The other day a fellow was passionately expounding to a group of us about how great our National Parks are.

No argument there but when he finished I couldn’t resist saying too bad we gave them away to the United Nations. From the blank look on everyone’s face it was obvious none had any comprehension of Biospheres. I elected to just leave that dog lie and departed but that reminded me I haven’t heard anything about the U.S. Man and Biosphere Program lately and some nosing around was long overdue.

Back in 1972 the United Nations implemented a global conservation program spearheaded by its UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) branch.

The purpose was to identify natural areas of special importance and value around the world, designate them as U.N. Biospheres and ensure they are preserved for conservation and research. The stated goal is to achieve a sustainable balance between conservation, economic development and maintenance of cultural values. How much importance the latter two carry has always been a thorn in this program but that’s another story.

The U.N. recommends that each biosphere consist of three parts. First is the legally constituted core, the specific area(s) to be stringently protected. This core should be surrounded by a buffer zone which would allow only a limited amount of human activity.

Beyond that should be a transitional zone where pretty much normal human activity is allowed but under guidelines.

In 1979 Jimmy Carter agreed to abide by UNESCO’s conservation rules and signed up our first Biosphere, Yellowstone National Park and a 150 mile radius around it for buffer and transitional zones. You can imagine how happy the landowners and businesses within the buffer and transitional zones were about that! As we know, public ire and issues regarding Constitutional authority and individual rights are just minor annoyances to politicians and before long we had 47 Biospheres covering some 500 million acres, roughly the size of Colorado.

Following Yellowstone came such places as the Adirondacks covering most of Vermont and northern New York, the southern Appalachian Mountains involving portions of eight states, the Florida Everglades, the Hawaiian Islands, Denali National Park and the Aleutian Islands in Alaska and, here in Michigan, Isle Royal and a chunk of the northern Lower Peninsula. That’s just a piddling few. The Biosphere program may make sense for underdeveloped countries needing guidance in managing their natural resources but we can do just fine on our own, thank you. Biospheres pose issues regarding a country’s sovereignty and, internally, Constitutional legality and jurisdictional and individual rights. Unprecedented, they are at the sole discretion of the President. Congress, states and local jurisdictions have no say.

The UNESCO agreement specifically states that the U.S. retains sole jurisdiction over these Biospheres but that’s as hollow as a Halloween pumpkin because in signing the memorandum we agreed to follow UNESCO’s management procedures. This all smells fishier than a rotting carp but, in reality, the U.S. Biosphere Program has so far been fairly benign and, with just a few exceptions, little local change or inconvenience has been noticed.

Most of us support conservation and protecting our natural resources and on the surface the Biosphere Program sounds reasonable but it has potential for a mess. Some of our Biospheres have also been designated as United Nation World Heritage Sites which brings even more U.N. intervention into play. The UNESCO Biosphere Program has been directly or indirectly intertwined with several other more radical global conservation programs which, with naivety or outright ill intentions, could put our sovereignty in jeopardy. The tangled web gets too complex for me to fully comprehend, much less pass it on.

For these and other reasons including corruption, by the early 2000’s our Biosphere Program was barely on the edge of the back burner and mostly political lip service.

Recently, however, there is a significant movement to revive it. I side with the nay-sayers when they point out most of these sites are already protected as National or State Parks, Monuments and Historical sites. What compels us to enter into International Treaties to do what the U.S. has already done for itself? As Glen Beck would say – BEWARE!

Carpe diem.