great Lakes Water Quality in 1972, was a key advocate for the landmark federal Clean Water Act of 1972, and played a key role in persuading Congress to ban PCBs via the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act.
After several years leading the Federation, including numerous trips to Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress, Lee spent two years as a staff member at the Region 5 office of the young federal Environmental Protection Agency. In 1977, President Carter named her head of the Great Lakes Basin Commission, headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After all federal basin commissions were eliminated in President Reagan’s first federal budget, Lee held for several years a faculty research appointment at Northwestern University, followed by two years as a staffer and consultant for the City of Chicago’s new Department of the Environment.
Lee believed in the importance of experiential nature education and that establishing a learning center in the Indiana Dunes could help to build a constituency over time that would have specific affection for them. Through her vision and coordination–after talking about the idea for a solid quarter century–the Indiana Dunes Environmental Learning Center opened its doors to students in 1998 at the site of the historic Goodfellow Youth Camp in Porter. Lee served as the first chair of the Center’s board of directors. Later renamed the Dunes Learning Center, it operates today as a private, not-for-profit partner of Indiana Dunes National Park and offers year-round environmental education programs to thousands of students annually.
Lee was a good and long-term friend of Shirley Heinze Land Trust, serving for over 25 years on our Advisory Council and as a volunteer steward of our Green Heron Pond property in the City of Gary near her second Miller Beach home.
Her final achievement, conceived when Lee was well into her eighties, was the creation of the 60-minute documentary film Shifting Sands: On the Path to Sustainability. Lee had complained about the need for such a film for over 20 years before approaching documentary film director Patricia Wisniewski to help create one. The film depicts the natural history, the course of industrial development, and subsequent environmental restoration in the northwest Indiana dunes and surrounding region. Lee was its executive producer and conducted many of the personal interviews contained in the film. Released in 2016, it has been shown on dozens of PBS stations and was nominated for a Midwest Emmy Award. Among those interviewed for the film were several individuals who had pre-existing ties to Shirley Heinze, or who would develop ties later, including:
- Dale Engquist (retired superintendent of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and Shirley Heinze Land Trust Board President from 2010-2012);
- Kelly Carmichael (retired Vice President, Environmental & Sustainability at NiSource and Shirley Heinze Land Trust Board President from 2018-2020); and
- Mark Bouman (Chicago Region Program Director at the Field Museum of Natural History and current Shirley Heinze Land Trust Board member).
Those who are interested can access the documentary on the Lakeshore Public Media website.
The National Park Service also wrote a wonderful tribute to Lee on its website.