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

420 Pages·2011·2.45 MB·English

by  Harold C. Jordahl Jr.

Environmental Politics
and the Creation of a Dream
WISCONSIN LAND AND LIFE
Arnold Alanen
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Environmental Politics
and the Creation of a Dream
(cid:2)
Establishing the Apostle Islands
National Lakeshore
Harold C. Jordahl Jr.
with Annie L. Booth
the university of wisconsin press
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The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data
Jordahl, Harold C., 1926–
Environmental politics and the creation of a dream : establishing the Apostle Islands
National Lakeshore / Harold C. Jordahl Jr. with Annie L. Booth.
p. cm. — (Wisconsin land and life)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-299-28194-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-299-28193-9 (e- book)
1. Apostle Islands National Lakeshore (Wis.)—History. 2. Apostle Islands (Wis.)—
History. I. Booth, Annie. II. Title. III. Series: Wisconsin land and life.
f587.a8j66 2011
977.521—dc22 2010044624
Keep the faith!
This is a unique collection of islands. . . . There is not another
collection of islands of this signifi cance within the continental
boundaries of the United States. I think it is tremendously
important that this collection of islands be preserved.
—gaylord a. nelson
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
List of Abbreviations xvii
Introduction 3
Part One:
The National and State Context
for the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore
1 The Apostle Islands in Historical Context 11
2 The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Political Context:
State and Federal Initiatives 24
3 A New Era in Wisconsin: Gaylord A. Nelson and Conservation 49
Part Two:
Establishing the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore
4 The 1960s Road to a Lakeshore: The Decade of Planning,
Bureaucratic Obfuscation, and Politics 69
5 The Blowup—Or, Do We Have a Lakeshore? 100
6 Long Island at Last 117
Part Three:
Issues and Policy Studies
7 Planning the Lakeshore 149
8 The Role of Politics in Establishing the Lakeshore 166
vii
viii contents
9 The Sellers of Dreams: The Role of the Media in Supporting
the Lakeshore 185
10 The Local Citizens and the Lakeshore 207
11 The State and the Apostle Islands 219
12 The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and
the Native Americans 255
Part Four: Conclusions
13 Refl ections 297
Appendix One: A Chronology of Signifi cant Events
Regarding the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore 319
Appendix Two: Identifi cation of Apostle Islands
National Lakeshore Participants 323
Appendix Three: Bills on the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore 328
Notes 331
Index 379
Preface
I fi rst experienced the Apostle Islands region in the late 1940s while on a vaca-
tion traveling through the northern Great Lakes region. While there, I took
the excursion boat around the islands. The boat made frequent stops at fi shing
camps to collect fi sh for the commercial markets. We docked at Rocky Island
for a splendid fi sh 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 fl own to the next island. Dur-
ing 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 De-
partment 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 search-
ing 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
ix