Unofficial Conference Blog | Society of Environmental Journalists

Photo Feature: Sunset at Aldo Leopold's iconic Wisconsin River shack

I was a lucky member of a sunset trip to "The Shack" -- the small house and farm where Aldo Leopold was inspired to write his book "A Sand County Almanac" -- on Saturday October 10, final evening of the conference. 

The shack sits close to the Wisconsin River near Baraboo, Wisconsin, near tall-grass prairie and the present-day Leopold Center, which hosted SEJ for the evening.

 The Aldo Leopold shack at dusk.

Not with a Bang: Badger Ammunition Plant Mini-Tour

(Photo: Tour-goers take notes and photos at an overlook of the plant)

In 1941 – months before Pearl Harbor -- the federal government seized 10,000 acres of prairie farmland in Sauk County Wisconsin (northwest of Madison) to build an ammunition plant. The Badger Army Ammunition Plant first produced sulfuric acid and then gunpowder and rocket propellant during World War II. The complex geared up again during the Viet Nam War, but in 1975 it was put “on standby status,” all but shut down.

The Army will soon turn over those 10,000 acres to other federal agencies, but first it must clean up an alphabet soup of toxic substances left behind by the manufacturing process. On the Saturday afternoon mini-tour, Army representative Joan Kenney said that the site is one of 25 Superfund-level sites owned by the Army across the United States. However, these sites are not Superfund sites, she explained, because the federal government was already responsible for their clean-up.

Laura Olah, a neighbor of the plant and executive director of Citizens for Safe Water Around Badger, said that the group recently has been meeting with other grassroots groups near some of these other sites.

Complicating the clean-up is the fact that it was explosives that were manufactured at the site. The residues mean that it is quite possible that in knocking down a building, you will also blow it up. In the past burning these types of buildings has been the safest way to remove them. This, however, releases toxics into the air, so Citizens for Safe Water pressed the Army to find another way to remove the buildings. The buildings are now being carefully deconstructed instead of demolished, and appropriate materials are being decontaminated and recycled.

Pilots prepare to guide whooping cranes on migration to Florida

A busload of groggy but resolute SEJ members left Madison at 5:00 am on Thursday to visit Necedah Wildlife Refuge, where scientists and pilots are readying this year's batch of whooping crane chicks for the trip to Florida. The young birds will be following ultralight aircraft, riding the vortices off the plane wings. Weather did not permit us to see an actual training flight, but we did hear the resonant call of the cranes, which can be heard for 4 miles, and we saw two pairs of cranes flying and foraging out in the wetlands of Necedah.

Whooping cranes have gone from a low of just 15 individuals to roughly 250 wild birds, with the help of scientists like John French, Research Manager at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, who  joined our tour. He explained how the center hatches and raises chicks, which are attended by scientists in whooping crane costumes to encourage their charges to imprint on birds, not people. When close to fledging, the chicks are transported to Necedah, where similarly costumed pilots mount ultralight aircraft and encourage the young birds to follow them through the air.

At migration time--and departure is planned for this Sunday--the planes and birds head south, stopping at night in the yards of carefully selected homeowners along the route. The young cranes overwinter in Florida and then fly back to Wisconsin without guidance in the spring, having learned the route in a single trip. Their journey back is carefully monitored by scientists, who retrieve the few individuals that lose their way and bring them back to Necedah.

We also visited the International Crane Foundation (ICF) center in Baraboo, where we saw representatives of all 15 of the world's crane species, a collection of cranes used in breeding operations, and a nursery facility. Nine chicks raised at ICF will be released this month at Necedah, hopefully to follow adults instead of planes on their trip to Florida.

Many thanks to Matt Mendenhall of Birder's World, who organized the trip.

 

CSI Madison: Lab investigates the mysteries of wildlife disease

Local authorities want to know why a gray fox lay immobile in someone’s Wisconsin backyard. The fox was put down and its body was sent to the National Wildlife Health Center Laboratory, in Madison, Wisc.

There, Carol Meteyer, a wildlife pathologist at the lab, began to unravel the fox’s mystery. On a steel table in her basement lab, she began a necropsy, or animal autopsy, on the fox’s remains. Each of the fox’s organs held a possible clue to what had caused the fox to act so oddly.

She drained urine from the fox’s bladder so it could be tested for the tell-tale crystals of antifreeze poisoning. A cat and a raccoon had died in the same area at about the same time, and antifreeze, while toxic, tastes sweet to animals, and they will drink it if they find a puddle of it. Meteyer did not find crystals in the fox’s kidneys, which would also occur if the fox drank anti-freeze, so she put antifreeze poisoning lower on her list of possible causes.

Infections tend to cause a swollen spleen, and this fox’s spleen looked normal, Meteyer said. The fox’s stomach was empty, so other types of poisoning dropped lower on her list as well. Poisoned animals often have a stomach full of human food, like stew, Meteyer explained, that the poisoner has spiked. Diarrhea is often a sign of canine parvovirus, but she found no diarrhea in the fox’s bowel.

That left canine distemper as a likely cause. Meteyer would look for virus inclusions, basically bumps, on the fox’s inner eyelids and bladder. Distemper can also leave tell-tale clues in the brain, she explained.

Meteyer was part of one of four teams of researchers who explained their work at the lab to our conference tour group. The lab deals with all sorts of wildlife diseases, from plague to West Nile virus to white nose syndrome in bats to monitoring for avian influenza. These researchers not only diagnose illnesses, but sometimes they discover new disease-causing organisms in the process. The lab’s job doesn’t stop with diagnosis, but goes on to containment strategies, and even vaccines.

