In Walker's wounded WI, environmental advocacy still strong

While noting Wisconsin's u-turn on climate change science by scrubbing information from official web pages and conservative GOP legislators' continuing attack on the state's environmental traditions, too, it's important to see that there are still strong voices fighting the good fight:

* The Bad River tribe, again being assertive when it comes to keeping the water clean:

Props to the same stewards of the land who helped preserve the Bad River watershed and the Penokee Hills in NW WI from decades of destructive open-pit mining:

A Chippewa tribe in Wisconsin is calling for 12 miles of pipeline to be removed from its reservation after 64 years of operation, saying they want to protect their land and water from oil spills. 

The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa's tribal council approved a resolution Wednesday refusing to renew easements for 11 parcels of land along a section of Enbridge's Line 5 pipeline, which carries oil and natural gas liquids 645 miles from Canada to eastern Michigan. 

The resolution also calls for decommissioning the pipeline and removing it from the tribe's reservation along the shores of Lake Superior in far northern Wisconsin. The resolution also directs tribal staff to prepare recycling, disposal and surface restoration work that would come with removal.

*  Matthew Rothschild, at Wisconsin Democracy Campaign:

As Wisconsinites, we rightly take pride in our beautiful landscape and our noble tradition of protecting our air, land, and water.

But this tradition is under assault these days by lawmakers who side with polluters over Wisconsin families.

In a recent column in the Wisconsin State Farmer by Senator Tom Tiffany and Representative Adam Jarchow, the Republican legislators tried to turn their anti-environmental records into badges of honor.

“We have the audacity to take on the environmental left,” they said.

What they really mean is they’ve never met a polluter they didn’t like... 

“This session, we will continue to press for legislation that runs afoul of the dogmatic beliefs held by many so-called environmentalists,” they wrote.

More on this matter, here.

*  Tia Nelson, at the Outrider Foundation, in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel op-ed: 

In 1989, Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of the United Kingdom at the time, gave an eloquent speech at her Conservative Party’s conference in Blackpool, England, about the relationship between fossil fuels and global warming. 

The same year, her ally in many conservative causes, the late President Ronald Reagan said this in a letter to the speaker of the House and the president of the Senate presenting the 1990 budget: “Because changes in the Earth’s natural systems can have tremendous economic and social effects, global climate change is becoming a critical concern.” 

Former President George H. W. Bush, who signed in 1992 a climate change treaty at The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, said this in an Earth Day proclamation two years earlier: “Many scientists are concerned that a buildup of certain gasses in the atmosphere may cause significant climate changes with serious, widespread consequences.” 

It is important to our future prosperity that we agree that science very much matters, as do facts, and that cutting off the public’s access to scientific facts is dangerous. People have the right to know that a warming planet right now and into the future carries significant risks.

On the same subject - - Keith Reopelle, from Clean Wisconsin, in The Wisconsin State Journal: 

A Madison-based conservation activist who is pushing for the [new Federal] air pollution standards said spreading falsehoods about climate change was dangerous because delays in addressing the problem will worsen the climate-related health hazards faced by future generations.

“The notion that this is a matter of scientific debate is ridiculous,” said Keith Reopelle, policy director at Clean Wisconsin. “The only people who say that are being paid by the fossil fuel industry.”