Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
A state that produced both John Muir and Aldo Leopold must have a fairly good track
record of being “green.” If you discount the first century of statehood, during which the
state—like most states at the time—pillaged the natural world full-bore, Wisconsin has in
fact been ahead of its time environmentally. The state government initiated exceptionally
far-sighted environmental laws beginning in the 1950s, when tourism loomed as a major
industry. The state was the first to meet the 1972 Clean Water Act; it had put similar legis-
lation on its own books a half-decade earlier. Former Wisconsin governor and U.S. senator
Gaylord Nelson founded Earth Day in 1970.
Superfund Sites and Dirty Water
Still, as always, things could be better. Wisconsin retains more than three dozen EPA Su-
perfund sites (areas so contaminated that the EPA allots large amounts of money to clean
them up). The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has found that about 900 miles
of rivers in the state flunked environmental standards since the mid-1990s, and another 50
or so lakes were “questionable” or worse. Twenty-two percent of rivers and streams fail,
onewayoranother,tomeetthestate'sclean-watergoals.Fish-consumptionadvisorieshave
been in effect since 2000 for well over 300 lakes and rivers. Though the figures may con-
stitute less than 5 percent of riverways and an even lower percentage of lakes, it portends
worse things to come.
Though the state has some of the strictest groundwater laws and is pointed to by the
EPA as one of three exemplary states, not enough local water sources pass muster. Land
use,particularlyagriculture,forestry,andconstruction,oftencreateserodedsoilsandrunoff
polluted with fertilizers and toxins. But agriculture cannot hold all the blame; urban runoff
potentially causes up to 50 times as much soil erosion and dumps whatever is on the street
into the water (like your oil leak). And by the way: farms can be far more progressive than
most cities; Wisconsin agriculture leads the nation in farm bioenergy plants, recycling all
waste into energy (five cows equal a week's worth of power for one house).
Contaminated sedimentation from decades of abuse remains a secondary problem. Pulp
and paper mills discharged almost 300 million gallons of wastewater, most of it untreated,
into surface water. The EPA was asked to declare 39 miles of the Fox River—the heart of
papermaking—a Superfund site because 40 tons (of an original 125 tons) of toxic PCBs
(polychlorinated biphenyl) remained from factory waste discharge.
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