After the purge

Can Wisconsin’s DNR get its science mojo back?

by

Walk into any supper club in northern Wisconsin and somewhere there is a walleyed pike. It might be on your plate as a fish fry staple, or it could be someone’s fish of a lifetime, a lunker mounted to swim in perpetuity above the bar.

The walleye has always been an emblem of the North Woods. No lakeside cottage is complete without vintage photos of happy anglers hoisting sagging stringers of one of Wisconsin’s most sought-after game fish. Today, the species remains high on the list of the nearly 1 million recreational anglers who ply Wisconsin’s lakes and rivers, and who spend billions annually on licenses, tackle, bait, guides, and food and lodging in their pursuit of Wisconsin game fish. Good fishing helps draw hundreds of thousands of out-of-state visitors and supports an estimated 21,500 jobs, many of them in northern Wisconsin, which boasts one of the world’s greatest concentrations of freshwater lakes. The fish also remains a traditional staple of the Ojibwe, who spear fish on 175 lakes in what is known as Wisconsin’s ceded territory, roughly the northern third of the state.

Today, walleye are in trouble. A cool water fish, walleye are at risk from climate change as surface water temperatures rise, creating conditions that stunt reproduction and make lake habitat more favorable for competing fish such as bass. A recent study from UW-Madison and Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources suggests that for decades a “hidden overharvest” of walleye is nudging 40 percent of the Wisconsin game fish’s population to the brink. Data gathered by the DNR and the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission show that the walleye population in the ceded territory has plummeted, falling 36 percent since 1990. The upshot, scientists say, is that the decades-old regulatory framework for protecting and sustaining walleye populations in Wisconsin is broken.

But the new walleye study isn’t just about fish. It is, importantly, a tangible reminder of why science matters when it comes to managing Wisconsin’s natural resources. It turns out the conclusions of the new study — that walleye are being overfished — first emerged six years ago in a different DNR study, one the agency’s political appointees under the administration of then-Gov. Scott Walker didn’t want you to know about.

The study, funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and completed in early 2014, was conducted by DNR fisheries biologists in collaboration with researchers at Michigan State University’s Quantitative Fisheries Center. It was a sophisticated effort to mathematically model walleye productivity in northern Wisconsin’s ceded territory, where off-reservation tribal spearfishing, together with angling, play the biggest roles in walleye population dynamics.

“The results of the analysis suggested that in some cases we needed to ratchet down both types of harvest — the spearing harvest and the angling harvest — because the populations weren’t going to be sustainable,” recalls John Lyons, one of Wisconsin’s leading fish biologists and, at the time, a supervisor in the DNR’s Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences Research Section, part of the agency’s now disbanded Science Services Bureau. “That’s a controversial finding. It had all sorts of implications. You say, ‘Well, we’re going to have to reduce bag limits further and we’re going to have to enter negotiations with the tribes to cut their quotas.’”

Those conclusions were unwelcome news for then-DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp, the Republican politician and construction business owner who was Walker’s choice to lead the state’s natural resources agency. “Basically, the person who was in charge of fisheries at this point said, ‘You can’t publish this, you can’t talk about this,’” says Lyons, who retired from the agency in 2017 after 32 years and now spends his days teaching or immersed in the vast collection of pickled fish at UW-Madison’s Zoological Museum. “This was something they didn’t want to hear. The scientific side was beyond reproach. It was well done and well supported. Eventually, it did get published, but it put a chill on everything we did.”

Open for business

For the research scientists at the DNR, there was much more to come, we now know. The attempt to quash a research study that might not play well with some constituencies was just one skirmish in an all-out assault on science at the DNR. With a “Wisconsin is open for business” mantra, Walker enjoyed the avid support of a Republican-controlled Legislature and set a course to dramatically diminish the role of science in regulating and protecting Wisconsin’s abundant natural resources.

At the time of Walker’s inauguration in 2011, the DNR enjoyed a national reputation as a leader in applying research to address natural resource issues. It had created a Science Services Bureau that was stocked with talent, a cadre of scientists, many of them early-career researchers, whose job was to do the original science — such as the walleye modelling study — that could be used to get in front of the challenges natural resource agencies routinely confront. In its roles managing the state’s wildlife and fisheries to protecting groundwater and regulating things like mining and pollution, the agency was superbly equipped to do the science that could address a problem and help inform pragmatic solutions.

