The Chicago Controversy

Whole Earth,  Spring, 2001  by Alf Siewers

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How did it all happen? How did what a few thousand volunteers in the Chicago area saw as a positive, nonconfrontational, grassroots movement find itself painted as a conspiracy involving big government and allegedly secretive environmental organizations--as if black helicopters might be sighted over the forest preserves any day?

They are frying baby rabbits and baby birds right where they stand, because they think that they need to cleanse these lands of everything. --Cindy Erickson, director of Voices for Wildlife, on a WGN-AM Radio call-in show, June 14, 1996.

God made these nonnative plants and trees, just as surely as he made the Oak. --Chicago-area anti-restoration flyer.

... "good" and "bad" trees remind ... me of an old Far Side cartoon, where a salad is shown holding a gun on a quart of milk. The caption: "When potato salad goes bad." Good trees? Bad trees? Come again?--Mark Spreyer, naturalist. Barrington (IL) Courier-Review, Jan. 2, 1997.

... this minority of tree-hugging preservationists has managed to halt all of the world-renowned ecological restoration projects that have been under way for twenty years ... skidding to a stop under orders of blindly flailing, panicked politicians who have no idea what they are doing ... --John Husar, outdoors writer, Chicago Tribune, Jan. 9, 1997.

Dave Eubanks, a volunteer steward of a restoration site in the Cook County Forest Preserve District, woke up on June 4, 1996 to find his restoration work the target of a scathing newspaper attack by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Raymond R. Coffey, as part of a series of articles and columns labeling local restoration efforts as a secretive plan to deforest Chicago's beloved forest preserves.

Coffey hit plans by Eubanks and restorationists to turn their two-hectare (five-acre) neighborhood site, which included a picnic grove and recreation field, into a preserve with prairie. Coffey wrote that recreational use of the preserves was threatened, along with the trees that were being cut, for the sake of an elitist restoration program being run by The Nature Conservancy, a private environmental group.

Eubarks, at the time an employee of the city's environmental department, found himself in the eye of a political maelstrom. As painted in the newspaper, the usually mild-mannered Eubanks had now become an agent provocateur of a conspiracy by an international environmental group to denude local preserves of their trees, all for an unproven and unscientific theory called "restoration."

The irony was that, just a few weeks prior to this, a new consortium of environmental groups called Chicago Wilderness, representing a broad spectrum of major institutional players in the Chicago-area environmental scene, had been announced with great fanfare. A prime goal of the group was to support restoration. A portent of trouble to come, however, was criticism of the plan in a John Birch Society publication, which painted it as part of an effort to supplant local governments with bioregional councils across the United States that would be under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Trusteeship Council.

Eubanks, more concerned with local press coverage of his stewardship site, suddenly also had fears about losing his job in the controversy-shy Daley administration at Chicago's City Hall. To him, the brouhaha all seemed ridiculous. He had started up the project and worked long hours on it with neighbors in order to help bring back native plant species, build a nature trail, and create a more beautiful preserve in an area disrupted by flood-control-related construction. He was being helped by forty home-school children from the area, whose science curriculum included helping out at this local restoration project.

Yet not long after the article appeared, Eubanks found himself (along with other restorationists in the area) prohibited by order of the county board from doing any restoration work. More than a year later, Eubanks's neighborhood was one of a handful where the ban remained in place.

"Now things are going back to the way they were before the project was started," said a controversy-weary Eubanks, who has since left his job with the city to start his own environmental consulting firm, but who still attends community meetings, speaking out for a lifting of the ban on cutting, burning, and essentially any work on the nearby land, which is a combination of meadow and woods. "Garbage is out there again, illegal four-wheel drive vehicles are running their wheels through the area ... and the kids can't pursue their science project."

Although the moratorium on restoration work has been lifted in most of the Chicago area, following a series of heated public hearings, stricter regulations of the work were put in place, especially in Cook County, where Eubanks's neighborhood remains under the ban. More importantly, says Eubanks, the restoration movement temporarily lost momentum just at the point at which it seemed to have really been picking up steam.