The Chicago Controversy

Whole Earth, Spring, 2001 by Alf Siewers

Animal-rights activists helped trigger Coffey's anti-restoration newspaper crusade, which in turn provided the linchpin for joining the animal-rights activists with the other key group in the controversy, namely residents of an exclusive residential neighborhood on Chicago's Northwest Side that, nestled amid preserves, is one of the most politically clout-heavy neighborhoods in a city dominated by intense community politics.

Some residents in that mainly white enclave, especially in the Edgebrook neighborhood, had been concerned about what they perceived to be a deliberate thinning of local woods that provided them with privacy from the rest of the city, and about the presence of "outsiders" in neighborhood woods. Some residents who live near preserves began to object to the application of herbicides and the use of controlled burns as part of restoration efforts, seeing both as potentially dangerous in an urbanized area. The community was one in which many current or former city employees lived. The current Mayor Daley's brother William, then US Secretary of Commerce, lived nearby. Another Daley sibling, John, was in charge of the finances of the county government that controlled the preserves. The highly interconnected world of Chicago's conservative political establishment was extremely influential in the area. And this establishment, political world is the home base of Coffey, a long-time Chicago journalist.

The Cook County Board, a virtually invisible body of elected officials whose majority seems essentially to serve at the bidding of the above mentioned local elites, was frightened by Coffey's media spotlight, by pressure from the Chicago City Council, which was responding to well-connected neighbors of the preserve, and by several obdurate members in its own midst.

Another well-orchestrated network, much more politically important than the animal-rights groups, thus became energized against restoration, but somewhat ironically in the role of a grassroots movement aimed at an "elitist" restoration conspiracy.

Further complicating the situation was the impact of the book Miracle Under the Oaks by New York Times science writer Bill Stevens, published the year before the controversy erupted, which highlighted the charismatic Stephen Packard, key motivator and theoretician of the region's volunteer restoration efforts. The book cast Packard, a Harvard-educated, former anti-Vietnam War organizer, as a kind of environmental celebrity. It was in some ways an unintentional set-up for a fall. Packard's visionary genius and the recently hailed success of his efforts had attracted their share of resentment. His willingness to support county animal-control policies and his openness in speaking to Stevens of the early concerns and tactics of restorationists provided critics of the projects with a text for a target and a scapegoat--namely Packard himself.

Stevens's accounts of restoration techniques in the late 1970s and early 1980s provided opponents with ammunition related to the way the work was being carried out. It told of how, in the early days of the program, strips of greenery were left to screen restored sites from view to avoid complaints from the public or officials. While restorationists have since said that these accounts were misleading, the two or three brief references to such practices were quickly amplified in support of the conspiracy theory that had gained credence among the general public as a result of Coffey's newspaper reports and official reactions to the controversy.