"Biosphere" Project So Shady
Denials Inspire No Confidence

ROLLA, Mo. — Sometimes eco-activists and their bureaucratic allies can be too crafty for their own good. When they get caught trying to sneak a controversial project in under the public radar it can inspire more suspicion than they can ever dispel.

Such is the case with "Man and the Biosphere."

Jo Ann Emerson recalls campaigning for Congress a few years ago at a sawmill in tiny Ellington, Mo., when a man's question made her pause in puzzlement.

The citizen asked what Emerson knew about man and the biosphere.

It was fall 1996. Emerson said she didn't know anything about it, but directed her office to find out.

"Man and the Biosphere" is an international, three-decade effort to designate so-called ``biosphere reserves.''

The reserves are tracts of land deemed significant by environmental activist groups and government bureaucrats, supposedly distinctive enough to warrant regulatory and legal protection because of their primitive and pristine conditions.

Globally, there are more than 300 reserves, 47 of them in the United States, most of those in national parks.

Legislation pending in Congress and backed by Emerson would revoke the U.S. site designations and mandate that Congress would have to sign off on any such designation. Failing to take that step would be a surrender of national sovereignty, an audience at a congressional hearing was told.

Since entering Congress in 1996, Emerson, a Republican, said she has been asked nonstop about facts, rumors and myths surrounding the MAB program.

The information mishmash included coffee shop buzz about supposed international plans to depopulate the once-planned Ozarks Biosphere Reserve; the imprisonment of uprooted residents in nonexistent concentration camps around St. Louis; and private property seizure by force, with blue-helmeted United Nations troops disembarking from black helicopters.

Most frightening to many at a hearing here Saturday and a rally-luncheon hosted by conservative groups was any talk of surrendering U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations.

In a ``Dear Concerned Citizen'' letter in February 1998, Roger E. Soles, executive director of the U.S. Man and the Biosphere Program, dismissed as ``completely false'' any assertion that the U.N. was taking over any U.S. lands, public or private.

``There is no threat that the U.N. has authority to manage any U.S. property ...'' Soles wrote.

After a study and amid protests, officials concluded in 1996 that the swath of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas counties, while rich in timber, wildlife and scenery and "deserving" of reserve status, would not be nominated.

There are no plans to nominate the area now, officials insist, but the secretive nature of the original scheme makes those denials ring hollow to people in the targeted area.

Ozarks folks talked about the biosphere on Saturday as if it were lurking just outside, reflecting their steep skepticism that any government program simply goes away.

A campus auditorium that seats 300 was full and some were standing. Witness after witness asserted that bureaucrats had conspired with environmental groups to sneak an Ozarks Man and the Biosphere Cooperative into creation with little public notice before the plan was shoved from the drawing board.

``I see coincidences that frighten me,'' said one witness, Wanda Benton of Salem, Mo.

``They're only taking a nap,'' warned Connie Burks of Jasper County, Ark.

Burks displayed photocopies of documents dated January 1996, which she said were obtained from the National Park Service.

The draft plan included directing Arkansas and Missouri conservation agencies, federal agencies and individuals to ``support the establishment of an Ozark Man in the Biosphere (OMAB) Cooperative in the region and work towards implementing of its goals and objectives.''

Burks said the documents show that state and federal agencies in Arkansas and Missouri were working with The Nature Conservancy and other environmental activist groups to acquire large amounts of land for preservation, with some of the targeted property certain to be privately owned.

Speakers said the Ozarks and Mark Twain national forests in Missouri are already yielding just one-fourth of their capacity of timber, lead and other natural products because of government regulations. A biosphere designation would bring more regulation that will shrink that percentage and hurt local economies, they said.

``We need to monitor the situation and resist it,'' Burks said, as audience members nodded and murmured in agreement.

Environmental activist groups —including the Missouri Audubon Council, the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club Ozark Missouri Chapter — were invited to the hearing but didn't attend.

The Sierra Club's Ken Midkiff said he wouldn't travel to Rolla because the setting didn't offer ``exactly a receptive audience.''

Midkiff also said he was nervous about attending the hearing because of what he called past hostility against environmental activists.

The audience scoffed at any suggestion that Midkiff would have been in any physical danger at the hearing.

``They don't look very threatening to me,'' Emerson said as she glanced around the auditorium at an audience comprised largely of senior citizens.

Emerson shared the stage with U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho. Together they listened to more than three hours of testimony about the Biosphere Reserves. Ozarks residents labeled the biosphere idea a ``gigantic plot'' that will ``destroy economies, lower land values and move populations out.''

Biosphere reserve designations may be sought by regional committees with state-level membership under the umbrella of the U.S. State Department, following a model crafted by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Emerson asked the audience: ``Would it be accurate to call the biosphere a pig in a poke?''

Audience members said in unison: ``Yes!''

``I always said if the government would leave me alone, I'd leave it alone,'' Frank Floyd of Berryville, Ark., told the hearing. ``Government programs are kind of like the creeping crud. They always get bigger and nastier.''