Daniel Libby
David Clutter, executive director of Driftless Area Land Conservancy, points out a potential power-line corridor near Brigham County Park to Howard Learner, executive director of the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center.
A Chicago environmental legal advocacy group is scrutinizing the Driftless Area west of Madison and the damage that could be done there with construction of a high-voltage American Transmission Company power line.
The ATC project would carry electricity from Dubuque County, Iowa, to Middleton along 500 steel towers, each one 10 to 15 stories tall.
The Environmental Law and Policy Center has led a number of successful advocacy campaigns designed to protect natural resources throughout the Midwest. In 2003, the group led the effort to get a court order that halted accelerated logging in Wisconsin’s Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, safeguarding 22,000 acres of forestland.
One of the tactics that makes the center successful is its Science Advisory Council. Susan Mudd, the group’s senior policy advocate, says, “Each scientist contributes pro bono advice and connects us with other experts and research that relates to our work.”
One of these experts is Don Waller, a UW-Madison professor of botany and environmental studies. “This Driftless Area Project and the transmission corridor is a new approach,” Waller says. “Instead of just focusing on one issue, we are looking at the range of threats now and in the future for a particular region and how those threats can be addressed in an effective and collaborative way.”
American Transmission Company
Transmission lines proposed for the Driftless area are 10 to 15 stories tall.
Waller has studied how development and forest fragmentation diminishes plant diversity. “Similar work has been done on birds,” he says. “Everything clearly indicates that when extensive edges are created, such as when you install a power line corridor, you reduce habitat and diminish local diversity within the remaining patches of habitat.”
On Sept. 19, center staff and board members joined their counterparts at the Driftless Area Land Conservancy, a 15-year-old Dodgeville-based land trust, to tour the two proposed power line corridors, traveling through some of the area’s most fragile environments.
The tour began at the panoramic vista from Brigham County Park, where Mark Mittelstadt, a forester and Conservancy board member, pointed out that towers twice as tall as the trees in the woodlands below could cut directly across that view.
The Nature Conservancy has named the Military Ridge Prairie Heritage Area — which contains 95,000 acres of grassland in Dane and Iowa counties — a priority area to protect because it provides habitat for declining species. With more than 60 prairie remnants, it is one of the highest concentrations of native grasslands left in the Midwest.
Waller points out that predators of native birds like raccoons, skunks, bluejays and crows thrive by foraging in edge habitats created by intrusions like power corridors. “These predators make life miserable for the songbirds who are trying to reproduce in the nearby habitat remnants.”
“Transmission corridors also act as avenues of invasion by species that thrive in open habitats, including both opportunistic predators and weedy species of plants,” Waller says. “Workers managing the corridors sometimes accidentally introduce weedy invasive plants from their clothing and equipment.”
Waller adds a third destructive element. “Vegetation under the lines is controlled with a combination of cutting and herbicides, so we’re also concerned about herbicide drift.”
Kaya Freiman, a spokesperson for ATC, says her company will comply with federal and state environmental requirements and anticipates that the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin also will prepare an environmental impact statement. “We have practices in place to minimize environmental impacts of our work,” Freiman writes in an email.
But David Clutter, executive director of the Driftless Conservancy, hopes to stop the project. “This is a unique area,” Clutter says. “Most people wouldn’t think of putting a power line across the Grand Canyon, so why would we think of putting one through one of the most beautiful and unique landscapes in the Upper Midwest? We have a national treasure in the Driftless Area, and we should treat it like one.”