“The whole idea was to hire the best research scientists we could and charge them with building a science program within the DNR,” says John “Jack” Sullivan, who led the Science Services Bureau, was its architect, and who spent nearly half of his 32 years at the apex of the agency’s research ecosystem. “At our peak, we had 15 to 20 Ph.D. scientists. We had built a significant capability and a fair amount of capacity in terms of our ability to do research projects and bring science to decision-making at the DNR. That was our job.”

The research scientists in the bureau had considerable latitude. They had license to collaborate with university scientists, hire interns and graduate students, and seek “soft money,” grants from private and public entities beyond the agency to conduct research and answer questions relevant to Wisconsin natural resources or the specific needs of the agency. “We were the only part of the DNR bringing in more money than it cost to keep us,” recalls Sullivan, who retired from the agency in 2015. “We were moving the ball forward on really, really strong science for the agency.”

Natural resource agencies like the DNR are stocked with all kinds of scientists. The nature of managing and regulating natural resources requires a broad set of technical expertise, and agencies like the DNR use scientists in various capacities to fulfill that mission. But the Science Services Bureau was different. Led by university-caliber Ph.D. scientists, they were the agency’s utility fielders, capable of setting up and conducting the research studies that provide new information and insights — data — that natural resource managers could then deploy in the public interest.

Stepp and the DNR’s legislative critics never thought this approach to research was a legitimate function of the agency.

“The controversy over the years has been on the role of research and gathering data, which could then be turned over to the applied scientists at the DNR,” explains George Meyer, who served as secretary of the agency from 1993 to 2001 and is now the executive director of the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation. Disrupting that research, adds Meyer, runs counter to the “very specific needs” of the agency: “The fundamental building block at the agency is science.”

The guns of October

The opening salvo in the war on science at the DNR came in October 2011 when Walker fulfilled a campaign pledge to impose new oversight on the DNR’s deer herd management practices and appointed James Kroll as the state’s first — and so far only — “deer czar.”

The appointment of Kroll, who at the time directed the Institute for White-Tailed Deer Management and Research at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, was in response to criticism that the state’s deer herd was being mismanaged.

“When [Kroll] said he was going to supplant [Aldo] Leopold, that rocked the scientists in the agency,” says Meyer, noting that Leopold was the first to propose an antlerless hunt in Wisconsin, a state where deer hunting is akin to secular religion. “But that was welcomed by the Walker administration and Stepp because it deemphasized science and science causes controversy in deer management. If you didn’t get a deer, you didn’t believe the DNR science.”

At the time Kroll was hired by Walker, Wisconsin had been struggling for more than a decade with chronic wasting disease, the fatal prion infection of deer and other cervids that continues to spread and has sapped the joy of the traditional Wisconsin deer hunt.

In addition to CWD, population estimates of the state’s deer herd were a point of constant contention. With a herd of nearly 2 million animals, Wisconsin is flush with deer, but many hunters each year never fire a shot, creating the impression for some that there are too few animals to satisfy the estimated half a million people who hunt deer annually in Wisconsin. The methods the DNR used to count deer were audited more than once, including during Stepp’s time at the agency’s helm, and were found to be “the gold standard” for accurately estimating the size of the state’s herd.

“It was as good a science as there was, but people didn’t believe it,” says Sullivan, as we chat in his rural Wyocena home under the steady gaze of several impressive bucks decorating his kitchen walls. “Hunters view the world from their deer stand, but deer are not equally distributed across the landscape and people don’t understand scale.”

Meyer sees encouraging signs now that Preston Cole is in charge of the DNR. “For the first time in a decade, I have seen a DNR expert talk about how many deer there are statewide — with a number,” marvels Meyer. “That was banned during the Stepp administration.”

An inconvenient truth

There have always been science triggers aplenty for the DNR’s critics, and many bubbled up during Stepp’s six-year tenure. In addition to eroding walleye stocks and deer management, rebounding wolf populations, groundwater contamination and depletion, and climate change were among the many topics to inspire political blowback for the agency’s researchers. Mining was another.

Cory McDonald, like Lyons, was one of the research scientists in the science bureau. Trained as an environmental engineer, McDonald was a young scientist launching his career as an aquatic ecologist and researcher in the Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences Research Section, one of five sections that made up the Science Services Bureau.

McDonald left the agency in 2016, not long after he and other DNR research scientists received formal notice that their jobs were at risk due to the targeted cuts imposed on the agency by the Legislature. He is now an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan Technological University.

