A new report from the American Lung Association finds Sheboygan ranked among the top 25 worst cities in the nation for ozone pollution in recent years, and air quality worsened in the Milwaukee metropolitan area.
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A Wisconsin solar farm. | Photo courtesy Clean Wisconsin
Fifty-five years ago, 20 million Americans came together on the first Earth Day to say “no” to pollution: no more oil spills off the Santa Barbara coast, no more toxic rivers catching fire like the Cuyahoga, no more pesticides like DDT that harm our health. Fed up with unchecked pollution, environmental leaders of the 1970s organized, educated, and advocated, ultimately ushering in landmark federal regulations, such as the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, that fought contaminants in our air, water and land.
The environmental movement has excelled at standing up and saying “no,” with huge results. We can credit the rejection of pollution with helping to restore ecosystems and save countless lives. Today, while some things remain the same — and we’re still justified in fighting polluters to protect environmental and human health — some factors have changed, warranting new approaches. Climate change is no longer some far-off problem. It’s here, and it’s wreaking havoc. Last year was the warmest year on record; in fact, the hottest 10 years on record were all of the last 10 years. Floods, extreme storms, and disappearing winters are hurting Wisconsin’s communities and economy. And we need to do something about it. On this Earth Day, as we watch our federal government turn its back on the science of climate change, we have an opportunity to keep moving forward in Wisconsin by saying “yes” to wind and solar projects lining up for approval in our state.
While the president may be pushing expensive, “beautiful” coal and opening up protected lands for oil and gas drilling, we know that homegrown wind and solar are not only the cheapest ways to produce energy in Wisconsin, but they also bring enormous economic benefits to communities that host these projects. Farmers who sign leases to host solar panels or wind turbines receive high, stable income for 30 or more years. Communities hosting projects receive annual utility aid payments to the tune of $5,000 per megawatt. Local leaders can then direct this boost to municipal budgets where the community needs it most, like repairing roads and lowering taxes.
But let’s face it, in Wisconsin, large wind and solar projects remain controversial. Our state is rock bottom in the Midwest when it comes to the amount of wind energy we produce. Solar produces 100 times more energy per acre than ethanol, yet we devote more than a million acres of land to ethanol production and just a fraction of that to solar farms. The reality is that to protect the places we love and that sustain us, we need to build new, better infrastructure, because what we have now is harming us. We desperately need an alternative. We need more Wisconsinites to speak up in support of these solutions. The environmental movement cut its teeth by saying “no” to the problem of pollution. The time has come to build on this legacy and say “yes” to solutions: “yes” to clean energy, “yes” to thriving Wisconsin communities, and “yes” to a brighter future.
Solar panels in Damariscotta, Maine. (Photo by Evan Houk/ Maine Morning Star)
WASHINGTON — The legal battle over a Biden-era climate program ramped up late Wednesday when an appeals court halted a federal judge’s ruling requiring the disbursement of those funds.
The ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will keep funds frozen in Citibank accounts while a federal suit over the program is ongoing.
The appeals court order reversed a preliminary injunction that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan of the District of Columbia issued Tuesday that temporarily barred the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from “unlawfully suspending or terminating” grant awards.
The appeals panel said it had not had access to Chutkan’s opinion explaining her order granting an injunction — which came a day after the order itself — and the trial judge had therefore not met the high bar needed to issue a preliminary injunction. The panel’s order “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits,” the judges said.
“The purpose of this order is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the district court’s forthcoming opinion in support of its order granting a preliminary injunction together with” the government’s appeal, the judges wrote.
Chutkan issued her opinion the day after granting the preliminary injunction, pointing out that “for weeks, despite repeated inquiries to Citibank and EPA, Plaintiffs received little to no communication from EPA or Citibank regarding their inability to access their funds.”
“Overnight, billions of dollars appropriated by Congress were frozen. As a result, nationwide projects were halted, workplans were disrupted, and millions of dollars in approved transactions with committed partners could not be disbursed,” she wrote.
On Thursday, the D.C. Circuit panel asked the government to refile its argument responding to Chutkan’s opinion by 5 p.m. Eastern on Saturday.
Climate United Fund and other organizations sued President Donald Trump’s administration and Citibank in March over money frozen in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
The $27 billion initiative, which provides funding to organizations building for energy-efficient projects and other measures to tackle climate change, was authorized by Congress as part of the Inflation Reduction Act that Democrats passed along party lines and President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022.
Chutkan’s order blocked the administration from “directly or indirectly impeding” Citibank or causing the bank to “deny, obstruct, delay, or otherwise limit access to funds in accounts established in connection with” the organizations’ grants.
The Trump administration quickly challenged that ruling Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The higher court temporarily blocked Chutkan’s decision “pending further order.”
The appeals court’s ruling halts Chutkan’s preliminary injunction to the extent that it “enables or requires Citibank to release, disburse, transfer, otherwise move, or allow access to funds.”
The higher court also prevented the Trump administration from having to file a status report with the district court within 24 hours of the preliminary injunction’s entry that confirmed their compliance, as outlined in Chutkan’s ruling.
The appeals court also ordered that “no party take any action, directly or indirectly, with regard to the disputed contracts, grants, awards or funds.”
The EPA said in March it would be terminating $20 billion in grants under the program, and the agency’s administrator Lee Zeldin described the climate initiative as a “gold bar” scheme.
Climate United Fund did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday, and the EPA declined to comment.
Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) speaks about how advocates can convince Republicans to fund the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program at the Great Lakes Audubon Society's 2025 advocacy day. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)
Wisconsin Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) said Wednesday the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program is “on life support,” adding that some of his Republican colleagues give it a 20% chance of being extended in this year’s budget debate before its expiration next year.
Kurtz, Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine), Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay) and Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Secretary Karen Hyun spoke Wednesday to a gathering of members of local Audubon Society chapters and staff of Audubon Great Lakes ahead of the organization’s advocacy day to lobby legislators to support conservation funding.
The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program was established in 1989 to help preserve local natural environments. Throughout its history, the program has enjoyed mostly bipartisan support as it has provided grants through the DNR to help local governments and nonprofits fund the acquisition, restoration and maintenance of public land, parks and wildlife habitats.
In recent years, the program has become a flashpoint in the fight over the boundary between the executive and legislative branches of state government. Until a decision by the state Supreme Court last year, any member of the Legislature’s powerful Joint Committee on Finance had the authority to hold up a project funded through the stewardship program by placing an anonymous hold on that spending.
The Court’s decision entirely removed the Legislature’s oversight of the program, a change that further turned Republicans against its continued existence.
“We could make that process better, where it was not just one individual not liking something and being able to kill a project. I agree with that,” Kurtz said. “When the court case came in and basically took that entire process away, that was not good either, because there was no oversight. And I understand some of you believe whatever the DNR does is fine. That’s great. Some of my colleagues don’t believe that.”
Especially in the northern part of the state, Republicans have objected to stewardship funds being used to conserve land that then gets taken off of local property tax rolls — taking money away from already struggling small local governments. In other cases, Republicans have complained that proposals for projects under the grants rely too heavily on the state funds without the local governments providing enough of their own money.
In his proposed 2025-26 budget, Gov. Tony Evers has requested the stewardship program be increased from its current funding of $33 million per year to $100 million per year for 10 years.
Kurtz said he’s working on a bill that would return some oversight authority over the program to the Legislature without the anonymous objection provision. He added, though, that if the Audubon members went to Republicans Wednesday saying, “‘It’s the governor’s budget or nothing,’ you already lost.”
“I don’t need you to do that, because, I’m being very sincere, I’m trying to keep this alive, and if you go over there [saying that], there’s a good chance it’ll die,” he said. “So don’t do that. Let them, especially when you’re meeting with my colleagues, ask them what [their] concerns are. ‘Why don’t you like this? What is it about the program that we can do better so we can have another day to make sure we protect all our wonderful birds and animals.’”
Habush Sinykin noted that 93% of Wisconsinites support the program and said that in her purple district covering Milwaukee’s northwest suburbs, the stewardship program is hugely popular. She said the anonymous hold of a project in the district drew the ire of community members of both parties.
“There’s a lot of understanding at the legislative level that in these uncertain times, with these newer maps, that our state representatives and senators, including those on the Joint Finance Committee, have to be wary and strategic about issues like this that are bipartisan,” she said. “They’re actually non-partisan. They are successful community building issues. So I think that’s a little bit where your leverage is to lean in hard. How popular these are.”
