Environmental Politics and the Creation of a Dream: Establishing the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore

Preface

ix Preface I first experienced the Apostle Islands region in the late 1940s while on a vacation traveling through the northern Great Lakes region. While there, I took the excursion boat around the islands. The boat made frequent stops at fishing camps to collect fish for the commercial markets. We docked at Rocky Island for a splendid fish lunch. I fell in love with the beauty of the archipelago. Some years later I was employed by the Wisconsin Conservation Department at Spooner as the wildlife biologist for the northern Wisconsin region and became more intimately acquainted with the islands. One of my responsibilities was to monitor a burgeoning deer population on the islands. Each winter the area wildlife manager and I would charter a ski-equipped plane and have it land us on safe ice adjacent to an island. On snowshoes, we crisscrossed the islands, recording our observations on deer habitat and use; then we were picked up and flown to the next island. During the 1953 summer season I hiked and camped on Stockton Island to judge its suitability as a site at which to reintroduce pine marten, which had been extirpated throughout the state. In cooperation with the Wildlife Ecology Department at the University of Minnesota, I released twelve adult marten that had been trapped in northern Minnesota. For several years I snowshoed with university researchers predetermined transects across Stockton Island searching for marten tracks. They showed modest reproduction for a few years and then vanished. A transfer to the Madison, Wisconsin, headquarters a few years later made my visits to the Apostle Islands less frequent. In 1960 I joined the staff of a newly formed state agency spearheaded by Governor Gaylord A. Nelson, who would go on to found Earth Day a decade later. From a midlevel bureaucrat in the large Conservation Department I suddenly became a staff person to the director of a new department, the Wisconsin Department of x preface Resource Development, as well as an advisor to the governor. I worked closely with Gaylord Nelson on his new and exciting initiatives in conservation in the 1960s, including work toward the protection of the Apostle Islands. During the year 1963, and over several years to follow, I witnessed significant changes in the political and bureaucratic landscape that would have a direct influence on the creation of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. That year, Nelson was sworn in as Wisconsin’s junior U.S. senator. Charles Stoddard, a personal friend and impassioned colleague, and then director of the Resource Policy Staff Office in the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, invited me to join his staff. I became the regional coordinator for the Upper Mississippi River and Western Great Lakes area and was attached to his policy staff. This position was affirmed in September 1963 by President John F. Kennedy in his speech to the Land and People Conference in Duluth, Minnesota, after an aerial inspection of the Apostle Islands and a public speech at the Ashland airport. After being mentioned in a presidential speech, and with the imprimatur of the secretary of the Interior’s office, I suddenly had significant influence in working with or enlisting the assistance and support of various bureaucrats during the creation of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. In 1967 I joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison but, with the encouragement of Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota and Senator Nelson, I also accepted a presidential appointment as the alternate federal co-chair of the Upper Great Lakes Regional Commission (while still teaching part-time). This commission was composed of the governors of Minnesota , Michigan, and Wisconsin, as well as the federal co-chair and alternate co-chair. I returned to the university full-time in 1969, but in the 1970s I also served as Governor Patrick Lucey’s alternate for the Upper Great Lakes Commission . Lucey also appointed me to the Natural Resources Board, the policy body for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (the successor to the Conservation Department), where I served for five years. In 1962, while Gaylord Nelson was governor of Wisconsin (1959–1963), he proposed to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall that the Apostle Islands be named a national lakeshore. It took almost a decade to accomplish this goal (plus an additional sixteen years to add the last island to the lakeshore). I was in the fortunate position, given the different positions I had held, of being...