us regarding the wise allocation of resources in our regions and worldwide. Unfortunately, ecology and evolutionary biology are not widely understood; we are not good at reading the landscape.2 If these studies were part of the common operating knowledge of our society, this article, indeed the whole supplement and the project it describes, could take a much different starting point. Nevertheless, many of the main principles of ecology are simple, even commonsensical.3 They can be stated in a straightforward manner. Singly and together, some of these principles are predictive in some highly specific ways. In other aspects the study of ecology has far more in it of probability and contingency than of arithmetic and geometry. Even in these respects (and in the face of much to learn in a rapidly changing world), ecology generates a set of questions that are absolutely fundamental to the meaningful study of sustainability, equity, and decisionmaking in the years to come. Ecology and evolutionary biology point to what we should be concerned about and provide the fundamental tools to understand the complexity of the "home place," the region in which we all live. I take this opportunity to discuss some very basic ecology and evolutionary biology with frequent references to the Chicago region by way of specific examples. The overriding motivation of this paper is to alert the reader to the complexities of our home places and the care we must