Meteyer’s work with the fox was not done by the time our group left the building, but it offered an example of the wildlife disease mysteries explored at the National Wildlife Health Center.

Feeding Cities

Sustainable agriculture is such a great subject to write about – There’s always something new to learn. Today at Growing Power in Milwaukee, I learned that I put the wrong worms in my compost pile! As soon as I get home, I’m replacing those nightcrawlers with red wigglers. They live up to their name, showing off a vigorous wiggle for the assembled tour participants. 

Will Allen was selected as a MacArthur Fellow in 2008 for founding Growing Power. Talk about intensive agriculture – they’ve got fish ponds at the bottom, with the nitrogen-rich water pumped up into sprout trays that are harvested weekly. The water flows down to grow watercress at the next level. Then the water, now clean, flows back into the fish tank. 

 

This urban farm grows everything from two kinds of fish (tilapia and perch) to several kinds of sprouts, lots of greens such as chard, vegetables such as beets and tomatoes. Growing Power’s priority is to grow good dirt in order to grow good food. That’s where the red wigglers figure in. They work over the compost and wood chips to make dirt. Along the way, the decomposing compost produces enough heat to grow tropical plants, including bananas, figs and papyrus

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Chickens contribute twelve dozen eggs a day. Muscovy ducks, turkeys and goats (Saanen and Alpine) are raised for meat, and, from the goats, milk. 

Our lunch came from the gardens – salad, corn, beets (Will’s own recipe, spiced with cinnamon and cloves), braised cabbage with amazing flavor. Lasagna made with Wisconsin cheese. If you thought sprouts were evidence of self-denial, think again. These have varied, bright flavors, a delightful taste surprise. 

 We moved on to Walnut Way after lunch. It’s a project that reclaiming a Milwaukee neighborhood that the city tried to demolish. Literally. It was scheduled for demolition in the 1960s and more than 1,500 homes – and the heart of the black business district – were bulldozed. The justification was to make way for a freeway. That never got built, but the neighborhood was devastated. Some of the residents refused to leave, or, having left, came back. One of the older residential buildings, formerly a triplex, is now Walnut Way’s headquarters, right across the street from the house where co-founder Sharon Adams, shown here, in a photo from the Walnut Way site, was born.

   

 Walnut Way has its own gardens, and helps local residents grow food in their yards. Mrs. Adams points out that the gardens are not fenced, but the vegetables remain safe. She notes the lack of graffiti in the neighborhood as evidence of the peace the project has brought to the neighborhood. 

All the problems aren’t solved yet – two young men faced off in the street during our visit, until Mrs. Adams straightened them out. An backpack, torn open, contents scattered on the steps of a house, suggested some kind of tussle. But Walnut Way is leading the way not only to housing and community recovery, but improved nutrition and environmental stewardship. Thanks, Diane Hawkins-Cox and Karen Herzog for organizing this tour. 

Note: Because I did not bring my own camera equipment, I've posted photos from these organization's sites.

Quagga mussels and cladophora: Partners in eco-crime

The EPA's Lake Guardian, based in Milwaukee.

Nature is full of heartwarming stories about partnerships. One of my all-time favorites is the three-way mutualism between Western ponderosa pine trees, tassel-eared squirrels and mycorrhizal fungi. The trees house the squirrels in their branches and the fungi on their roots. The mycorrhizae break down nutrients in the soil for easier absorption by the tree roots, and the trees supply sugar to the fungi. The squirrels eat the fruiting bodies of the fungi, called truffles, then defecate the spores throughout the forest, thereby inoculating new trees. Everybody benefits; forest health improves.

Pan east about a thousand miles to the Great Lakes region. Lurking beneath Lake Michigan is another partnership that's just as impressive. But its effects on the Lake Michigan ecosystem are anything but beneficial, at least the way we perceive a healthy freshwater scene.

Earlier today, about 30 SEJ attendees toured the University of Wisconsin's Great Lakes Water Institute in Milwaukee. We also cruised the lake for a couple of hours aboard the EPA's research vessel, called the Lake Guardian. Of all the research, I was most struck by new insights into the efficient relationship between quagga mussels and an algae called cladophora.

A visit to the Crave Brothers dairy farm

One of SEJ's many tours Thursday took participants to the Crave Brothers dairy farm in Waterloo, Wisc., less than an hour's drive from Madison. Our tour included a look at the barns where the farm's 1,000 dairy cows are kept, a peek into the cheese-making operation next door, and a delicious lunch featuring several kinds of cheese made on site.

SEJ-ers packed into an open-air wagon for a trip around the farm.  

Farmer Tom Crave told us how he and three of his brothers began the farm 30 years ago with 80 cows. In addition to its 1,000 cows, the operation now has 1,700 acres of crops and a cheese-making business.

 

The farm uses a digester to process cow manure and turn it into electricity. The $4 million facility helps manage odors, nutrients and greenhouse gas emissions, said Karl Crave, a second-generation member of the family. 

At Crave Brothers Farmstead Cheese, the SEJ group enjoyed a lunch of sandwiches, salads with fresh mozzarella, and a variety of desserts using the farm's ricotta and mascarpone. Karl's wife Beth, a chef, prepared the food. 

Gordon Stevenson, chief of runoff management for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, challenged the idea that large concentrated animal feeding operations (called CAFOs) are the major source of agricultural pollution. Stevenson said the 200 CAFOs in Wisconsin are highly regulated, whereas the 30,000 smaller farms do not have to meet the same standards. 

Small family farms are perceived as "holy" and unassailable, while CAFOs are perceived as uncaring "factory farms," a term he thinks is unfair. "Here is the truth about Wisconsin," he said. "Those small farms are no more virtuous than large farms are villainous."