In 2013, a year after joining the agency, McDonald was tasked with compiling a report on the potential environmental effects of a massive iron mine proposed by Florida-based Gogebic Taconite in northwest Wisconsin’s Penokee Hills, not far from Lake Superior. “I was asked to lead a literature review of taconite mining and potential environmental effects,” McDonald recalls. Literature reviews are standard operating practice across science. For any research project or a more formal and in-depth environmental impact statement in the case of a management agency like the DNR, a literature review is the requisite opening act, a simple compilation of what is already known about a topic and what are the lessons that have been learned, all drawn from existing scientific and technical reports that have been published in the open literature.

But McDonald’s routine white paper became the object of controversy when it was slipped to Media Trackers, a self-described “conservative watchdog” of media and government, while still being fine-tuned and discussed within the agency.

“It was a very objective review of the literature,” says Sullivan of the report, which was held up by the agency’s critics as evidence of anti-mining bias. “It was viewed very negatively by the administration. But it was just a literature review that said, ‘if you’re going to put a mine in, these are the things you should look at.’ It was an inconvenient truth that they hated. I went to the woodshed on that one.”

What has not been reported before, though, was that, according to Sullivan and others, Stepp herself requested the literature review in a routine meeting where the agency’s biennial research priorities were discussed. “I asked Cathy, ‘do you want us to do a white paper on iron ore mining?’ She said ‘yeah,’ says Sullivan, recalling that he and others in the meeting were “totally blown away that she would say, ‘yes, go ahead and do that,’ but she did. I don’t think she knew what she was asking for, to be honest.”

Although Stepp denied asking for the mining report, that assertion was contradicted by several people interviewed for this story, at least three of whom were at the table when she gave the green light.

“This is where I have nothing but contempt for [the Stepp] administration, because they asked for that,” says Lyons. “Then they denied up and down that they did. But they asked for that and they were fine with [McDonald] doing it until everything hit the fan and then all of a sudden we were being disciplined for doing something inappropriate, something they had no idea about and wouldn’t have approved if they did. Bullshit.”

Stepp did not respond to a request for comment.

Stepp’s naiveté was a shock to Sullivan because it was no secret that the proposed $1.5 billion Gogebic mine initiative was a priority for the politically powerful business lobby Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce. Although it wasn’t known publicly at the time, Gogebic Taconite was quietly lavishing money on state political races — some $700,000 — through a conduit known as the Wisconsin Club for Growth in an ultimately successful effort to help flip the state Senate. Thus, the mine was a pet project of Walker’s and also, in particular, of Hazelhurst Republican Sen. Tom Tiffany, a long-time critic of the DNR who, working hand-in-glove with the mining company, helped spearhead the legislative effort to weaken environmental protections related to mining, and who would later lead the push in the Legislature to slash science at the agency. Tiffany is now running for Sean Duffy’s former seat in Congress.

By early 2015, the Walker administration, with the avid support of a Republican-dominated Legislature, proposed steep budget cuts for the agency, specifically targeting science, as well as communication and education, the channels through which science is broadly shared. Eighteen research scientist positions were axed, effectively dismantling a program that had taken years to build and that had made Wisconsin’s DNR a national model in applying science to natural resource management.

A changing climate

But the assault on science did not stop there. Perhaps the most famous example of the Stepp administration’s antipathy to science was the surreptitious cleansing in 2016 of any information related to climate change on the DNR’s various websites. Struck were any mention of the potential human causes to what is widely considered the defining environmental issue of our age. The language was traded out for text that suggested scientists were still at sea on the issue, despite the fact that by 2016 there had long been an overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that climate change is real, is caused by human activities — principally the burning of fossil fuels — and that the impacts will be widespread and possibly irreversible. 

By contrast, Cole, Gov. Tony Evers’ pick to lead the agency, talks about climate change at almost every whistle stop. Talking to students and faculty in a packed lecture hall at UW-Madison’s Russell Labs on Nov. 8, Cole recounts his experiences fighting wildfires in the American West and about the increasing incidence and severity of wildfire in a new climate regime. He emphasizes the economic value of Wisconsin’s natural resources and illustrates the threat of a changing climate by laying out impacts on things like trout streams, an important element of the state’s recreational fishing industry.

Cole also makes clear where science stands in his administration. “The Department of Natural Resources is uniquely aware of the drama associated with science, developing the science at a place where humans may not agree.... Follow the science, follow the law.”

