Picket signs drew a few honks from passing cars as eight members of the Sierra Club stood in front of the Iowa Department of Transportation Friday at noon.

In the next few weeks, the Sierra Club might make a decision to take the IDOT to court.

Closely resembling a protest but termed a “rally,” the group gathered to express its concern about IDOT plans to construct a four-lane corridor highway through a small but ecologically diverse part of southeast Iowa — the Eddyville Dunes.

The dunes are home to several state-protected species, including the endangered pale-green or tubercled orchid and the ornate box turtle.

The highway would threaten the fragile sandhill prairie community interspersed with wetlands, according to a Sierra Club news release.

Pat McAdams, assistant professor of geology at William Penn University in Oskaloosa, is responsible for the extensive species discoveries made at the Eddyville Dunes habitat, including a special sand formation and rare turtles and orchids.

As a result of McAdam’s findings, the IDOT decided to revisit the site and perform an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

The EIS was completed early this year and is now circulating at the federal level, open for comments.

Dennis L. Tice, IDOT director of planning and programming, said the EIS is expected to be published “any time now.”

It must be published 30 days before the IDOT can move forward with the project. If the EIS succeeds, the project will begin early next year. If not, Tice said the IDOT is at a “standstill.”

Tice is optimistic the EIS will go through at the federal level.

If it does, the Sierra Club, working with environmental attorney Wallace L. Taylor, may press charges against the IDOT and the Federal Highway Administration for performing an “inadequate” EIS.

“Once the bulldozers get moving, it’s harder to stop them. But if we were completely discouraged, we wouldn’t be here,” McAdams said. “There’s always time to convince them of something else.”

Tice said the U.S. Highway 69 bypass would improve transportation from Des Moines to Burlington.

“They’re engineers, and they think the world is here to be engineered, not preserved,” Taylor said.

Taylor said the IDOT has not sufficiently analyzed the impact that “secondary development” would have on the dunes.

“The problem with a bypass is that it draws secondary development,” he said.

Taylor said from an environmental perspective as well as an economic one, putting a highway through an ecosystem does not affect that strip of land only.

“Plants and animals don’t know where the boundaries are — it’s still the same ecosystem to them,” he said.

Moving the environment or species is not much of an option either.

“We can move the [state-endangered pale-green] orchids, but we haven’t had much experience in doing it successfully,” McAdams said.

“At some point there has to be an end to moving things. We can’t replace the habitat,” McAdams said.

McAdams said the Eddyville Dunes and the species found there are a “valuable part of our history and heritage.”

“We can’t lose them,” he said. “If we do away with this species or the next, where does the road stop?”