Terrence Adeyanju
It's hard to think of a balmy day as a sign of the apocalypse. But you surely haven’t already forgotten Dec. 15. If you ran into friends on the street you probably uncomfortably skirted the question of why it was 68 degrees. Or “joked” about how we’re screwed and then made plans to grill. Because what else can you do?
Later that night your phone chirped a tornado warning. If you logged on you saw the blade-thin crescent of storms slicing across Iowa and Minnesota. Only five days before, Kentucky had been rolled by tornados in the terrifying dark of night. The winds were memorable, but we were spared the worst.
Just a few years ago we weren’t as lucky: Heavy rains in 2018 flooded basements and storm sewers on the isthmus and left Mazomanie submerged. Such unsettling events are now widespread and opinion polls in the U.S. and abroad over the past several years show that two out of three people are at least somewhat worried about climate change. It makes them feel sad, afraid and anxious.
These are understandable emotions in response to an overwhelmingly large, contentious and existential threat. But if there’s a bright side to planetary decline, it’s that scientists working to understand the nature of the threat are also realizing that a big part of successfully reining in climate change has to do with mending damaged landscapes and conserving wild nature. It’s work that Wisconsin understands, has pioneered, and used to be good at. Can it also begin to mend our broken political culture?
Judith Davidoff
Record-breaking rains in August 2018 raised Madison lake levels and submerged docks.
‘Once-in-a-lifetime’ storms
When the deluge began to fall in Ashland on July 11, 2016, MaryJo Gingras was buttoning down the last details of a backpacking trip. The storm was legendary, dropping 8-10 inches, and in some places more. An entire summer’s worth of rain fell in only eight hours.
As an avid backpacker, a little weather rarely bothers Gingras. But the next morning portions of her planned route were underwater. Scores of culverts had blown, severing roads all across northern Wisconsin. Regional damage topped $38 million, destroying local budgets. Just two years later, in June 2018, another “once-in-a-lifetime” storm hit.
That year Gingras became Ashland’s county conservationist. “This is a sign that we need to make changes,” she says of the storms. “It made me realize, very strongly, we have to change the way we manage if we are going to continue to be good stewards.”
The county land and water plan was due for an update, and as Gingras worked she discovered that the Forest Service’s Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science (NIACS) had a complete package of science-backed adaptation strategies and analysis for the North Country. NIACS is a geographically dispersed group of scientists and land managers that has been preparing for this moment for years, and it was a relief to find professional help.
NIACS data showed that annual precipitation in Ashland County was increasing substantially and falling out of its historical rhythms. When county leaders and citizens began meeting, Gingras shared what she’d learned about these changes and possible adaptation strategies. Together they began to plan.
They weren’t alone in their efforts. Some of the worst flooding had been along the Marengo River, which joins the Bad River and flows into Lake Superior through the Bad River Reservation just east of Ashland. Erosion was already a water quality problem in the basin. Local and tribal advocates had been working to improve the system.
The scale of the floods sent everyone back to the drawing board. The Wisconsin Wetlands Association set out to document what was happening. Their compelling report, “Exploring the Relationship between Wetlands and Flood Hazards in the Lake Superior Basin,” is now being actively shared in the Upper Midwest and beyond by communities dealing with similar challenges.
The group laid out the ecological history: how clearcut logging followed by agricultural settlement transformed the streams and wetlands more than a hundred years ago, and how that legacy still influences the way water flows across the landscape today. The region has many wetlands of all sizes, but a few photographs and diagrams clearly demonstrated how many had been damaged by sediment, erosion and gullies. These papercuts on the landscape — countless small disruptions — recurred across the countryside. The land and the water table were clearly disconnected, and it culminated downstream into a flooding disaster.
“The landscape has never truly recovered from the cutover,” says report co-author Kyle Magyera, local government outreach specialist for the wetlands association. “The hydrology underpins everything. If you want healthy habitat, you need to fix the water. Hydrology is really what allows a system to cope with that disturbance and then to bounce back.”
The traditional response to flooding is to clear or relocate at-risk structures from the floodplain, and that can be a good choice. But Magyera and Gingras looked further upstream, hoping to use low-tech landscape tools to rebuild the land’s capacity to slow down and hold water. “We’re trying to get the water working in flow paths and velocities that are going to be sustainable, to help to achieve flood resilience,” Magyera says.
And that’s where this thread of hope begins to come together: In March 2020, the state Legislature passed Act 157, giving Ashland County $150,000 to “test natural flood risk reduction practices.” The bill had 22 sponsors — nine Republicans and 13 Democrats — and passed unanimously. Work begins in the spring.
Dylan Brogan
Volunteers and residents fill sandbags to protect Madison homes and businesses against flooding during the summer of 2018.
Nature as healer
As Ashland has rethought its land and water conservation strategies there have been no politically charged arguments about climate change. Widespread disaster saw to that. “The flooding affected every single person,” says Gingras. “The storms that we see are happening, they’re changing, they’re becoming more intense, and more regular, and more severe. And so when people are seeing that on the ground, they can’t really argue it. So it’s actually worked in our favor to talk about building climate resiliency, and to talk about the fact that our environment — our climate in our own county — is changing drastically.”
