Courtesy Meyer family
George Meyer talking to tribal leaders in northern Wisconsin.
Meyer, in the middle, stands among tribal leaders during the spearfishing conflicts in northern Wisconsin.
Years ago I covered the so-called walleye wars while a reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal. During those spring nights on northern boat landings, tribal members speared walleye on the dark lakes to the beat of Ojibwe drums. Just yards away, hundreds of non-Indian protesters gathered, hurling rocks and full beer cans and racial slurs as they surged against snow fences and police lines.
Night after night I watched from behind the protective ranks of armor–clad police as the slight, bespectacled George Meyer, then an attorney for the Department of Natural Resources, joined wardens to wade into the midst of the irate crowds to calm tempers and defuse the potential for violence.
At issue were the treaty-protected rights of the Ojibwe to hunt and fish throughout their former territory in northern Wisconsin. Between 1987 and 1991, until the tribes beat back the final court challenges to their off-reservation rights, tribal members speared during the spring spawn, and the walleye wars turned the boat landings into battlegrounds.
In the midst of that controversy, Meyer, who died Dec. 10, was a constant and calming presence. On those tumultuous nights, Meyer, sometimes wearing a bullet-proof vest, demonstrated skills and character traits that would land him in the secretary’s office and carry him through a distinguished career dedicated to Wisconsin’s environment. His patient and tenacious approach to negotiations made him a force in the state’s conservation community for 50 years.
Wisconsin’s storied environmental tradition was under attack through much of Meyer’s career by politicians and others who wanted to weaken the DNR, especially its regulatory role, and introduce politics into the stewardship of Wisconsin’s natural resources.
“George was a product of Wisconsin’s conservation culture,” says Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold’s biographer and an environmental historian. “He came into that culture at a time when it was changing dramatically…. We think of George as being a constant through all of this. He was a rock.”
Meyer would leave a legacy of protected landscapes and wildlife, resolved conservation conflicts, and pollution-free waters. That legacy alone ranks him alongside such fabled Wisconsin environmental heroes as Leopold and Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, according to Meine. After leaving the DNR Meyer became the executive director of the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation and continued his tireless advocacy for conservation causes.
Meyer died at 78 after a battle with prostate cancer. He penned his own obituary during his final days, according to his wife, Jayne. Typical of George, he remained humble to the end, preferring to credit the citizens of Wisconsin and his staff for his many successes, both as DNR secretary and later with the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation.
Meine says Meyer should be remembered not only for his dogged stewardship but also for guiding the agency through what was perhaps the most turbulent time in its history. Traditionally an independent agency with a secretary appointed by its board, the DNR would find itself in the sights of the state’s politicians during Meyer’s tenure.
In 1995, Gov. Tommy Thompson and the state Legislature made the office of DNR secretary a position appointed by the governor rather than the Natural Resources Board. From then on, the secretary would be a member of the governor’s cabinet and subject to political influence. Meyer, who had been named secretary in 1993 by the Natural Resources Board, decided to remain in his position, despite the change. He would be the last secretary to be appointed by the board rather than the governor.
Privately, he told friends he wanted to remain and do his job, to help guide the agency through a transition that would be fraught with threats from the Capitol just up the street.
“He could have resigned in protest,” says Meine. “He stayed on.”
It is not hyperbole to say that Meyer loved the agency and the role it played in upholding the state’s rich heritage of protecting its natural bounty.
As the science and environment reporter at the State Journal, I experienced firsthand how fierce he could be in his defense of the agency. Once, I did a lengthy and critical story about the agency’s cleanup of the heavily polluted Fox River.
Tim Eisele
George Meyer in 2021.
Meyer served as DNR secretary from 1993-2002.
The story ran on Sunday, and first thing Monday morning, Meyer was on the phone with a sharp and forceful defense of the agency and its employees. My ears stung and the call gave me a new perspective on the unassuming Meyer.
Meyer’s years with the agency after the changes were not easy, as politics intruded more and more upon the DNR’s former independence. But anyone who knew Meyer knew his capacity for hard work, a trait he acquired from his father while growing up on a small dairy farm in New Holstein.
“One thing George really drove home was that this stuff is hard and you have to work hard at it,” says Todd Ambs, a longtime environmental advocate and former DNR deputy secretary. “You were not going to outwork George.”
Meyer’s wife, Jayne, recalls times when her husband would spend all night in the office, and even the janitors would sometimes prod him to go home. In his farewell speech to the agency, Meyer joked that the family kept a photo of him on the refrigerator so his children, daughter Jocelyn and son Andrew, would not mistake him for a stranger.
But Jocelyn recalls her father as dedicated to his family. She especially remembers the many outdoor adventures he organized. Once, she says, he was working on a project for the Wildlife Federation to protect prairie chicken habitat and insisted that Jocelyn accompany him to hear the prairie chickens drumming. He was a scoutmaster, and his son Andrew became an Eagle Scout.
Meyer’s decision to remain at the agency would pay off. He successfully fought off numerous efforts by the state Legislature to break up the DNR. He resisted attacks aimed at diminishing the agency’s role in providing the science upon which to base resource management decisions.
Meyer would marshal science that would help turn the tide against the proposed Crandon mine. He continued to work with the tribes to protect their treaty rights, negotiating more than 40 agreements.
Under his leadership, hundreds of thousands of acres of forest, wetland and prairie were acquired and protected, along with miles of waterways. He oversaw the return of threatened creatures such as the whooping crane and the elk to Wisconsin’s lakes and forests.
In the end, Meyer wrote his name on Wisconsin’s landscape not with the poetry of a Leopold or the oratory of a Gaylord Nelson but with the hard work of a farm kid and with a deep understanding of and respect for science and the law. Yet, he would have been the last person to speak of himself as prominent in the state’s conservation history.
Jayne says she talked with him toward the end about his legacy.
“I told him, ‘I think people are going to write stories about you,’ and he said, ‘Why? I’m not a celebrity.’”
