Recently I wrote my state senator, Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), expressing concern about a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources environmental decision approving a high-capacity well for another of those anti-cultural, dairy super-factories. The operation would house 4,300 cows and pump nearly 73 million gallons of well water annually, irrespective of any impact on smaller wells, aquifers and surface waters in the state's productive yet lovely Central Sands region.
Darling's no-doubt canned email response offered up this tautology (bold-facing added):
As you know, on May 21st, the [state legislature's GOP-dominated] Joint Committee on Finance adopted a motion that prohibits challenges to high capacity well permits based on a lack of consideration of cumulative environmental impacts.
Hey, thanks for nothing, Senator. I write you concerned about how a gigantic pumping operation may damage residential wells and impact nearby lakes and streams, and you say, in effect, too bad because the powerful legislative committee that
you chair has banned all challenges to such applications if they involve "cumulative" impacts. Which is the entire point: The environment is holistic, and if you don't consider cumulative environmental impacts, you're not even trying.
Darling went on to write:
The Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has determined that it has no statutory or other legal authority to consider cumulative impacts when determining whether to approve or deny a permit for a high capacity well.
Uh, yeah, senator. That's why I wrote to you. An environmental protection agency unilaterally "deciding" it has no power to do a credible, meaningful environmental review?
Well, then, mandate that power! Oh, but your committee just took away even more of the agency's review authority, just in case it actually ever in the future again tries to do its job.
All this hand-wringing, no-can-do talk from the DNR and its right-wing, anti-environment, GOP controllers comes despite a 2011 state Supreme Court decision that said the DNR is bound by the Public Trust Doctrine, a provision in the state constitution requiring that all Wisconsin waters must be protected on behalf of the public, and shared by all. That was in a case similar to the current matter involving the giant corporate dairy farm development.
In her email, Darling's staff went on to write that the Joint Finance Committee's action "does nothing to change current law, which already extensively protects the environment from potential detrimental effects resulting from high capacity wells."
Gee, Senator Tautology, if your committee's action really changes nothing in current law, why act on it? And here's another question: Why is your committee -- which is supposed to be concerned with the state budget -- busy ramming through changes (in Darling's mind, non-changes) to state environmental law? Is that really about the state budget? And wouldn't the state legislature's environmental committees be better venues to consider such issues, rather than hide them in thousand-page "budget" bills?
Read on to find out how this matter is just a toe-dip into the clean-water controversy now enveloping Wisconsin under the right-wing, GOP, anti-conservation Scott Walker regime.
Under Republican Gov. Scott Walker, care for Wisconsin's environment -- which was long a major issue in the state enjoying bipartisan support -- seems suddenly to have morphed into a purely dollar-and-cents issue. One of Walker's first moves after taking office in 2011 was to ease restrictions on wetlands development so precisely one big-box retailer could locate in a protected area. The public outcry was so loud that, while Walker refused to reverse himself, the retailer bowed out of the deal.
But the precedent stands. Figuratively speaking, Walker seems to like paving paradise and putting up parking lots, alongside his infamous, ubiquitous "Wisconsin Is Open For Business" signs. Meanwhile, he just can't figure out why tourism spending is down in the state.
Many more in-roads against the state's strong history of environmental protection have ensued, including Walker moves to meddle in scientific deer-herd management, reduce citizen input into DNR policy-making and -- worst of all -- to fast-track by gutting rigid environmental review a gigantic, open-pit iron-ore mine near the Penokee Hills, a pristine state forest, and, downstream, a native American tribal reservation and its wild-rice fields. if it comes to pass, that will be Walker's signature stamp on the state: A miles-long, thousand-foot-deep, permanent scar in what is now wooded paradise.
Oh, and Walker's lieutenant running the DNR? That would be Cathy Stepp, a former Republican state senator who with her husband owns a construction business. No wonder the sky's suddenly the limit for environmental recklessness.
DNR's claim that it cannot consider the cumulative impact of the proposed high-capacity wells on regional waters is, in the judgment of environmental groups, University of Wisconsin researchers and at least one former DNR water quality engineer, inconsistent not just legally but in terms of good science. It's also inconsistent with the way the DNR used to regard such proposals before Walker and his wrecking crew came along.
This DNR position is quite sudden and new. Other bloggers have noted a page on the agency's own web site, which describes the importance of the Public Trust Doctrine that GOP lawmakers and the DNR hierarchy now disavow (boldface added):
Wisconsin's Public Trust Doctrine requires the state to intervene to protect public rights in the commercial or recreational use of navigable waters. The DNR, as the state agent charged with this responsibility, can do so through permitting requirements for water projects, through court action to stop nuisances in navigable waters, and through statutes authorizing local zoning ordinances that limit development along navigable waterways.
The court has ruled that DNR staff, when they review projects that could impact Wisconsin lakes and rivers, must consider the cumulative impacts of individual projects in their decisions. "A little fill here and there may seem to be nothing to become excited about. But one fill, though comparatively inconsequential, may lead to another, and another, and before long a great body may be eaten away until it may no longer exist. Our navigable waters are a precious natural heritage, once gone, they disappear forever," wrote the Wisconsin State Supreme Court justices in their opinion resolving Hixon v. PSC.
So, the DNR is legally obligated to consider cumulative environmental effects, but it's not? Talk about policymakers with two brains.
The DNR's decision to allow this latest agribusiness dairy factory to drill a deep well still faces court challenges. Critics of the plan say that, if replicated in future such applications, such deep wells could produce regional water shortages and damage thousands of pristine Wisconsin streams and lakes. It is the literal manifestation of what CNN in a broader context recently called Wisconsin voters' "deep well" of anger.
Approval of the deep, high-capacity well seems wildly out of step given growing evidence that massive over-pumping of aquifers in other states and in some areas of Wisconsin already have created environmental damage, only some of which has yet to become apparent above ground. For example, Wisconsin's environment right now arguably is being ravaged by major "frack sand" mining, which provides a special kind of sand used in other states in natural-gas fracking operations. Drive through western Wisconsin, where many of these mines operate, and you'll see many hand-painted, roadside signs decrying the damage these operations have wrought.
So here is how bad things have become in Wisconsin in just a couple of years, thanks to Walkerism: A state once in the forefront of protecting the environment, especially its thousands of rivers and lakes, is now busy putting business ahead of such suddenly mundane considerations.
And when a citizen writes his state senator and complains that the DNR isn't doing its environmental protection job, the senator writes back and says, in so many words, that it's because the DNR is not doing its job. What she doesn't say is that's because, along with the governor, GOP lawmakers are making sure the agency can't do its job, despite the apparent violation of the state's constitution.
Sounds like the seventh circle of Hell to me.
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