Aside from the stewardship program, the society members lobbying in the Capitol Wednesday were pushing for the state to increase protections for wetlands and grasslands, advance sustainable practices in the state’s agriculture and forestry industries and grow renewable energy production.
On Wednesday morning, the administration of President Donald Trump announced a proposed rule that would rescind habitat protections for endangered species across the country.
Marnie Urso, Audubon Great Lakes’ senior director of policy, said that with the federal government retreating from conservation efforts, state level efforts have become more important.
“With that uncertainty, this kind of work is even more important, for state lawmakers to be on the path to conserving our natural resources,” Urso said. “The Knowles Nelson project program is bipartisan. It always has been a permanent foundation. So we know it has wide, widespread bipartisan support.”
Urso said leaning into that popularity could help advance the group’s priorities.
“Even Trump voters like the Knowles Nelson Conservation Fund,” she said. “So we’re confident that by coming and talking, telling our story and getting to understand what’s important to our lawmakers, we can inform those decisions. And now it’s more important than ever to have state conservation programs continue.”
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Milwaukee Health Commissioner Dr. Mike Totoraitis. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
Federal layoffs have hampered the city of Milwaukee’s ability to respond to growing concerns about lead contamination in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) denied the city’s requests for assistance after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cut the agency’s response team, which would have helped Milwaukee tackle lead contamination in its K-12 schools.
“This is a pretty unprecedented scenario to not have somebody to turn to at the CDC,” said Mike Totoraitis, commissioner of the Milwaukee Health Department (MHD), during a Monday press conference. Totoraitis learned of the development, which he said left him “quite shocked,” in an email as the Health Department was planning further responses to lead contamination in MPS. “To see that all of our partners at the CDC had been let go was pretty…pretty difficult,” he said.
Although a local network of partners will continue supporting MHD’s efforts, Totoraitis said that the department now has no CDC contacts to consult with on childhood lead poisoning. The commissioner called it “a pretty stark moment for us at the department to not have someone to reach out to federally.”
In February the Health Department began reaching out to the CDC as staff members realized the scale of the lead problem e in MPS buildings. Totoraitis said the department might have to assess the school district’s 68,000 students and over 100 school buildings.
The CDC initially connected the city to specialists at the National Center for Environmental Health’s childhood lead prevention program. City health officials had hoped national teams would help investigate potential lead exposure cases and help with evaluating which schools were likely to have the worst problems.
Totoraitis explained that while there are acute exposures to lead — such as ingesting paint chips — chronic exposure from dust was paint degrades over time is also a hazard.
With closer analysis, the health department would be able to learn more about how children in Milwaukee are getting exposed to lead, including whether they’re exposed at school or at home.
CDC was expected to send three to four people to Milwaukee for up to five weeks, he said, as well as provide technical assistance from individuals advising the department remotely from Atlanta.
“That’s why we engaged them right away,” said Totoraitis. He described the team as “the top experts in the field for lead exposure,” with experience dealing with lead hazards at a much wider scale than local experts in Milwaukee.
There was “no indication” that the CDC teams would be let go, said Totoraitis. “So that was pretty startling,” he added. Preparation to deploy the teams was underway when the CDC abruptly canceled “overnight” on April 1.
So far, nearly 250 MPS students have been tested for lead poisoning and several schools have been shut down as work crews undertake remediation efforts.
In early April, MPS announced that it was separating with its facilities director Sean Kane, who’d been with the district for 25 years. Officials said Kane had not allowed health department staff into Golda Meir School to do a full risk assessment and did not disclose that remediation work had been attempted after a student tested positive for lead contamination.
Childhood lead contamination has been linked to cognitive disorders including degraded impulse control, learning disabilities and violent behavior. About 85 MPS schools were built before 1970 and are therefore at high risks of lead contamination.
Totoraitis said that so far, there isn’t a timeline on when MPS schools that have been closed due to lead will reopen. Fernwood Montessori School, Starms Early Childhood Center and LaFollette School were closed, while four others that had been closed were re-opened.
Totoraitis said that remediation work is farthest along at Fernwood, which is beginning its fifth week of closure. Fernwood was “significantly worse off” than investigators anticipated and required extensive repair work, he said.
As the city works to respond to the lead issue, federal staff and the unpredictability of federal assistance will remain a challenge. Just a couple of weeks ago, the city lost $11 million in COVID-19 grants that were geared towards “recovery” rather than “response,” officials said.
“The part that’s really concerning for us is there hasn’t been any communication warning us of these changes and shifts in personnel,” said Totoraitis. “April 1 is a really stark moment for public health here across the country, and specifically here in Milwaukee, where now we don’t know who to call. We don’t know how to respond to some of the challenges that we’re dealing with right now because we don’t know if I’m reaching out to someone today, if they’re going to be there tomorrow.”
Totoraitis said the Health Department and its local partners stand ready to respond, but he questioned what could happen if the department encounters a complex challenge, such as a particularly complicated blood screening data.
“The CDC brings that expertise, that bigger picture, that we just don’t have eyes to because we’re here focused on an issue in Milwaukee,” said Totoraitis.
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A complex of data centers in Ashburn, Va. (Photo by Gerville/Getty Images)
This is the first of two States Newsroom stories examining the implications of the growing need for electricity largely from artificial intelligence and data centers. Read the second here.
The next time you’re on a Zoom meeting or asking ChatGPT a question, picture this: The information zips instantaneously through a room of hot, humming servers, traveling hundreds, possibly thousands of miles, before it makes its way back to you in just a second or two.
It can be hard to wrap your mind around, said Vijay Gadepally, a senior scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, but large data centers are where nearly all artificial intelligence systems and computing happens today.
“Each one of these AI models has to sit on a server somewhere, and they tend to be very, very big,” he said. “So if your millions or billions of users are talking to the system simultaneously, the computing systems have to really grow and grow and grow.”
As the United States works to be a global AI superpower, it’s become a home to hundreds of data centers — buildings that store and maintain the physical equipment needed to compute information.
For users of the new and increasingly popular AI tools, it might seem like the changes have been all online, without a physical footprint. But the rise of AI has tangible effects — data centers and the physical infrastructure needed to run them use large amounts of energy, water and other resources, experts say.
“We definitely try to think about the climate side of it with a critical eye,” said Jennifer Brandon, a science and sustainability consultant. “All of a sudden, it’s adding so much strain on the grid to some of these places.”
As society traded large, desktop computers for sleek laptops, and internet infrastructure began supporting AI models and other software tools, the U.S. has built the physical infrastructure to support growing computing power.
Large language models (LLMs) and machine learning (ML) technologies — the foundation of most modern AI tools — have been used by technologists for decades, but only in the last five to seven years have they become commercialized and used by the general public, said David Acosta, cofounder and chief artificial intelligence officer of ARBOai.
To train and process information, these fast-learning AI models require graphic processing units (GPUs), servers, storage, cabling and other networking equipment, all housed in data centers across the country. Computers have been storing and processing data off-site in dedicated centers for decades, but the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s and the move to cloud storage demanded much more storage capacity over the last decade.
As more things moved online, and computing hardware and chip technology supported faster processing, AI models became attainable to the general public, Acosta said. Current AI models use thousands of GPUs to operate, and training a single chatbot like ChatGPT uses about the same amount of energy as 100 homes over the course of a year.
“And then you multiply that times the thousands of models that are being trained,” Acosta said. “It’s pretty intense.”
The United States is currently home to more than 3,600 data centers, but about 80% of them are concentrated in 15 states, Data Center Map shows. The market has doubled since 2020, Forbes reported, with 21% year over year growth. For many years, nearly all of the country’s data centers were housed in Virginia, and the state is considered a global hub with nearly 70% of the world’s internet traffic flowing through its nearly 600 centers. Texas and California follow Virginia, with 336 and 307 centers, respectively.
Tech companies that require large amounts of computing power, the private equity firms and banks that invest in them and other real estate or specialized firms are the primary funders of data centers. In September, BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, Microsoft and AI investment fund MGX invested $30 billion into new and expanded data centers primarily in the U.S, and said they will seek $100 billion in total investment, including debt financing.
Investment in American data center infrastructure is encouraging considering the global “AI arms race,” we’re in, Acosta said.
“If you own the data, you have the power,” Acosta said. “I just think we just make sure we do it ethically and as preemptive as possible.”
Current estimates say data centers are responsible for about 2% of the U.S.’ energy demand, but Anthony DeOrsey, a research manager at sustainable energy research firm Cleantech group, projects data centers will be about 10% of demand by 2027.
