Welcome to the OBR!

The Obtawaing Biosphere Region serves as a living example of the diversity, complexity and resilience of the natural world. Our partners envision a region where thriving and healthy freshwater seas meet healthy forests along coastlines, where streams flow through clean inland lakes and where living beings interact and thrive. These living lands and waters support, and are in turn supported by, peaceful, respectful and healthy human communities that sustain responsible relationships with the natural world. We consider humans as active participants within the natural world. As such, we see people inseparable from nature and we envision a sustainable region where all thrive. We see a necessary human responsibility to steward the set of relationships between each other and between humans and the other elements of the natural world. We, thus, are of two equal minds regarding the uniquely human role and the inseparability of all nature.