A Conversation with John Rogner

John Rogner, Chair of the Biodiversity Council and Chicago Wilderness Supervisor for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and came to the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment to discuss the challenges of implementing community-based, landscape-scale biodiversity conservation and restoration within a highly urbanized context.

EMI: What were the origins of Chicago Wilderness?

Rogner: It grew out of the recognition that our conventional approach to conservation in an urban area, where you have so many players and it's so complex, the conventional mode of each of us working individually and independently was just not going to work. We had to join together and work in concert to create an initiative with a level of visibility that could make conservation part of the urban culture. We operate under a loose structure, and we've tried to stay a very loose association from the very beginning, and not become too bureaucratic. Since our inception, we've done over 150 collaborative projects that have advanced different aspects of our different goals, and these projects address Chicago Wilderness priorities. We want them to be collaborations of two or more institutions, so we build that into the projects.

EMI: You mentioned earlier today that Chicago Wilderness started with thirty-four organizations and now the collaboration consists of more than one hundred members. How did this happen?

Rogner: We have an application process. We're not really rigid in terms of setting firm criteria as we are trying to be as inclusive as we possibly can. However, we want to make sure that members do have a commitment to biodiversity conservation. There is some opposition to restoration work, such as prescribed burning, that we are convinced is absolutely essential to restore our lands. Another example is the need to cull deer as we have a tremendous deer overpopulation problem in this region. There have been groups that are vehemently opposed to these kinds of efforts we think are important to preserve biodiversity. We wanted to make sure there was a way to screen groups to ensure they had the best of intentions before joining Chicago Wilderness and so they wouldn't be a disruptive element. Other than that, we're trying to be as inclusive as we possibly can. And one really exciting thing to me recently is that we've started to broaden our membership beyond the conservation organizations. We have municipalities that have applied and been admitted to Chicago Wilderness because they think this is important, they want to be able to tie in to the terrific resources that we have within our existing membership to get help. This is another step of us getting beyond the bounds of our own conservation sphere and start to make our effort more mainstream. We have not gotten into areas of public policy that perhaps could be more controversial yet, although it is likely to happen. My observation is that Chicago Wilderness is still a fairly fragile coalition, and so we tread lightly when we go into areas that would needlessly splinter and fragment the group. But when we start to deal with the general public at large in a bigger way, I think we will get into that arena and there will be some difficult issues to deal with at that point.

EMI: What role has funding played in the operation of Chicago Wilderness?

Rogner: I think the promise of dollars has been terrifically important for getting people to want to be a part of the organization. So I guess you could ask the question, well how much of a coalition really is this if it's just money holding people together? And I don't think it's just that, but clearly that's been part of it. That whole issue of dedicated funding has been kind of an interesting road we've gone down because we started Chicago Wilderness without any anticipation of getting any funding at all. We were just going to collaborate to figure out how we were going to do these projects using whatever was available from our own resources. And we actually got along quite well together until the Forest Service came along and said, "This is a neat idea and we're going to plunk down $600,000." And all of a sudden, people started to argue. And I don't know if that is a lesson or not but I often wonder what direction we would have taken and what we'd look like now if no one had ever come in at the beginning and contributed a dime. Would we, in fact, be a smaller group and more dedicated? I don't know, and I guess we'll never know. But I will say that a lot of the work would not have happened without this external funding. It's just been critical. One of the things that we've realized, and I've helped people acknowledge this, is that federal money doesn't continue forever. The role of federal funding in efforts like this is generally to provide some start-up funds to get the project going. And then what the funders get back, in addition to good on-the-ground work, is a model that may be applicable someplace else to wherever else we do our work. And so the idea is that funding is provided for a series of years and then eventually it goes away and it's essential to consider how to continue after that point. And what Chicago Wilderness is doing now is really focusing on developing grant proposals to some big, big nationwide funders. And hopefully they'll be able to make up some of the difference when the federal money truly goes away.

EMI: What might you say to someone who questions whether wilderness exists in Chicago?

Rogner: I don't know who first came up with this term "Chicago Wilderness" but it does highlight that fact that we have important natural areas in the city of Chicago and the surrounding metropolitan area. The other thing that it does for me is that it highlights the real connections between our nature in the Chicago area and real, big "W" wilderness that you find in million-acre chunks out west and in the north. This hit home to me a couple of years ago. I went on a wilderness canoe trip in extreme northwest Canada - as pure and untrammeled a place as you'll ever find. We saw all kinds of wildlife - grizzlies, musk-ox, you name it, it was there - so it really was a wilderness. In retrospect, though, the wildlife that really impressed me the most were the common yellow legs, small shorebirds that we found rising from every sandbar. They would come and scream at us like we were intruders there, which in fact we were. The reason these birds impressed me so much was after we actually got back to Chicago. A few weeks later I was standing on the shores of Lake Calumet, which is in this post-industrial wasteland of southeast Chicago. And I was standing in this little, thin ribbon of beach material - I call it "beach material" because I don't know what it was, it was this black stuff along the shoreline - and there were these yellow legs foraging along the shoreline, fueling up on their way south. Three weeks before, I had seen them in an area that was clearly, obviously wilderness, and then I was seeing them on the shores of Lake Calumet in a place that clearly was not wilderness. And then I got to wondering: is it really so clear? These birds don't make the distinction, and it raises some questions about the distinctions we make between that capital "W" wilderness, and places like Chicago Wilderness.