As data centers are developed in new communities across the country, residents and their state legislators see a mix of financial benefits with energy and environmental challenges.
The development of data centers brings some infrastructure jobs to an area, and in busy data center communities, like Virginia’s Loudoun and Prince William counties, centers can generate millions in tax revenue, the Virginia Mercury reported.
Local governments can be eager to strike deals with the tech companies or private equity firms seeking to build, but the availability and cost of power is a primary concern. New large data centers require the electricity equivalent of about 750,000 homes, a February report from sustainability consultancy firm BSI and real estate services firm CBRE.
Under many state’s utilities structures, local residents can be subjected to electric price increases to meet big electric needs of data centers. Some legislators, like Georgia State Sen. Chuck Hufstetler, have sought to protect residential and commercial customers from getting hit with higher utility bills.
Granville Martin, an Eastern Shore, Connecticut-based lawyer with expertise in finance and environmental regulation, said the same problem has come up in his own community.
“The argument was, the locals didn’t want this data center coming in there and sucking up a bunch of the available power because their view — rightly or wrongly, and I think rightly — was well, that’s just going to raise our rates,” Martin said.
Some states are exploring alternative energy sources. In Pennsylvania, Constellation Energy made a deal to restart its nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island to provide carbon-free electricity to offset Microsoft’s power usage at its nearby data centers.
But climate experts have concerns about data centers outside of their power demand.
“The general public is largely unaware that cooling industrial facilities, whatever they might be, is actually a really, really important aspect of their function,” Martin said.
The equipment in data centers, many of which run 24/7, generate a lot of heat. To regulate temperature, most pump water through tubing surrounding the IT equipment, and use air conditioning systems to keep those structures cool. About 40% of data center’s energy consumption is used for cooling, the Cleantech group found.
Some have a closed-loop system, recycling grey water through the same system, but many use fresh drinking water. The amount of water and energy used in cooling is enormous, Brandon, the sustainability consultant. said.
“The current amount of AI data centers we have takes six times the amount of water as the country of Denmark,” she said. “And then we are using the same amount of energy as Japan, which is the fifth largest energy user in the world, for data centers right now.”
Energy is now a material issue to running an AI company, DeOrsey said, and unrestrained, quickly evolving AI models are very expensive to train and operate. DeOrsey pointed to Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which released its attempt at a cost-conscious, energy efficient large language model, R1, in January.
The company claims it trained the model on 2,000 chips, much fewer than competitors like Open AI, ChatGPT’s parent company, and Google, which use about 16,000 chips. It’s not yet clear if the model lives up to its claims of energy efficiency in use, but it’s a sign that companies are feeling the pressure to be more efficient, DeOrsey said.
“I think companies like DeepSeek are an example of companies doing constrained optimization,” he said. “They’re assuming they won’t just get all the power they need, they won’t be able to get all of the chips they need, and just make do with what they have.”
For Gadepally, who is also chief tech officer of AI company Radium Cloud, this selective optimization is a tool he hopes more companies begin using. His recent work at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center focused on the lab’s own data center consumption. When they realized how hot their equipment was getting, they did an audit.
Gadepally said simple switches like using cheaper, less-robust AI models cut down on their energy use. Using AI models at off-peak times saved money, as did “power capping” or limiting the amount of power feeding their computer processors. The difference was nominal — you may wait a second or two more to get an answer back from a chatbot, for example.
With Northeastern University, MIT built software called Clover that watches carbon intensity for peak periods and makes adjustments, like automatically using a lower-quality AI model with less computing power when energy demand is high.
“We’ve been kind of pushing back on people for a long time saying, is it really worth it?” Gadepally said. “You might get a better, you know, knock-knock joke from this chatbot. But that’s now using 10 times the power than it was doing before. Is that worth it?”
Gadepally and Acosta both spoke about localizing AI tools as another energy and cost saving strategy for companies and data centers. In practice, that means building tools to do exactly what you need them to do, and nothing more, and hosting them on local servers that don’t need to send their computing out potentially hundreds of miles away to the nearest data center.
Health care and agricultural settings are a great example, Acosta said, where tools can be built to serve these specialized settings rather than processing their data at “bloated, over-fluffed” large data centers.
Neither AI developer sees any slowdown in the demand for AI and processing capabilities of data centers. But Gadepally said environmental and energy concerns will come to a head for tech companies when they realize they could save money by saving energy, too. Whether DeepSeek finds the same success as some of its American competitors is yet to be seen, Gadepally said, but it will probably make them question their practices.
“It will at least make people question before someone says, ‘I need a billion dollars to buy new infrastructure,’ or ‘I need to spend a billion dollars on computing next month,” Gadepally said. “Now they may say, ‘did you try to optimize it?’”
Correction: This story has been corrected to reflect that 70% of the world’s internet flows through data centers in Virginia, not that 70% of data centers in the world are housed in Virginia as previously reported.
A Union Pacific train transports coal through Spanish Fork Canyon in Utah County, Utah. on Wednesday, July 31, 2024. President Donald Trump signed an order on April 8, 2025, aimed at boosting coal production. (Photo by Spenser Heaps/Utah News Dispatch)
An executive order President Donald Trump signed Tuesday to block state-level renewable-energy initiatives set off alarm bells among climate advocates.
But experts and state policy groups said constitutional protections will blunt any effect the order would have on state operations.
The order, one of four Trump signed Tuesday aiming to revitalize the coal industry, directs the U.S. Justice Department to investigate and block enforcement of state laws that restrict fossil fuel production. It specifically targets state and local policies involving climate change, environmental justice and carbon emissions reductions — popular among blue states.
By attempting to strip states of their own authority to make and enforce laws, the order violates basic constitutional principles and would likely be struck down in court, environmental law experts said Wednesday.
Brad Campbell, the president of the New England-based environmental advocacy group Conservation Law Foundation, said in an interview with States Newsroom the order does not cite any federal law or interest the administration is seeking to protect — though the order does mention interstate commerce and an objective to improve national security — revealing it is more about messaging than policymaking.
“This is political theater more than it is law,” Campbell said. “It completely disregards the understanding of federalism that has been in place for centuries and the language of the Constitution itself.”
While the order itself may be unlikely to withstand legal scrutiny, it signals the administration could make demands about climate policy that would have to be obeyed at risk of losing federal cash, advocates said.
Trump officials already have shown an eagerness in their first months for using federal funding as leverage with states, universities and other institutions that are outside the federal government’s control.
In a statement, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said Wednesday the order would protect against states assuming the power to regulate international issues like climate change.
“The President is right to ensure that Americans in both red and blue states are not beholden to State overreach stifling American energy that are unconstitutional or contradict federal law,” she said.
The order includes a lengthy preamble attempting to justify federal involvement in state and local policymaking, while also noting that state policies focusing on emissions reductions and climate protections are at odds with Trump’s goals.
“These State laws and policies try to dictate interstate and international disputes over air, water, and natural resources; unduly discriminate against out-of-State businesses; contravene the equality of States; and retroactively impose arbitrary and excessive fines without legitimate justification,” the order’s opening section reads.
“These State laws and policies are fundamentally irreconcilable with my Administration’s objective to unleash American energy. They should not stand.”
At the Tuesday signing ceremony for the order and three others on coal production, White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf told the president that states promoting renewable sources of energy were a major part of the coal industry’s decline.
“One of the biggest problems we have in this space is Democrat states, radical leftist states, enacting policies and enacting an agenda that discriminates against coal, against secure sources of energy,” Scharf said.
The order, though, does little to change the market and technological forces that have led to the coal industry’s decline, Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, the executive director of the environmental group Western Environmental Law Center, said Wednesday.
“I just don’t see how the order … is going to do anything but create confusion and uncertainties for communities that are transitioning away from coal right now,” he said.
“In many respects, it does an injustice to those communities by giving them a false sense of hope that somehow coal mines and coal-fired power plants are suddenly going to be resurrected from the dead or be pushed well beyond their economic and technological lifespan.”
Environmental lawyers and climate advocates said the order does not change the constitutional structure of the U.S. government that empowers states to set their own laws.
Casey Katims, the executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of 24 governors seeking to prioritize state-focused climate policy, said the group’s members would not be moved by the order.
“The reality is that states continue to enjoy broad, independent constitutional authority to advance solutions to meet the needs of communities, businesses and workers,” Katims said in a Wednesday interview. “The president cannot change the Constitution by fiat.”
The group’s co-chairs, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, both Democrats, said in a Tuesday statement the administration had no power to block state authority and the coalition would be undeterred by the order.
