FEATURES

12 Unplugging the power monopolies by Toby Eckert
The political bill is coming due on customer choice.

16 Power to the people by Bill Knight
Advocates worry that the rural electric co-ops will be shut out
of the equation as the state moves to deregulate the power companies.

20 Deregulation & the environment by Peggy Boyer Long
A conversation with physicist Alex Casella.

22 Troubled Waters by Christopher Wills
Sediment is killing the state's most important river system.

25 Nurture or nature? by Alf Siewers
A local battle over the best way to make a prairie threatens
to widen into a war against open spaces.

28 Meigs power play

by Chad Anderson, Julie Blair and Heather Landy

The state's move reflects Chicago's declining political capital.

DEPARTMENTS

3 A Conversation With
Our Readers
by Ed Wojcicki

4 Editor's Notebook
by Peggy Boyer Long

6 State of the State
by Donald Sevener
Abolish a commission?

8 Briefly by Donald Sevener

33 People
by Beverley Scobell

36 Letters

37 A View From the Suburbs
by Madeleine Doubek
Strange Meigs alliances

38 Politics
by Charles N. Wheeler III
Do you care about Meigs?