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The staff of Wisconsin’s Board of Commissioners of Public Lands should talk about climate change a lot. Now they’re prohibited from even speaking its name.
Until recently you may never have heard about this quiet little backwater of state government. But it recently made national news because of the antics of one of its commissioners. The state treasurer has succeeded in banning the bureau’s staff from so much as answering an email regarding climate change.
Some quick background. The BCPL was created at statehood to manage land given to the state by the federal government for the purposes of building a public school system. The feds gave the state one section of land in each township, which totaled about 1 million acres. More land was added a few years later, for a total of about 3.25 million acres — almost 10% of the total state land area.
The state sold most of the land in succeeding decades and used the proceeds to create a trust fund to aid in public education in a variety of ways. The most prominent one today is the $35 million a year it makes available for public school libraries.
The BCPL also makes low-interest loans to local governments for all kinds of nitty-gritty stuff like road graders and fire trucks. And, thanks to its extensive records of land conditions and transactions going back to the mid-19th century, its archives are valuable for researchers.
Finally, it maintains a remnant of about 75,000 acres of its original grant lands. This is mostly forested land in the northern part of the state. It uses that land to demonstrate best management practices, and the timber proceeds are also reinvested to further aid public education.
Pretty neat. And it does all that with a staff of less than 10 and with a budget that is completely self-funded — no general state tax dollars are involved. In other words, it’s a model of public-sector efficiency that any public official with half a brain would just leave alone to do its good work.
The commission is made up of the attorney general, the secretary of state and the state treasurer, but for the most part it has risen above the clamor — or maybe stayed below the radar screen — of partisan politics.
But this month the treasurer decided to attack a problem that didn’t exist. He introduced a motion prohibiting BCPL staff from taking any action or even discussing “global warming” or “climate change.” Never mind that they weren’t doing that anyway. The treasurer cited a climate change task force that Tia Nelson, director of the agency, served on in 2007 at the request of then Gov. Jim Doyle. But that wasn’t an agency initiative, and Nelson hasn’t done any climate change activity as part of her official role since.
But she should. Far from prohibiting conversation about the subject, the commissioners should have voted to ask staff for a climate change plan.
That’s because those 75,000 acres of forest that they are responsible for are threatened. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has written that Midwest forests could be at risk from the effects of climate change. “Threats include more frequent droughts, wildfires, and larger populations of harmful insects such as gypsy moths.” And the very composition of the forest tree species may change as well. Climate change has major implications for how BCPL forests are managed.
It seems that wise stewardship of these lands in public trust would involve developing a plan to deal with the coming threats, not willfully ignore those threats.
Moreover, carbon sequestration from trees is one partial answer to climate change. Maybe the BCPL staff should be planning to get as much benefit as possible out of their lands.
But instead, the staff is prohibited from so much as mentioning the name of the disease, much less working on its treatment. This is beyond irresponsible.
Secretary of State Doug La Follette deserves credit for standing up to this nonsense and casting the lone vote against it. Attorney General Brad Schimel deserves criticism for being smart enough to know better, but caving to climate deniers in his own Republican Party.
And the state treasurer deserves to fade from public notice along with his own office, which he promised to abolish during his campaign. You may have noticed that in this post I didn’t name him. That’s because I believe the treasurer is trying to get noticed by doing extreme stuff that plays to the tea party base. So, I am taking a page out of his book: I will not speak his name.
Maybe what he hopes for climate change will happen to him: if we just ignore him, he might just go away.