“The federal government cannot unilaterally strip states’ independent constitutional authority,” they said. “We are a nation of states — and laws — and we will not be deterred.”
If the Justice Department, under Attorney General Pam Bondi, sues to stop enforcement of state laws, courts would likely reinforce states’ well-understood power to govern themselves, Campbell said.
Even the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a conservative supermajority that includes three members appointed by Trump and has shown deference to even the most controversial actions of his second presidency, would move to restrain that federal power, Campbell predicted.
“I think the notion that the president can stop enforcement of state laws that don’t align with his political program will be too much of an overreach even for this very Trump-friendly Supreme Court majority,” he said.
Further, he said, even Republican governors, whose party has traditionally advocated for increased states’ rights in relation to the federal government, might object to the intrusion of the executive branch into state policymaking. Allowing action under the order would set a precedent for a future Democratic president to meddle in Republican states, he said.
The lack of legal authority to directly block enforcement of state laws may not keep the Trump administration from exercising power in another way: withholding federal funds from uncooperative states.
The order signals the administration, which has been bold in asserting a power to deny congressionally appropriated funding, could target states over climate policy, Schlenker-Goodrich said.
“Do they have a legal basis? Not really,” he said. “Can they use political weapons, in particular relative to funding, against states that are stepping up on climate action? That is very much a possibility. That is the direction you will see the White House going.”
A group of coal miners watch as President Donald Trump speaks at the White House shortly before signing executive orders on the coal industry on April 8, 2025. (White House livestream)
President Donald Trump signed four executive orders Tuesday aiming to invigorate the U.S. coal industry.
In wide-ranging comments in front of a phalanx of coal miners at the White House, Trump said the orders would revitalize an industry pushed to the brink by Democratic policies that encourage renewable energy.
“This is a very important day to me, because we’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned, despite the fact that it was just about the best, certainly the best in terms of power, real power,” Trump said.
The orders:
Two of the orders cite increased energy demand for the power-intensive task of artificial intelligence data processing as the rationale for increasing coal production.
A press release from the Interior Department, which oversees resource management on public lands, added that one of the orders reopens plans to build mines in Montana and Wyoming, removes regulatory burdens on coal production and lowers royalty rates coal companies owe for production on federal lands.
Environmental groups cautioned against a renewed federal investment in coal and took particular exception to the provision allowing the federal government to undermine state efforts to move away from the sector.
“Reviving or extending coal to power data centers would force working families to subsidize polluting coal on behalf of Big Tech billionaires and despoil our nation’s public lands,” Tyson Slocum, the energy policy director for the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement. “States planning to move to cleaner, cheaper energy sources could be forced to keep old coal plants up and running for years, forcing nearby residents to breathe dirty air and harming the climate.”
In a line that appeared ad-libbed, Trump also promised the orders could not be reversed by a future president.
“We’re going to give a guarantee that the business will not be terminated by the ups and downs of the world of politics,” he said. “We’re going to give a guarantee that it’s not going to happen, so that if somebody comes in, they cannot change it at a whim.”
Trump said he’d thought of the idea “about 15 minutes before” getting on stage at the White House.
Trump cast the move as a direct rebuke to his Democratic predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and said it was in service of restoring working-class jobs in states like West Virginia.
“We’re ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all. And it wasn’t just Biden, it was Obama and others, but we’re doing the exact opposite… We’re going to put the miners back to work.”
A 2024 Biden rule to raise emissions standards on coal plants was unworkable, one of the orders, which reversed the Biden rule, said.
“The Rule requires compliance with standards premised on the application of emissions-control technologies that do not yet exist in a commercially viable form,” the order said. “The Rule therefore raises the unacceptable risk of the shutdown of many coal-fired power plants, eliminating thousands of jobs, placing our electrical grid at risk, and threatening broader, harmful economic and energy security effects.”
With both U.S. senators from West Virginia, Republicans Shelley Moore Capito and Jim Justice, on hand, Trump said the state’s workers rejected Democrats’ vision of transitioning away from their mining identity.
“One thing I learned about the coal miners is that’s what they want to do,” he said. “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue in a different kind of a job, but they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal. That’s what they love to do.”
Even before the orders were signed, environmental advocacy groups panned them as a giveaway to the industry and a reckless move away from attention to the climate crisis.
“Trump’s coal orders take his worship of dirty fossil fuels to a gross and disturbingly reckless new level,” Jason Rylander, the legal director of the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said in a written statement. “This is yet another assault on efforts to preserve a livable climate.”
Lena Moffitt, the executive director of environmental group Evergreen Action, said true energy reliability would come from renewable sources.
“Coal is toxic and outdated,” Mofitt said in a statement. “It poisons our air and water, jacks up household energy bills, and is deadly for communities living under the shadow of its smokestacks. If Trump actually cared about meeting rising energy demand, he’d invest in affordable, clean power—not drag us backward to prop up a dying industry.”
Trump spoke for about 45 minutes and touched on issues beyond energy policy, including his recently enacted tariffs that have rocked world financial markets and the case of a Maryland man erroneously swept up in a deportation operation.
Trump promoted his aggressive immigration policy and referenced the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man who the administration has admitted was mistakenly deported from Maryland to his native El Salvador despite being granted legal protection to remain in the United States.
The administration sent planeloads of Venezuelan nationals to an El Salvador mega-prison last month, accusing them of being members of the gang Tren de Aragua.
Without naming Abrego Garcia, Trump referenced a man sent to El Salvador who was not a member of the Venezuelan gang, but said he was a member of a different Latin American gang. The government has produced no evidence to suggest Abrego Garcia is a gang member.
On tariffs, Trump said the taxes on imported goods were already bringing in billions of dollars daily in new federal revenue and were critical to protect U.S. industries.
“We’ve been ripped off and abused by countries for many years with the tariff situation,” he said. “They’ve used tariffs against us. We didn’t use tariffs against them in any way, but we just didn’t use them of any monumental proportion. And so we are doing it now.”
He did not respond to a shouted question about Republican unease with the worldwide tariffs at the close of the White House event.
In northeast Iowa, a wispy stand of trees looks out of place.
It is surrounded by crop fields on the north side of a four-lane highway, an oasis of nature that is uncommon in rural Iowa, where farming every inch of land is paramount.
Its owner hopes to cut and till it for cropland.
But he can’t do it without risking his business. For now.
Jim Conlan, an out-of-state investor in Iowa farmland, knew the federal government considered those nine acres to be a wetland before he bought it as part of a larger tract. If he clears and plows that land, he will lose eligibility for the federally subsidized crop insurance and other benefits that a majority of row crop farmers depend on, under a 1985 law called “Swampbuster.”
Conlan went to court to challenge the law, arguing it violates his constitutionally protected property rights. If he wins, hundreds of thousands of acres in Iowa and other states could be drained, plowed and put into production.
Conlan said he sued after the U.S. Department of Agriculture declined to reclassify the wetland, which is often dry.
“They’re so impossible to deal with,” he said, following a recent federal court hearing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
He’s represented by the same law firm that persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 to overturn Clean Water Act protections for vast areas of wetlands because they are not continuously connected to a stream. As they did with the Sackett case, Conlan’s lawyers hope to topple another pillar of the federal government’s wetland conservation policy.
The case describes Swampbuster as unfair and coercive, arguing that it prevents farmers from draining or filling wetlands on their own properties without paying them for taking the land out of production.
“It seemed really egregious to me that farmers — an industry that’s so vital to America and to the world — couldn’t use their own property to do this and weren’t being compensated for it,” said Loren Seehase, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, one of two organizations representing Conlan’s company, CTM Holdings. “As long as they … are getting (federal) benefits, they can’t do anything with that wetland.”
But advocates of the statute say it’s reasonable — the law does not prohibit farmers from draining wetlands on their property.
“This isn’t money that’s owed to these farmers. These are optional grants and insurance programs that the government provides,” said Dani Replogle, a staff attorney at Food & Water Watch. “So there are conditions associated with receiving government money, just like there are conditions associated with receiving Medicare and food stamps.”
Whatever happens in court, people in this part of the world know that one farmer’s decisions about how to manage their land will affect their neighbors.
One of those people, a beginning farmer named Elle Gadient, has 160 acres downstream from Conlan’s property. Gadient’s cropland and pasture swaddle an old white farmhouse at the top of a hill.
She and her husband hope to raise young dairy cattle there in future years.
Gadient is concerned about what happens if Swampbuster goes away. “This is really a program for all farmers and affects water quality that affects all of us,” she said.
