The Civic Committee and Commercial Club of Chicago have given the region something it badly needs: a serious conversation about growth.
Their new Growth for All strategy lays out what it will take to attract and retain more people in the region, including economic opportunity, a better quality of life and investment in the infrastructure that makes a region work. We agree.
But if nature is not part of that conversation from the beginning, we are leaving out one of the things that makes a region appealing, healthy and livable, while helping businesses attract and retain the people they need. Nature should not be something we bolt on after the growth strategy is written. It should be part of the strategy itself.
The lakefront is perhaps our most visible example. More than 180 years ago, when Chicago was still a young city, its lakefront was designated public ground, “forever open, clear and free.” That decision still shapes the city today. The lakefront belongs to everyone. It is unquestionably part of what attracts people to Chicago and keeps them here.
As former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson recently wrote, “Nature is critical infrastructure, not a free and inexhaustible good.” A new report from the Paulson Institute, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund highlights that nearly $58 trillion in global gross domestic product depends on nature, according to an analysis by PwC.
The identity and history of the region reflect this principle. Cook County created the nation’s first forest preserve district over a century ago. DuPage, Kane, Lake and Will counties followed, and McHenry County established its own conservation district. Together, they built a network of protected natural areas woven into a major metropolitan region. Since 2022, residents in these counties have approved $1.6 billion in funding over the next 20 years for these places. That is a significant expression of what people value about the region.
This is about more than quality of life. Nature and the outdoors are already part of the economy. Illinois’ outdoor recreation economy generated $26.4 billion in economic impact and supported nearly 180,000 jobs in 2024.
Nature has long been part of how this region thinks about its future. Openlands helped create the Illinois Prairie Path, the nation’s first rails-to-trails project. Chicago Metropolis 2020, the Commercial Club’s own regional planning effort, endorsed a Regional Greenways Plan developed by the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission and Openlands. It envisioned a 4,300-mile network of connected greenways to improve water, reduce flooding and strengthen quality of life.
Nature also contributes to the health of our communities. New research from Northwestern University scientists using 11 years of data from 801 Chicago census tracts found that year-to-year increases in tree canopy were associated with lower mortality. Among the hottest neighborhoods, greater losses in tree canopy were associated with more deaths. The study does not prove causation, but it strengthens the case for maintaining and expanding tree canopy as essential public health infrastructure, particularly in communities most vulnerable to heat.
Growth for All itself recognizes that parks are critically important to public health. The opportunity is to carry that insight more fully into implementation.
The region is already planning for this. The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning is developing The Century Plan, the next long-term vision for northeastern Illinois. Nearly 270,000 acres of natural space extend across the region’s seven counties, but we remain well short of the 400,000 acres of conserved land the region has set as a goal for 2050. Connecting this work to Growth for All would build on investments already underway.
That kind of coordination also makes fiscal sense in a region known for costly and inefficient jurisdictional complexity. Nature does not stop at municipal boundaries, and neither do the effects of flooding and other environmental challenges, as this summer made clear. Neither should our efforts to protect and connect it.
Growth for All recognizes that transit stations can be more than places to get on and off a train. They can be anchors for housing, businesses, public spaces and new investment. That is a useful way to think about infrastructure: not simply as something that serves growth but as something that helps create the kind of places where people want to live.
We need an equivalent way of thinking about nature.
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The Chicago Riverwalk offers a glimpse of what that can look like. Once largely an industrial edge of downtown, the river is now a destination for recreation, public life and economic activity. Chicago has 150 miles of riverfront along its three river branches. A growth agenda that takes livability and talent retention seriously should bring that same thinking to more of that riverfront.
Across the region are places such as the Indiana Dunes and Illinois Beach, with levels of biodiversity that would be remarkable anywhere. Along with the lakefront, riverfront, forest preserves, trails and other natural areas across the region, they are part of what makes this region distinctive and livable. That matters when Growth for All sets a goal of bringing Chicago’s population back above 3 million and the region’s above 10 million. As we pursue those goals, success should be measured not only by how many people we attract, but also by the quality of the places they call home.
Chicago has understood this for a long time. The city’s motto “Urbs in Horto,” or “City in a Garden,” was adopted when Chicago was incorporated in 1837. More than 70 years later, the Commercial Club’s 1909 Plan of Chicago put the lakefront, parks and an outer system of forest preserves at the foundation of the region’s future. Chicago Metropolis 2020 carried that tradition forward. And this region has long been a place where people understood nature not as scenery but as something fundamental to how a region works.
We should bring that tradition into the next chapter of regional growth. Nature should be part of the strategy for achieving growth and part of what it means for growth to be truly for all.
That is the opportunity before us: to make the places that sustain us part of the strategy for attracting and retaining talent, strengthening the economy and building a region where more people want to live.
Michael Davidson is president and CEO of Openlands. Joe Ferguson is president of the Civic Federation and a member of the Openlands board of directors. Raed Mansour is a member of Openlands’ board.
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