Water is real, dangerous, elemental. When rain falls and waters our crops and fills our rivers, we tend to think of it simply as nature just doing its thing. When major floods happen, you can just point and say: Something’s not quite right here.
The ability of a wetland to absorb water, store it, filter it, and release it over time is one of many ecosystem services: things that nature does that benefits us. And nature does a lot for us — it feeds us, it cleans our air, it clothes us. Those benefits can be broken down into abstract slivers like pollination and water storage and filtration. We’re not used to paying for these things, but can you imagine an agricultural economy without pollinators and rain? Growing human populations and appetites are putting visible stress on planetary boundaries, and one way to measure that breakdown is through the degradation of nature’s benefits.
The footage of historic floods, epic droughts, extreme heat, and catastrophic fires never seems to end. And now instead of just worrying about the fate of the Amazon or when a doomsday glacier will slide into the sea, the disasters hit closer and closer to home. The climate crisis demands a hard, urgent dialogue: How much nature do we need to avert the most dystopian outcomes?
A phrase you’ll hear a lot as you tune into the climate crisis is nature-based solutions. Scientists have been trying to do the math here, asking just how much nature we need to maintain life in the manner to which we’ve become accustomed. And a rough consensus has emerged: Nature needs half.
This number is open to a great deal of debate. In Half Earth the late famed Harvard ant biologist E.O. Wilson focused primarily on the elegant and morally compelling rationale of preventing extinction. More immediately existential are the multidisciplinary teams looking to identify thresholds and possible tipping points, particularly around carbon.
Healthy and intact ecosystems actively knit carbon into the Earth; fragmented and damaged ecosystems release it. This double-edged sword cuts both ways: Conserving what remains of healthy and functioning ecosystems will help us stabilize climate change. Allowing them to fall to bulldozers and blades deepens our peril.
In 2019 a signature paper from more than a dozen prominent conservation scientists suggested 30 percent as an effective and achievable target. Despite critiques and controversy, 30 by 30 has become a rallying target internationally: conserve 30 percent of nature by 2030.
This is not a technology versus nature debate. The consensus is that we urgently need both the widespread adoption of new energy technologies and more conservation and ecological restoration to stabilize the climate. And while we haven’t even invented all of the technology, nature is already widely deployed. We just need to give it space to operate.
“I would say 30 percent is a good, reasonable number,” says Monica Turner, a celebrated landscape ecologist at UW-Madison. “It’s not going to work 100 percent of the time for everything.”
Work done by a former student of hers, Jiangxiao Qiu — who now teaches at the University of Florida — helps validate the 30 percent concept for the Yahara Basin. Comparing smaller watersheds within the basin, he was able to show that simply decreasing the percentage of row crops to about 60 percent of the landscape would stabilize phosphorus loss from most soils. Phosphorus causes algae growth in our lakes and at high levels can be harmful to human and animal health. That Qiu’s analysis saw results by reducing cropland to 60 percent, tells us that 30 percent is in the ballpark.
“It is a little ‘squishy’ in terms of an actual number,” says Turner. “If we could get there it would be a big improvement in the benefits that we gain from ecosystem services, so I think it’s a very good target.”
Nature-based solutions also deliver multiple benefits. Build yourself flood protection with concrete, and that’s all you’ve got: concrete. “You may well address those flooding problems, but that’s probably it,” says Nick Miller, director of science and strategy for the Nature Conservancy in Wisconsin. “But preserve and manage an acre of wetland, or other natural systems, and you get a huge array of collateral benefits, or co-benefits.” You get biodiversity, carbon storage, wildlife habitat, water quality — the building blocks of nature-based solutions.
And nature doesn’t just exist on publicly protected land. “There are many natural working lands out there in Wisconsin,” says Miller. “We really just have to find a balance between all of these, so that we can find the best fit between people’s needs and nature’s needs.”
For decades the Nature Conservancy has prioritized conservation — setting aside the lands that haven’t been plowed, drained, or cut — on the first principle of do no harm. While no landscape is untouched by human influence, there are tracts large and small that are particularly valuable because they’re more ecologically productive. We can, and must restore ecosystems. “But it takes a long time for the benefits to be realized,” says Miller. “It’s really hard to bring back the full functionality of a habitat. It takes a long time to build up those deep soils, complex root structures, and the complexity and diversity of the community itself.”
That’s why increasing conservation funding now has such immense potential: the cost of conservation will only go up. When lands that could have been conserved become degraded, restoration costs get higher even as its nature-based solution potential drops. “One element of strategy is to do as much as we can right now, especially since the clock is ticking,” says Miller.
And climate change is overwinding that clock. “Some of the things that we’re seeing we thought we’d see in mid-century, not in the 2020s,” says Turner. “Things are happening quickly.”
The power of nature-based solutions buffers Turner’s optimism. “What I don’t know is how to get the political will,” she adds. “That part of me has not gotten so optimistic yet.”