Wetlands in the United States have gained appreciation over time for their environmental benefits. They filter pollution, absorb floodwaters and provide habitat for wildlife. But millions of acres have been destroyed since European settlement.
When European settlers arrived in the Midwest in the 1700s, wetlands were an impediment to agriculture. So settlers drained most of them with ditches and, later, perforated underground tubes known as “tiling.”
In the early 1900s, the government helped organize the drainage networks — primarily in the wetter northern parts of Iowa — through the creation of drainage districts.
There are now thousands of these districts, which are overseen by counties and landowners to collectively maintain the vast systems of drain tiling that lie several feet beneath the surface. There are hundreds of thousands of miles of tile in Iowa alone.
In Iowa and Illinois — the nation’s leaders for corn and soybean production — about 90% of those states’ pre-settlement wetlands were converted, primarily to increase their cropland.
Attitudes toward wetland destruction shifted about 40 years ago. Up to that point, USDA programs were not uniformly designed to protect wetlands — some were actively destructive, such as crop commodification and price supports, which encouraged practices that led to more soil erosion and polluted water.
Conservation groups like the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society lobbied for changes to agricultural policies in the 1985 farm bill, or the Food Security Act.
The farm bill is a massive, omnibus measure that funds federal policies for food and agriculture. It is renewed by lawmakers about every five years, and it includes SNAP benefits and crop insurance subsidies for farmers, among other supports. Hundreds of billions of dollars are allocated to cover programs, loans and insurance.
The 1985 bill included the Swampbuster provision, as well as Sodbuster, which was intended to prevent soil erosion.
These provisions bound wetlands protection to USDA loans, payments and assistance programs, including crop insurance and price support. They are key programs that more than 34% of farm households in the U.S. receive, helping them break even in times of drought or low commodity prices. About 95% of both corn and soybeans in Iowa — nearly 23 million acres — are insured, according to the USDA.
And it worked. A 1998 study found that about 12 million acres of U.S. wetlands had been protected under Swampbuster.
But it’s hard to track these threatened ecosystems. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which oversees Swampbuster rules, does not maintain a searchable database and cannot accurately say how many acres there are, said Sue Snyder Thomas, a former NRCS state compliance specialist.
She said the wetlands often range in size from a half acre to 10 acres in Iowa.
Conlan’s property doesn’t look like a wetland.
It’s not connected directly to a stream. Its surface is often dry and overgrown with grass. There’s a stand of trees on part of it, and the rest is pocked with stumps — the government allows landowners to harvest trees as long as the stumps and roots remain.
But you can’t judge a swamp by its surface water.
NRCS is the judge. Federal regulators evaluate the soil and vegetation for signs that it’s often waterlogged during the growing season. They also review aerial images.
In 2010, the NRCS determined that part of the property was a wetland for the purposes of the Swampbuster rule.
Twelve years later, Conlan bought 72 acres near the town of Delaware for $700,000, according to county records. A little more than half of those acres were farmed at the time.
Conlan has since removed trees from part of the land to grow more corn and soybeans, and he would like to clear the wetland. He asked the NRCS to reevaluate the wetland designation but said he was refused.
Federal rules allow landowners to ask for reevaluations if nature alters the land or if there’s evidence the agency erred.
Wetland designations have been challenged repeatedly in federal court with varying degrees of success, but Conlan’s lawsuit might be the first to question whether the wetland protection program itself is lawful under the Fifth Amendment’s clause that says private property cannot be taken for public use without just compensation.
The lawsuit claims that when USDA designates a piece of farmland as a wetland, it effectively takes that area out of production, barring farmers from draining, filling or cultivating it if they wish to remain eligible for USDA benefits.
While applying for USDA benefits is not mandatory, the lawsuit claims that farmers’ historic reliance on crop insurance and other federal subsidies — coupled with pressures on the nation’s agriculture industry — have made these programs essential to their livelihoods and operations.
And if Conlan violates Swampbuster, he loses the potential for those benefits for all of his Iowa farmland, which totals more than 1,000 acres. Conlan rents the land to farmers and confers the benefits to them.
“They’re basically relinquishing (that) constitutional right in order to receive federal benefits,” said Seehase, the attorney for Conlan’s company. “There are ways to conserve and preserve our environment that still keep those constitutional protections in place.”
CTM Holdings’ lawsuit has sparked action from sustainable agriculture groups in Iowa and neighboring states, which filed a motion to intervene in the case in October 2024. The coalition argues that eliminating or weakening Swampbuster would open the door to further depletion of wetlands, exposing its members to greater flood risk and other environmental hazards and imperiling their properties, crops and overall safety.
The groups challenging the Swampbuster law don’t think it will result in widespread wetlands loss.
“It’s a huge logical misstep to think that every farmer would then till their land and turn it into farmlands,” Seehase said. “Not every farmer is going to do that.”
Others are less optimistic. Corn and soybean prices are down, and costs to grow the crops are up.
“When margins are tight, farmers find every additional acre they can plant corn to plant the corn,” said Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union, a group of progressive farmers that has intervened to block the lawsuit.
He added: “It would, for sure, accelerate the depletion of our wetlands.”
In 2005, a federal appeals court ruled that the Swampbuster statute is not so “coercive” as to force farmers to comply, nor does USDA act as a “gatekeeper” to farmers developing wetlands on their properties if they so choose.
The wetlands can be transformed into a non-farm use without losing farm subsidies, under the federal rules. And following the Sackett court ruling, Swampbuster is the main federal legal disincentive for farmers who want to drain wetlands that are not continuously connected to navigable waters.
‘You could build a skyscraper on it if you want to.’
Chief U.S. District Judge C.J. Williams, noting that wetlands can be transformed into a non-farm use without losing farm subsidies, under federal rules.
At a March 31 hearing on Conlan’s case in Iowa’s northern district, Chief U.S. District Judge C.J. Williams noted that potential: “You could build a skyscraper on it if you want to,” Williams said.
Williams is considering competing motions in the case to decide the lawsuit before it is set to go to trial in June.
An assistant U.S. attorney representing the USDA argued the case should be tossed out because the agency was willing to take a second look at whether Conlan’s property is a wetland, though the agency admitted botching that message. Conlan is dubious.
Even if the judge agrees it was a miscommunication, he might still decide to weigh the arguments about its constitutionality. Whatever he decides will likely be appealed.
It’s unclear what might happen if the lawsuit succeeds. The federal government could implement a new plan that pays farmers for setting aside flood-prone land that they could otherwise grow crops on.
That still might pit farmer against farmer.
“All my upstream neighbors’ land could be drained, and that water’s got to go somewhere,” said Lehman, who farms in central Iowa. “It’s going to come and make my land less usable.”
That’s disconcerting to Gadient, the young farmer who is downstream from the land at the center of the Iowa lawsuit.
She and her husband have sought to strengthen their farm community, inviting their neighbors for regular breakfasts at their home on the hill.
They hope to graze livestock on their farm but for now have chickens and barn cats that laze about.
The men in the area typically go to a local McDonald’s for coffee in the mornings. The wives go to a women-owned gas station nearby. Gadient hopes that a Swampbuster defeat won’t fray those connections and others like them.
“We love the community,” she said. “We really care about our neighbors.”
This story is part of the series Down the Drain from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting collaborative based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.
One Iowa landowner fights to farm a designated wetland. Others could face consequences downstream is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
No amount of lead in the blood is safe for children, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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It was late in the season, and most of the birds were gone. But there had to be a few stragglers out there, late migrators that hadn’t yet left for warmer waters.
Jordan Lillemon tossed his decoys into Lake Christina, a few yards from shore, and hoped that western Minnesota still had some goldeneyes, ducks with stark black-and-white bodies. He was almost certain that sunlight would bring in hooded mergansers, smaller ducks that fly fast and dive and appear suddenly from any direction, at any time, and are among the most difficult to shoot.
Kettle, his 7-year-old black Lab, paused for a moment in the water, then climbed up to her platform next to the hunting blind and waited for the sun to rise.
Nearly all of the wetlands in Minnesota’s prairie region have been destroyed, drained away and turned into row crops by thousands of miles of ditches and tile lines. Many of the few that remain – an estimated 5% of the total before settlement – were saved by duck hunters.
The love of birds, for sport and food, or simply for observation, has been the saving grace of the swamps, marshes and shallow lakes along the Mississippi River, from its upper reaches in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa on down to Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana.
Hundreds of species, including every kind of duck, goose and swan, need those wetlands, which rise and fall, flood and recede, to breed, forage and rest.
