How Scott Walker Dismantled Wisconsin's Environmental Legacy
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-scott-walker-dismantled-wisconsin-s-environmental-legacy/?WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook
How Scott Walker Dismantled Wisconsin's Environmental Legacy
As governor of Wisconsin, the likely Republican presidential nomination-seeker consistently dismissed science and sided with polluters
When Wisconsin’s new state treasurer Matt Adamczyk took office in January, his first act was to order a highly symbolic change in stationery. Adamczyk, a Republican and one of three members of the board that oversees a small public lands agency, “felt passionately” that Tia Nelson, the agency’s executive secretary, should be struck from the letterhead. As soon became clear, his principal objection to Nelson, daughter of former Wisconsin governor and environmentalist-hero Gaylord Nelson, was that in 2007–08 she had co-chaired a state task force on climate change at the then-governor’s request. Adamczyk insisted that climate change is not germane to the agency’s task of managing timber assets, and that Nelson’s activities thus constituted “time theft.” When he couldn’t convince the two other members of the agency’s board to remove Nelson from the letterhead, he tried to get her fired. When that motion failed, he moved to silence her. In April the board voted 2–1 to ban agency staff from working on or discussing climate change while on the clock. The climate censorship at the public lands agency made national headlines.
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Since taking office in 2011 Walker has moved to reduce the role of science in environmental policymaking and to silence discussion of controversial subjects, including climate change, by state employees. And he has presided over a series of controversial rollbacks in environmental protection, including relaxing laws governing iron mining and building on wetlands, in both cases to help specific companies avoid regulatory roadblocks. Among other policy changes, he has also loosened restrictions on phosphorus pollution in state waterways, tried to restrict wind energy development and proposed ending funding for a major renewable energy research program housed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Most recently Walker has targeted the science and educational corps at the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which has responsibility for protecting and managing forests and wildlife, along with air and water quality. In his 2015–17 budget, released in February, he proposed eliminating a third of the DNR’s 58 scientist positions and 60 percent of its 18 environmental educator positions. (The cuts were approved by the state legislature’s budget committee in May, and the budget is currently making its way through the legislature.) Walker also attempted to convert the citizen board that sets policy for the DNR to a purely advisory body and proposed a 13-year freeze on the state’s popular land conservation fund—both changes that lawmakers rejected in the face of intense public objections.
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Kimberlee Wright, executive director of Midwest Environmental Advocates, an environmental law center, works closely with DNR engineers and scientists to review and comment on pollution permits for activities such as wastewater disposal and groundwater pumping under the Clean Water Act. In the past, Wright says, the process was typically straightforward, and she and colleagues were routinely able to hammer out permits that followed the technical requirements of the law. But since Gov. Walker took office, she says, “We have not been able to settle one permit—we’ve had to litigate every single challenge. We’re often told by [DNR] staff, ‘We know you’re right, but you’re going to have to sue us because the people above me won’t let me issue a technically sufficient permit.’ That’s a really big difference—the interference in science-based decision-making is pretty complete.”
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