Lee Botts

Leila (Lee) Botts (born 1928) is a prominent American environmentalist known primarily for her work related to conservation and restoration of the Great Lakes. She has founded two successful non-profit organizations, directed a subagency of the U.S. Department of the Interior in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, authored or co-authored a number of books and reports on environmental issues, and served in the administration of the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington.

Born Leila Carman in Oklahoma and raised in that state and in Kansas, Botts settled in Chicago in the early 1950s with her husband. While raising four children in the city's Hyde Park neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s, Botts formed a strong personal interest in the Indiana Dunes. Botts became involved as a volunteer in several local issues such as the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference, and took a leadership role in the campaign which in 1966 resulted in the creation of the federal Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. In the early 1960s she was a columnist for, and then editor of, the weekly Hyde Park Herald. In 1969 she became a staff member at the Open Lands Project, now known as Openlands, in Chicago.

In 1970, while on staff at Openlands, Botts founded the Lake Michigan Federation, which today operates as the Alliance for the Great Lakes. Within the wave of new interest in environmental issues in the U.S. during that period, the Federation was the first independent citizens' organization dedicated to the protection and preservation of a specific Great Lake.

After several years leading the Federation, including numerous trips to Washington D.C. to lobby Congress on issues such as first-ever federal Clean Water Act, Botts spent two years as a staff member at the Region 5 office of the young federal Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA). In 1978 President Carter named her head of the Great Lakes Basin Commission, headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After all federal basin commissions were eliminated in President Ronald Reagan's first federal budget, Botts held for several years a faculty research appointment at Northwestern University followed by two years as a staffer and consultant for the City of Chicago's new Department of the Environment. In 1986 she narrowly lost an election to the board of Chicago's countywide wastewater treatment district.

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