When wetlands are destroyed, the birds are usually the first to noticeably die off.
By the early 1900s, it was clear that draining the swamps, bayous and backwaters of the Mississippi River to create new and valuable farmland was causing drastic falls in duck and wildlife populations across the continent.
In 1918, a man who grew up in Davenport, Iowa, and moved out east wrote to the Omaha World Herald to ask if duck hunting along Davenport’s portion of the Mississippi River was still the best in the world.
“All swamplands have been reclaimed, drained and fields of waving corn now stand where in your days the muskrat built his home,” the paper’s outdoor writer responded. “Very little duck hunting is now enjoyed along the Mississippi River.”
Waterfowl populations continued to fall for the next 15 years, until the habitat loss and over-hunting pushed several species to the brink of extinction.
In 1934, Congress tried something new – and simple. Lawmakers required every goose and duck hunter over the age of 16 to buy a $1 stamp. All the money collected from the stamp would be used to buy and permanently protect swamps and marshes up and down the Mississippi Flyway that the birds needed to survive.
It worked. Through the first few years of the program, the United States and hunters were able to save thousands of acres of marshes. Then tens of thousands.
The ducks almost immediately returned.
The agency in charge of the duck stamp, which became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, started working with nonprofit conservation groups like Ducks Unlimited not only to save swamps but to revive ones that had been destroyed. Ducks Unlimited would negotiate easements with landowners and then remove drainage tiles, ditches and dams to restore the natural flow of water to breeding grounds that had been lost. The Fish and Wildlife Service worked with Ducks Unlimited and other groups to buy and permanently protect restored wetlands.
Over the last 90 years, revenue from the hunting stamp, which now costs $25, has saved about 6 million acres of wetlands. Ducks Unlimited, which is funded primarily by hunters, estimates it has restored 18 million acres in North America, the vast majority in nesting grounds for birds that migrate along the Mississippi Flyway, from prairie Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
That’s a total area of swamps, marshes, bogs and shallow lakes larger than Lake Superior.
But it’s a fraction of what it was.
Lake Christina was one of the most famed and productive hunting lakes in Minnesota in the 1920s. There were regular reports then of more than 100,000 white-backed canvasback ducks dotting the lake. But by 1959, that number had fallen to about 250.
Lillemon grew up on the lake, and seeing its rebirth helped inspire him to become a habitat engineer for Ducks Unlimited.
“It’s hard for me to hunt anywhere else,” he said, as the birds have become so consistent.
The waterline in a healthy and functioning wetland needs to fluctuate, like lungs. The damage done to a wetland when it is drained is immediate and obvious, like air sucked out of a collapsed lung. The rich soil dries up and can be plowed and turned into a cornfield. But the other extreme is just as damaging. Wetlands can be flooded to death. This happens when dams, drainage ditches and tile lines force too much water into the system and don’t let it leave. Imagine taking a deep breath and never being able to exhale.
That’s what happened to Lake Christina.
As thousands of acres of what had been meandering streams and marshes were drained to build out the crop fields of west-central Minnesota, some of that water pushed into Lake Christina. The higher water levels allowed bullheads and carp to thrive. They churned up the lake bottom, and it became dark and mucky. Native aquatic plants like wild celery died off.
The birds left.
About 15 years ago, Minnesota lawmakers funded a pumping system in one of the dams near the lake with the help of Ducks Unlimited and the Fish and Wildlife Service. In 2010, the state drew down water levels, allowing the system to exhale for the first time in 50 years. Fish and algae populations immediately dropped to more natural numbers. Sunlight once again reached the lake bottom. Plants started growing.
As the lake rose with the rains and snow melt of the following spring, thousands of ducks returned.
Shortly after sunrise on his hunting trip in November, a lone bird flew in high and fast from Lillemon’s left. The duck ignored the decoys, going straight overhead. Lillemon swung and fired. The bird fell.
“Hooded merganser,” he said.
Kettle leaped from her platform, swam out, brought it to Lillemon and then looked back up at the sky. It would be a busy morning for Kettle. There were no goldeneyes, but Lillemon and his party had nearly filled its limit of mergansers by 9 a.m.
Restoration can still feel like a losing battle.
For every acre of wetland being restored in Minnesota, more are being lost. A 2024 U.S. Department of Agriculture study found that eight of the top 10 U.S. counties where tile drainage was growing fastest were in southern Minnesota. Nearly all of those drainage systems shoot water into a river that ends up in the Mississippi.
Minnesota lost 140,000 acres of forested wetlands between 2006 and 2020, with many replaced by flooded or man-made ponds and lakes.
The Supreme Court’s 2023 Sackett decision has also removed federal Clean Water Act protections for wetlands unless they have a continuous surface connection to navigable waters. That strips federal protection from many shallow breeding ponds, which fill up with rain and snowmelt only in the spring.
Those ponds, called prairie potholes, will now have to rely either on state protections or conservation programs like those funded by the duck stamp.
Over the last 20 years, wetlands have been losing some of their most ardent advocates. Duck hunting, as a pastime, is in decline throughout breeding grounds of the Upper Midwest.
The number of licensed waterfowl hunters in Minnesota dropped by 45% between 2000 and 2023 – a loss of about 55,000 hunters. South Dakota duck and goose hunters fell by nearly a third over roughly the same time. Wisconsin has dropped by 5,000 licensed hunters.
But across the country, sales of the federal duck stamp have remained stable at about 1.5 million stamps sold each year since 2010. Some of that is because duck hunting has been growing as a sport in the South, in places like Arkansas where licensed hunters have increased.
It’s also because there has been a newfound push among birders, those who observe but don’t hunt, to buy duck stamps to support the preservation of wild places, said Scott Glup, the recently retired project leader of the Litchfield Wetland Management District for the Fish and Wildlife Service.
“They take as much pleasure in seeing a bird as I do watching my dog work a field,” he said. “If you want bird habitat, here’s something you can do. Buy a duck stamp.”
Each acre is its own struggle to reclaim.
The farmland where much of the losses have been is valuable. Some of it was drained by county or state governments for what was believed to be for the public good.
In November, Glup stood by the side of one of the wetlands he helped restore a few days before his retirement. It took 15 years for the Fish and Wildlife Service to work out a deal with the landowners to put a conservation easement on the property. It’s still owned by the farmers, but it can never be drained or intensively farmed again.
The site was a 200-acre lake named Butler Lake more than 100 years ago. But in 1919, a handful of nearby farmers asked Meeker County to drain it away to give them more room to graze their cattle. The county obliged, hiring a contractor to empty the lake.
Using duck stamp dollars, the Wildlife Service bought the easements. Partner groups including Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever helped tear out some of the old drain tile. And in 2024, a smaller, 65-acre Butler Lake held open water for the first time in more than a century.
Glup watched a pair of trumpeter swans in the lake. Just a few weeks earlier he had seen sandhill cranes, sora rails and black terns all finding an old stopping ground for their migration that had been covered up for a century.
How can you justify taking land out of production?
That’s the most persistent question Glup received in his 37-year career restoring wetlands.
Watching the swans, Glup said he used to dread that question from hostile county boards and skeptical farmers. But then he started looking forward to it – after he had hunted in some of those restored fields and seen all that they had brought back.
“We’re not taking it out of production, we’re putting it back into production,” Glup said. “With these wetlands we’re producing groundwater recharge, erosion control, flood protections, ducks and pheasants. We’re producing public land that people can go out and enjoy. We’re producing pollinators.”
Throughout his career Glup was usually the first one in the office, arriving around sunrise. The Litchfield office is a small building off of a two-lane road that backs up a few hundred acres of restored prairie. During the season he would hunt pheasants over his lunch break in that prairie with Rica, the best pheasant dog Glup has ever had.
About four years ago, as he walked from his car, he heard the clear and cheerful song of meadowlark. It’s a sound he had once heard often, but not in years as Minnesota’s western meadowlark population fell.
“I know young folks who don’t know what a meadowlark is because they’ve never seen them, they’ve never heard them perform,” he said.
Glup ran into his office, grabbed a pair of binoculars and found the bird — a male, bright and yellow, singing in the field.
“For about two weeks, he sang,” Glup said. “And then he disappeared.”
Each year since, meadowlarks have been back. He’ll count up to 10 of them some mornings.
He’s not sure what exactly the limiting factor was. Was it space, water, a certain mix of insects brought in by the right combination of wildflowers? But somehow the field behind his office went from inhospitable to hospitable for meadowlarks, he said.
And as soon as it did, a bird that he hadn’t seen in decades returned.
