Radical Leadership At Wisconsin DNR Gets Big Media Exposure

Home builder and radical Republican Cathy Stepp finds herself profiled on the front page of the Sunday Journal Sentinel.

And the disjointed, anti-government, DNR-bashing and very partisan rant she wrote in 2009 for a right-wing blog site that I have been linking to repeatedly is used in the profile fairly and prominently to bring Stepp into focus for a statewide audience.

The first item on my blog in which I linked to Stepp's posting  - - here - - in December, when her name began to circulate as a possible new Secretary of the Department of Natural Resources, has become the second-most downloaded item among the more than 1,000 I've written since a new data-tracking system was added to my blog in June.

All I can surmise is that Stepp's thoughts, in her own words, are finding readers, and after today, more, no doubt.

Here they are, again.

Turning the DNR into a business promotion agency as Scott Walker is directing, with a new employee loyalty oath to the WMC and the Wisconsin Club for Growth more or less mandatory, could end up being his undoing.

That's because there is an apolitical statewide constituency for outdoors preservation that transcends  mainstream environmentalist in Madison, or on Milwaukee's East side, or elsewhere in the state that that political conservatives like to mock as "Democrat."

Radicals who want to undo the DNR's historic mission will find themselves miscalculating, and also on the wrong payroll.

A friend of mine with decades more experience than I have had in Wisconsin conservation once told me "if you want to find the real environmentalists, go to the Towns," and I can think of people I know in rural Mukwonago, and the Town of Waukesha, for example, who fit that definition and practice it agenda-free.

It's a lifestyle, not a platform.

These are people less concerned with DNR procedures than they are with annexation-driven subdividers who, under a de-regulated Scott Walker administration, and a pro-home builder DNR, are far more likely to object and get organized righteously if their beloved lakes and streams and groundwater, their neighbor's farm fields and woodlands are degraded, filled-in, paved and otherwise "developed."

Many of these people may have voted Republican, but I am predicting that that's where the anti-Walker revolt will begin, one aggrieved voter and small wetlands filling at a time.

These are the true conservationists: ideological conservatives are forgetting the common root in the terminology; Their self-serving bedazzlement by money and political power - - temporal opposites of authentic resource stewardship - - makes the Walker crowd no friend to the Wisconsin environment, but does make Team Walker candidates for short, but damaging careers for having pushed private interests in public offices.