For his part, Cole refuses the opportunity to critique the Stepp administration’s science record, including the gutting of the Science Services Bureau and the attendant loss of world-class research scientists. “We’re not in the business of looking backward,” he says in an interview. “We cannot spend the time, energy or effort talking about what happened in the past.”

Under Cole, the agency has slowly begun to reinvest in climate science, recently reengaging with the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts and hiring staff to help revitalize the program. Initiated in 2007 as a joint effort with UW-Madison, the program was marginalized at the agency during the Walker/Stepp era and practically went dormant, even though its focus was squarely on adapting to a changing climate, not mitigating potential causes.

“We’re an organization that’s trying to help Wisconsin prepare for ongoing and future climate change,” explains Stephen Vavrus, the group’s co-director and a senior scientist at the university’s Center for Climatic Research. By reengaging with WICCI, “the state has made a renewed commitment to making climate change a top priority.”

In a memorandum to staff in September, Cole affirmed the importance of tackling climate change as an agency priority, calling it “one of the defining issues of our time.”

The reanimation of WICCI at the agency is a hopeful sign for some observers, but not more so than the naming of Cole, whose appointment has yet to be confirmed by the Republican-controlled state Senate, even though he’s been on the job for more than a year.

A forester by training, Cole served 12 years on the Natural Resources Board, the DNR’s policy-making authority, enjoying the support of both Democratic and Republican governors. The appointment of a scientist with experience in natural resources management is a sign that leadership at the agency will once again stand up for science and the agency’s researchers, and factor science-based information into the decision-making process, says Meyer. But can the agency regain its science swagger?

“I think the agency is rebuilding,” says Fred Clark, a forest ecologist and a former Democratic legislator who represented parts of Sauk and Columbia counties and who is now the executive director of Green Fire; the group formed in 2017 as a response to both state and national efforts to sideline science in natural resource decision-making. Its membership is heavily salted with current and former DNR and UW staff. “We’re seeing really encouraging signs of that.”

Cole insists his agency remains “in the research business. [The agency] didn’t stop doing the requisite work.”

The secretary designate notes that the agency’s latest budget includes two new research scientist positions devoted to the area of emerging contaminants, a response to PFAS or “forever chemicals,” a family of fluorinated compounds found in non-stick cookware, waterproof fabrics and firefighting foam that have been identified as contaminants in water across the state, including in Madison. “We got two back for emerging contaminants. That’s a win,” Cole notes. “We certainly have a tote board of what we’ll be asking for.”

But the research scientists lost in the purges of the Walker/Stepp administration are likely gone for good. While there are still many good scientists doing good work at the agency, the drain of research talent was a pummeling from which the DNR may not recover. “There’s no way I’m getting 18 scientists back,” Cole acknowledges.

Even if he could, the recent legacy of political interference and ethical research transgressions would give the best candidates pause, as it did during the last days of Sullivan’s tenure at the agency. “The number and quality of applicants dropped dramatically,” says Sullivan. “As the Walker administration continued to lead Wisconsin government, the ability to attract candidates clearly slipped. It was pretty bad by the time I left.”

Sullivan watched as his best researchers took jobs elsewhere, retired if they could, or were shifted to different parts of the agency.

Lyons chose to retire early instead of accepting reassignment to a part of the agency that had nothing to do with fish. At the time, he was a supervisor, part of the science management team, and he was spending his days trying to mitigate the toll on the agency’s research scientists: “I spent most of my time the last couple of years trying to find places for people to go, to reassure them as best I could, to try to resist certain changes, do our best to minimize the damage, with very little success,” says Lyons. “It was one body blow after another.”

Cole’s leadership may be a balm for morale that “dropped off the table,” as Sullivan puts it, during the Stepp years, and current and past agency researchers agree there are still good people doing good science on the agency’s behalf. Just not nearly as much. “We’ve lost capacity,” says Dreux Watermolen, who leads the DNR’s Environmental Analysis Bureau. “The science hasn’t changed. We still do good science. What’s changed is the focus or priority.”

“The big losers are the citizens of the state,” says Sullivan. “We had built a Super Bowl-winning team. We were nationally renowned. Our scientists were publishing in the best journals. The Wisconsin DNR was the best place to be if you wanted to do science and build a science program. We were self-supporting and making Wisconsin a national leader in natural resource protection. We’re not that anymore.”