It’s almost always the birds, he said, that will tell you if the land is healthy.
This story is part of the series Down the Drain from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting collaborative based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.
For sport or food, love of birds is saving grace for America’s wetlands is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
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Pierce County residents and a grassroots group are challenging a permit for a large livestock farm’s plans to nearly quadruple in size.
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In an interview with WPR's Robin Washington on "Morning Edition," Peter Nordgren talks about his new book, "A Place on Water: A Natural History Memoir of Northwest Wisconsin," in which he chronicles living among nature.
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A Wisconsin solar farm. | Photo courtesy Clean Wisconsin
Fifty-five years ago, 20 million Americans came together on the first Earth Day to say “no” to pollution: no more oil spills off the Santa Barbara coast, no more toxic rivers catching fire like the Cuyahoga, no more pesticides like DDT that harm our health. Fed up with unchecked pollution, environmental leaders of the 1970s organized, educated, and advocated, ultimately ushering in landmark federal regulations, such as the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, that fought contaminants in our air, water and land.
The environmental movement has excelled at standing up and saying “no,” with huge results. We can credit the rejection of pollution with helping to restore ecosystems and save countless lives. Today, while some things remain the same — and we’re still justified in fighting polluters to protect environmental and human health — some factors have changed, warranting new approaches. Climate change is no longer some far-off problem. It’s here, and it’s wreaking havoc. Last year was the warmest year on record; in fact, the hottest 10 years on record were all of the last 10 years. Floods, extreme storms, and disappearing winters are hurting Wisconsin’s communities and economy. And we need to do something about it. On this Earth Day, as we watch our federal government turn its back on the science of climate change, we have an opportunity to keep moving forward in Wisconsin by saying “yes” to wind and solar projects lining up for approval in our state.
While the president may be pushing expensive, “beautiful” coal and opening up protected lands for oil and gas drilling, we know that homegrown wind and solar are not only the cheapest ways to produce energy in Wisconsin, but they also bring enormous economic benefits to communities that host these projects. Farmers who sign leases to host solar panels or wind turbines receive high, stable income for 30 or more years. Communities hosting projects receive annual utility aid payments to the tune of $5,000 per megawatt. Local leaders can then direct this boost to municipal budgets where the community needs it most, like repairing roads and lowering taxes.
But let’s face it, in Wisconsin, large wind and solar projects remain controversial. Our state is rock bottom in the Midwest when it comes to the amount of wind energy we produce. Solar produces 100 times more energy per acre than ethanol, yet we devote more than a million acres of land to ethanol production and just a fraction of that to solar farms. The reality is that to protect the places we love and that sustain us, we need to build new, better infrastructure, because what we have now is harming us. We desperately need an alternative. We need more Wisconsinites to speak up in support of these solutions. The environmental movement cut its teeth by saying “no” to the problem of pollution. The time has come to build on this legacy and say “yes” to solutions: “yes” to clean energy, “yes” to thriving Wisconsin communities, and “yes” to a brighter future.
In less than 10 years, three catastrophic floods ravaged northwestern Wisconsin and changed the way people think about water.
The most severe, in July 2016, slammed Ashland with up to 10 inches of rain in less than a day — a month’s worth of rain fell in just two hours. As rivers swelled to record highs, major highways broke into pieces, and culverts washed away. It took months for roads to reopen, with more than $41 million in damage across seven counties.
The Marengo River, which winds through forests and farmland before meeting the Bad River that flows into Lake Superior, was hit hard during these historic deluges. Centuries earlier, the upper watershed would have held onto that water, but logging and agriculture left the river disconnected from its floodplain, giving the water nowhere safe to go.
Today, the Marengo River stands as an example of a new kind of solution. Following the record floods, state leaders invested in opening up floodplains and restoring wetlands to relieve flooding. As the need to adapt to disasters grows more urgent, the Marengo River serves as an example that there’s a cheaper way to do so: using wetlands.
“We can’t change the weather or the patterns … but we can better prepare ourselves,” said MaryJo Gingras, Ashland County’s conservationist.
Wetlands once provided more natural flood storage across Wisconsin and the Mississippi River Basin, soaking up water like sponges so it couldn’t rush further downstream. But about half of the country’s wetlands have been drained and filled for agriculture and development, and they continue to be destroyed, even as climate change intensifies floods.
As the federal government disposes of rules to protect wetlands, environmental advocates want to rewrite the ecosystem’s narrative to convince more people that restoration is worth it.
Wetlands aren’t just pretty places, advocates argue, but also powerhouses that can save communities money by blunting the impact of flood disasters. A 2024 Wisconsin law geared at preventing such disasters before they happen, inspired by the wetland work in the Marengo River watershed, is going to test that theory.
“Traditionally, the outreach has been, ‘We want to have wetlands out here because they’re good for ducks, frogs and pretty flowers,’” said Tracy Hames, executive director of the Wisconsin Wetlands Association. “What do people care about here? They care about their roads, their bridges, their culverts … how can wetlands help that?”
Northern Wisconsin isn’t the only place paying the price for floods. Between 1980 and 2025, the U.S. was struck by 45 billion-dollar flood disasters, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with a cumulative price tag of nearly $206 billion. Many parts of the vast Mississippi River Basin receive up to eight inches more rain annually than they did 50 years ago, according to a 2022 analysis from Climate Central, a nonprofit organization that analyzes climate science.
Damaging floods are now so common in the states that border the Mississippi River, including Wisconsin, that the issue can’t be ignored, said Haley Gentry, assistant director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy in New Orleans.
“Even if you don’t agree with certain (regulations) … we absolutely have to find ways to reduce damage,” Gentry said.
Former Wisconsin state Rep. Loren Oldenburg, a Republican who served a flood-prone district in southwest Wisconsin until he lost the seat last year, was interested in how wetlands could help.
Oldenburg joined forces with Republican state Sen. Romaine Quinn, who represents northern Wisconsin and knew of the work in the Marengo River watershed. The lawmakers proposed a grant program for flood-stricken communities to better understand why and where they flood and restore wetlands in areas that need the help most.
Jennifer Western Hauser, policy liaison at the Wisconsin Wetlands Association, met with Democratic and Republican lawmakers to advocate for the bill. She emphasized problems that might get their attention — related to transportation, emergency services, insurance, or conservation — that wetland restoration could solve. She said she got a lot of head nods as she explained that the cost of continually fixing a washed-out culvert could vanish from storing and slowing floodwaters upstream.
“These are issues that hit all over,” she said. “It’s a relatable problem.”
The bill passed unanimously and was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in April 2024. Evers and the Republican-controlled Legislature approved $2 million for the program in the state’s most recent budget.
Twenty-three communities applied for the first round of grant funding, which offered two types of grants — one to help assess flood risk and another grant to help build new wetlands to reduce that risk. Eleven communities were funded, touching most corners of the state, according to Wisconsin Emergency Management, which administered the grants.
Brian Vigue, freshwater policy director for Audubon Great Lakes, said the program shows Wisconsin residents have come a long way in how they think about wetlands since 2018, when the state government made it easier for developers to build in them.
There’s an assumption that wetland restoration comes only at the expense of historically lucrative land uses like agriculture or industry, making it hard to gain ground, Vigue said. But when skeptics understand the possible economic benefits, it can change things.
“When you actually find something with the return on investment and can prove that it’s providing these benefits … we were surprised at how readily people that you’d assume wouldn’t embrace a really good, proactive wetland conservation policy did,” he said.
About three-quarters of the remaining wetlands in the lower 48 states are on privately owned land, including areas that were targeted for restoration in the Marengo River watershed. That means before any restoration work begins, landowners must be convinced that the work will help, not hurt them.
For projects like this to work, landowner goals are a priority, said Kyle Magyera, local government outreach specialist at the Wisconsin Wetlands Association, because “they know their property better than anyone else.”
Farmers, for example, can be leery that beefing up wetlands will take land out of production and hurt their bottom line, Magyera said.
In the Marengo watershed, Gingras worked with one landowner who had farmland that wasn’t being used. They created five new wetlands across 10 acres that have already decreased sediment and phosphorus runoff from entering the river. And while there hasn’t been a flood event yet, Gingras expects the water flows to be slowed substantially.
This work goes beyond restoring wetland habitat, Magyera said, it’s about reconnecting waterways. In another project, Magyera worked on a private property where floods carved a new channel in a ravine that funneled the water faster downstream. The property now has log structures that mimic beaver dams to help slow water down and reconnect these systems.