Gage Skidmore
The 30 by 30 conservation goal was part of Joe Biden’s platform and a centerpiece in an executive order issued early in his administration.
Where’s the political will?
In the race to save the planet, nature is a tool of hope. For countless individuals it provides solace and rejuvenation. For many Wisconsin communities and for the state nature is a signature of our identity. For the planet, nature is a genuine buffer against the worst disasters, and an atlas to guide the best case scenarios.
So why does nature have so little place in our political dialogue?
The 30 by 30 conservation goal was actually a plank in the Biden platform and a centerpiece in the Jan. 27, 2021, executive order from the White House regarding climate change. While four states have enacted elements of 30 by 30 and three more have legislation in progress, 15 Republican governors have objected to what they call a federal land grab. With Wisconsin’s divided government there’s been no significant conversation on it, inside or out of government.
And as the focus shifted to the Build Back Better bills, 30 by 30 essentially disappeared from political discourse.
There is something existentially wrong with the political calculus of both parties here. Investing in the environment is enormously popular, and has been for at least three decades.
In polling done just before the Biden executive order, four out of five voters nationwide favored protecting at least 30 percent of America’s land, ocean and inland waters by the year 2030. Half (51 percent) strongly favored it. Even a few months later, after political lines were allowed to harden, three out of five voters still supported it, and the margin was 2-1 among rural voters.
We see even stronger support for Wisconsin’s primary land acquisition fund, the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program. Like most public policy polling, a dismaying number of respondents don’t recognize the program by name. But when the goals, context and costs of the program are described, support surges over 90 percent. Democrats and Republicans are different, but both parties register significant support.
In a deeply divided political environment, and in a state with an unparalleled legacy of environmental awareness, how can something with so much popular support be ignored?
For the Republicans, it’s simple: After decades of genial bipartisanship around environmental issues, Wisconsin’s GOP flared into open hostility with their dismantling of Department of Natural Resources authority and expertise under the administration of former Gov. Scott Walker. The very mention of climate change by agency employees was banned. More recently, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos famously said, in 2019: “I don’t know if climate change is real. I think it probably is. I have no idea why it is occurring nor do most people on the planet.”
The Republicans are who they say they are.
The Democratic relationship to conservation, both nationally and within the state, is more perplexing. Despite an open embrace of environmental issues, the party rarely leads with them, and even when it does fails routinely in its efforts to connect the dots with rural constituencies.
Are the Dems simply lacking in vision? Too risk averse? Are they ultimately — if to a lesser degree — beholden to the same donors that drive Republican antipathy towards conservation?
Has gerrymandering relieved politicians of the need to even respond to the will of the people?
Whether you’re left, right or center the failure to act on such existentially pressing problems using fundamentally popular solutions is not merely a sign of government divided, but government broken.
Nature needs room
And yet sometimes the Legislature does come through, albeit on a small scale.
Compared to the state budget, $150,000 for Ashland County to explore nature-based solutions to flooding is pocket change. But the bill passed unanimously, with lots of sponsors from both parties. Had it been a pilot project focused on guns or abortion, ideology would have flared on both sides. The small flicker of hope here is that, in the face of disaster, there is nothing ideologically abhorrent — to either party — about working with nature to heal a broken landscape.
The vote recognizes at the smallest scale possible support for nature-based solutions. The exact same logic underlies 30 by 30. It’s simply taking a global view. If we want to maintain some semblance of our familiar lives on Earth, we must pay attention to what nature does for us, and what we can do for it.
Dane County seems to have embraced this challenge and made great progress. In the 1980s and 1990s the county was riven by debates between developers and conservationists. Then policymakers learned to work, mostly, together. The signature deals here included landmark compromises between then Democratic County Executive Kathleen Falk and then Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson.
In 1999 a key county-wide referendum passed by a 3-1 margin to authorize $30 million in borrowing to fund acquisition of about 11,000 acres for parks and key natural resources, water and wetlands. The county’s parks and open spaces plan now recognizes that protecting these lands is a regional scale nature-based solution for keeping soil healthy, controlling floods, nurturing species diversity, keeping water quality high, and reducing carbon emissions.
Even as state support for local projects has dwindled, Dane County keeps prioritizing conservation investments. At the same time, the county has become an economic powerhouse for the state.
As she approaches 20 years with the Dane County Land and Water Resources Department, director Laura Hicklin has come to her own organic understanding of the natural forces underlying 30 by 30. “Nature needs room,” she says. She can see it in the parks themselves, with larger landscapes needing less intensive management than the smaller parcels. She sees it in the large swaths of private lands that are the natural backbone of the improving health of our land and waters.
“Day to day, we don’t necessarily see, understand or feel that connection to global change,” she says. “I do think we all believe, and trust, that there is a connection there. The scale that we work at doesn’t let us see it all play out.” But she knows how connected prairie restoration volunteers are to their projects, and how people heal themselves in difficult times by spending time on these lands. Can you even imagine the pandemic without our parks?
The immediate benefits of nature, says Hicklin, “keep us going day to day.”
Travel for this reporting was supported by the Resilience Fellowship Program of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
