Wisconsin Is Water; Protect Us

'If Wisconsin is looking for a growth industry, tourism is it.'

Wasn't disappointed in the Wisconsin gubernatorial debate last night, expect noise and a void.

Mary Burke did point out Scott Walker selling out pristine northern Wisconsin for a few million dollars in exchange for legislation to rip an open pit mine in Iron County.

But it's citizens who bring information. Thankfully, Wisconsin newspapers are still alive and local coverage is not dead.

One can look at the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune letters section on a given day and get the truth of where we're heading as a state. For example:

"I’m OK with a politician occasionally embellishing the facts, but tourism is the growth path for the Rome area (in central Wisconsin) and I want to know my representative (Scott Krug) is actually and proactively working at it. My experience says otherwise and unless I see a plan from him, I’m not sure he deserves my vote. This makes me question everything else (Krug) says," writes Don Ystad of Rome.

Ystad's concern with the environment is not confined to central Wisconsin, nor with lakes and aquifers.

Rivers are the canary in the coal mine, and they are under assault with Scott Walker selling out our rivers as well. See the River Alliance of Wisconsin (Facebook).

A healthy environment is good business, something Ystad appreciates as a retired successful business consultant.

"Studies show that tourism generates $17.5 billion in economic impact in Wisconsin, more than 185,000 jobs and $2.3 billion dollars in annual tax revenue. In 2013, visitors to Wisconsin spent $10.6 billion," writes the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin (TFW).            

A healthy environment is much more than good business, it's a legacy we owe our children, our grandchildren and all future generations. We are water creatures, part of a complex system of  which water is central.

Residents in a high-end tourist destination, Door County, know this well.

Check out the Peninsula Pulse up in Door County; that's local coverage.

So as Republicans kill local control and the capacity of the DNR to control polluters, on the current trajectory that Scott Walker is sending us, we will find that befouling Wisconsin's waters is killing our state's most precious resource.

This is bad business too.

No time for sheep

A look at the morning Inbox demonstrates renewed faith in our capacity to massively surveil our planet's climate; reverse our economys' use of the planet as a repository for waste, and deciding that innovative sustainability, peace and cooperation are national security and humanity security imperatives.

Think of what we are doing to the planet as a giant cigarette injecting its toxic contents into our childrens' organs at an accelerated rate; compounding the results by altering global systems, "climate forcings;" and poisoning our children and their children while guaranteeing disasters not yet imagined.

Carbon energy extraction forces such as the Koch brothers; destructive tools such as Scott Walker; and the bigoted and hateful need to be opposed by people working just a little to save and civilize.

Give up nothing to save everything.

Sounds like a good political slogan.

Our country and our civilization cannot afford Republicans as a force in this world, nor Democratic Party sheep. Peacefully oppose.

Conservancy Gets Help from Friends

A Madison-based company and its employees joined forces to help ensure that Dane county remains among the best places to live.

Late last week, some 40 volunteers from American Family Insurance gathered at the popular Pheasant Branch Conservancy in Middleton, Wisconsin for the United Way Day of Caring.

The volunteers helped gather wildflower and prairie grass seeds so that more prairie areas could be planted later this year.

Projects like this are what make our area truly among the most livable places in the nation.

Pheasant Branch Conservancy is located in Middleton, Wisconsin at the northwest corner of Lake Mendota. Two signed trailheads lead north into the conservancy from Century Avenue, between Allen Boulevard and Pheasant Branch Street. Another trail head leads north into the conservancy from Highland Way, which is north of Century Avenue and east of Allen Boulevard.

Ecological Activism Blooms at Ecological Internet

Madison, WI—Merge environmental activism, info technology expertise, and deep ecological values, and you have the website Ecological Internet.

It is the brainchild of Glen Barry, Ph.D., a lifelong Wisconsinite from Denmark, WI, and former UW-Madison botanical information systems specialist in the Dept. of Botany.

A critical environmental portal, the site “specializes in the use of the Internet to achieve environmental conservation outcomes,” writes Barry.

The academic community is abundantly aware of the net’s potential for environmental activism, and collectively the literature on the net’s use in grassroots organizing sounds near-manic.

“(T)he political implications of the Internet’s effects are truly staggering … the Internet has fostered the metamorphosis of environmental politics from the pursuit of broad, national polices to a populist grassroots crusade …,” wrote Norman Millier in Environmental Politics: Interest Groups, the Media and the Making of Policy.

Miller is right. And Glen Barry is proving it in the real world at Ecological Internet.
Read about its successes, analysis and hard-core activism—truly fascinating stuff.

If you have even a passing interest in saving the environment, please check out Ecological Internet.

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