Sometime in the next year Chicago’s biggest environmental coalition, Chicago Wilderness, may ask that the southern rim of Lake Michigan, including Chicago, be named a United Nations biosphere reserve. No, the city wouldn’t be turned into a national park. But having the biosphere-reserve label would make it easier for local agencies and organizations to publicize the region’s many little-known natural areas. More important, it would encourage people to use all the area’s resources in more nature-friendly ways–mowing less, paving less, and preserving more land.
A biosphere reserve isn’t primarily about action, adds Suzanne Malec, deputy commissioner of the Chicago Department of Environment and a member of the Chicago Wilderness steering committee. It’s about “acknowledgment and awareness….It can only help us in our quest to engage people and think differently about urban centers and their relationship to overall ecological health. It’s an opportunity to just connect people to a bigger picture.”
In other words, biosphere opponents object to the things environmentalists do, not to the auspices under which they do them. The battle between private rights and public interest is one the property absolutists have lost and continue to lose in the courts as well as in the court of public opinion–so they change the subject. The environmentalists have no more interest in reopening the issue than the Super Bowl champion has in replaying the game, so they change the subject too.
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As McCance suggests, a UN biosphere reserve would in many ways be Chicago Wilderness writ large. The coalition–also known as the Chicago Region Biodiversity Council–has no headquarters and few staff, much like the current biosphere reserves. It exists almost entirely through its member groups, who, according to its Web site, work together “to protect, restore, study and manage the precious natural ecosystems of the Chicago region for the benefit of the public.” Its existence alone–like that of a UN biosphere reserve–makes this work better known. It also makes it easier for bureaucrats employed by different agencies to persuade their bosses to let them work together.
Biosphere opponents would challenge that belief if they could. Instead they’ve mounted a flank attack–by trying to conjure up fears of a UN takeover. The fears are baseless. In the 27 years the biosphere reserve program has been in existence, no judge anywhere in the country has even come close to holding that the rules for a UN biosphere reserve take precedence over American law. Nevertheless, the opponents have pulled enough fragments of woolly UN prose out of context to arouse suspicion, putting biosphere supporters in the hopeless position of trying to prove a negative–that the UN is not about to overrule American law.
The UN didn’t preserve these areas. It didn’t buy any land. It didn’t regulate any land. It did encourage others to do both when it offered its honorific designation to qualified places that national, state, or local governments had already protected.
At some other reserves, the boundaries of the transition area have never been defined. That’s actually appropriate, because according to the latest thinking, there really aren’t any places where sustainable practices shouldn’t be in operation.
