2017 saw accelerating attacks on the state’s environment

Acid mine drainage turns vibrant rivers, lakes and wetlands into orange ecological dead zones that are toxic to the environment.
Photo: Nathaniel Warner, NSF

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, once an aspirational model for the rest of the nation, has deteriorated under Scott Walker into a rubber stamp for approving environmentally destructive projects — many of them involving his donors.

Since 2011, the DNR has seemed like a subsidiary of the Wisconsin REALTORS Association and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.

Right out of the gate, the Walker administration scrubbed the DNR’s website of the words “climate change,” fired one-third of the agency’s scientists, and axed 60 percent of its environmental educators. Every year the governor and the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature have undermined protection of the state’s natural resources.

But even in this context, the year 2017 was an especially bad one, with an “unprecedented roll back of environmental protections,” said Ryan Billingham, communications director of the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters.

The most destructive blow that Wisconsin’s environment took this year was the repeal a law that effectively stopped metallic sulfide mining, the nation’s most toxic industry. Sulfide mining creates acid runoff that poisons rivers, lakes, wildlife — and the public. The consequences of acid pollution are permanent. They cannot be mitigated.

In addition, the state failed this year to prosecute about 95 percent of manure violations at concentrated animal feedlot operations — factory farms where more than 1,000 animals are kept in confinement for over 45 days a year. There are as many as 300 of such operations in the state, and they produce more waste than Mexico City and Tokyo combined, Billingham said.

The manure seeps into the ground water and winds up in people’s wells. “There’s brown s--- water coming out of showerheads in Kewaunee County,” Billingham said. Algoma High School provides clean water to area residents whose wells are contaminated.

People don’t complain because the dairy industry is so revered in Wisconsin that they’d become pariahs in their communities if they complained about their water quality, Billingham said.

Flash forward

Next year could be even worse for the environment than this one. In December, Walker appointed anti-environmental lawyer Jake Curtis as chief legal counsel at the DNR.

Kerry Schumann, executive director of the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters, said Curtis’s appointment was an outrage, given his legal history of fighting environmental protections.

“From acid mining to air pollution to dirtier lakes and rivers, the damage Walker and his administration are perpetrating against the people of Wisconsin is brutal, morally reprehensible and endangers generations of Wisconsinites,” Schumann said in a statement responding to Curtis’ appointment.

Besides the appointment of Curtis, a couple of new laws working their way through the Legislature augur accelerating environmental destruction in 2018. One of the laws would allow developers to build on wetlands regardless of the environmental consequences (see opinion, "An attack on Wisconsin’s wetlands").

The other bill would repeal nearly 300 state regulations on air pollutants for which federal regulations exist. Backing the bill are business, manufacturing, paper and oil interests.