Now that the first round of funding has been disbursed in Wisconsin’s grant program, grantees across the state are starting work on their own versions of natural flood control, like that used in Marengo.
In Emilie Park, along the flood-prone East River in Green Bay, a project funded by the program will create 11 acres of new wetlands. That habitat will help store water and serve as an eco-park where community members can stroll through the wetland on boardwalks.
In rural Dane County, about 20 miles from the state capital, a stretch of Black Earth Creek will be reconnected to its floodplain, restoring five and a half acres of wetlands and giving the creek more room to spread out and reduce flood risk. The creek jumped its banks during a near record-breaking 2018 rainstorm, washing out two bridges and causing millions of dollars in damage.
Nature-based solutions to flooding have been gaining popularity along the Mississippi River. Wisconsin’s program could serve as a “national model” for how to use wetlands to promote natural flood resilience, Quinn wrote in a 2023 newspaper editorial supporting the bill.
Kyle Rorah, regional director of public policy for the Great Lakes/Atlantic region of Ducks Unlimited, said he’s talking about the Wisconsin grant program to lawmakers in other states in the upper Midwest, and he sees more appetite for this model than relying on the federal government to protect wetlands.
And Vigue has found that stakeholders in industries like fishing, shipping and recreation are receptive to using wetlands as infrastructure.
But Gentry cautioned that voluntary restoration can only go so far because it “still allows status quo development and other related patterns to continue.”
Still, as the federal government backs off of regulation, Gentry said she expects more emphasis on the economic value of wetlands to drive protection.
Some of that is already happening. A 2024 analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that wetlands save Wisconsin and the upper Midwest nearly $23 billion a year that otherwise would be spent combating flooding.
“Every level of government is looking at ways to reduce costs so it doesn’t increase taxes for their constituents,” Gingras said.
John Sabo, director of the ByWater Institute at Tulane University, said as wetlands prove their economic value in reducing flood damage costs, taxpayers will see their value.
“You have to think about (wetlands) as providing services for people,” Sabo said, “if you want to get people on the other side of the aisle behind the idea (of restoring them).”
And although the Wisconsin grant program is small-scale for now, he said if other states bordering the Mississippi River follow its lead, it could reduce flooding across the region.
“If all upstream states start to build upstream wetlands,” he said, “that has downstream impacts.”
This story is part of the series Down the Drain from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting collaborative based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
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Framing wetlands as a flooding solution won bipartisan support in Wisconsin. Could it work elsewhere? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
The Milwaukee School Board is considering taking legal action against paint manufacturers in response to the ongoing lead crisis in the district.
The post Milwaukee School Board may sue paint companies over lead crisis appeared first on WPR.
Solar panels in Damariscotta, Maine. (Photo by Evan Houk/ Maine Morning Star)
WASHINGTON — The legal battle over a Biden-era climate program ramped up late Wednesday when an appeals court halted a federal judge’s ruling requiring the disbursement of those funds.
The ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will keep funds frozen in Citibank accounts while a federal suit over the program is ongoing.
The appeals court order reversed a preliminary injunction that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan of the District of Columbia issued Tuesday that temporarily barred the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from “unlawfully suspending or terminating” grant awards.
The appeals panel said it had not had access to Chutkan’s opinion explaining her order granting an injunction — which came a day after the order itself — and the trial judge had therefore not met the high bar needed to issue a preliminary injunction. The panel’s order “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits,” the judges said.
“The purpose of this order is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the district court’s forthcoming opinion in support of its order granting a preliminary injunction together with” the government’s appeal, the judges wrote.
Chutkan issued her opinion the day after granting the preliminary injunction, pointing out that “for weeks, despite repeated inquiries to Citibank and EPA, Plaintiffs received little to no communication from EPA or Citibank regarding their inability to access their funds.”
“Overnight, billions of dollars appropriated by Congress were frozen. As a result, nationwide projects were halted, workplans were disrupted, and millions of dollars in approved transactions with committed partners could not be disbursed,” she wrote.
On Thursday, the D.C. Circuit panel asked the government to refile its argument responding to Chutkan’s opinion by 5 p.m. Eastern on Saturday.
Climate United Fund and other organizations sued President Donald Trump’s administration and Citibank in March over money frozen in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
The $27 billion initiative, which provides funding to organizations building for energy-efficient projects and other measures to tackle climate change, was authorized by Congress as part of the Inflation Reduction Act that Democrats passed along party lines and President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022.
Chutkan’s order blocked the administration from “directly or indirectly impeding” Citibank or causing the bank to “deny, obstruct, delay, or otherwise limit access to funds in accounts established in connection with” the organizations’ grants.
The Trump administration quickly challenged that ruling Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The higher court temporarily blocked Chutkan’s decision “pending further order.”
The appeals court’s ruling halts Chutkan’s preliminary injunction to the extent that it “enables or requires Citibank to release, disburse, transfer, otherwise move, or allow access to funds.”
The higher court also prevented the Trump administration from having to file a status report with the district court within 24 hours of the preliminary injunction’s entry that confirmed their compliance, as outlined in Chutkan’s ruling.
The appeals court also ordered that “no party take any action, directly or indirectly, with regard to the disputed contracts, grants, awards or funds.”
The EPA said in March it would be terminating $20 billion in grants under the program, and the agency’s administrator Lee Zeldin described the climate initiative as a “gold bar” scheme.
Climate United Fund did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday, and the EPA declined to comment.
Wisconsin's decades-old land purchase program is “on life support,” a Republican supporter told environmental advocates Wednesday.
The post As advocates call for conservation funding, Wisconsin’s stewardship program faces steep odds appeared first on WPR.
Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) speaks about how advocates can convince Republicans to fund the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program at the Great Lakes Audubon Society's 2025 advocacy day. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)
Wisconsin Rep. Tony Kurtz (R-Wonewoc) said Wednesday the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program is “on life support,” adding that some of his Republican colleagues give it a 20% chance of being extended in this year’s budget debate before its expiration next year.
Kurtz, Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine), Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay) and Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Secretary Karen Hyun spoke Wednesday to a gathering of members of local Audubon Society chapters and staff of Audubon Great Lakes ahead of the organization’s advocacy day to lobby legislators to support conservation funding.
The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program was established in 1989 to help preserve local natural environments. Throughout its history, the program has enjoyed mostly bipartisan support as it has provided grants through the DNR to help local governments and nonprofits fund the acquisition, restoration and maintenance of public land, parks and wildlife habitats.
In recent years, the program has become a flashpoint in the fight over the boundary between the executive and legislative branches of state government. Until a decision by the state Supreme Court last year, any member of the Legislature’s powerful Joint Committee on Finance had the authority to hold up a project funded through the stewardship program by placing an anonymous hold on that spending.
The Court’s decision entirely removed the Legislature’s oversight of the program, a change that further turned Republicans against its continued existence.
“We could make that process better, where it was not just one individual not liking something and being able to kill a project. I agree with that,” Kurtz said. “When the court case came in and basically took that entire process away, that was not good either, because there was no oversight. And I understand some of you believe whatever the DNR does is fine. That’s great. Some of my colleagues don’t believe that.”
Especially in the northern part of the state, Republicans have objected to stewardship funds being used to conserve land that then gets taken off of local property tax rolls — taking money away from already struggling small local governments. In other cases, Republicans have complained that proposals for projects under the grants rely too heavily on the state funds without the local governments providing enough of their own money.
In his proposed 2025-26 budget, Gov. Tony Evers has requested the stewardship program be increased from its current funding of $33 million per year to $100 million per year for 10 years.
Kurtz said he’s working on a bill that would return some oversight authority over the program to the Legislature without the anonymous objection provision. He added, though, that if the Audubon members went to Republicans Wednesday saying, “‘It’s the governor’s budget or nothing,’ you already lost.”
“I don’t need you to do that, because, I’m being very sincere, I’m trying to keep this alive, and if you go over there [saying that], there’s a good chance it’ll die,” he said. “So don’t do that. Let them, especially when you’re meeting with my colleagues, ask them what [their] concerns are. ‘Why don’t you like this? What is it about the program that we can do better so we can have another day to make sure we protect all our wonderful birds and animals.’”
Habush Sinykin noted that 93% of Wisconsinites support the program and said that in her purple district covering Milwaukee’s northwest suburbs, the stewardship program is hugely popular. She said the anonymous hold of a project in the district drew the ire of community members of both parties.
“There’s a lot of understanding at the legislative level that in these uncertain times, with these newer maps, that our state representatives and senators, including those on the Joint Finance Committee, have to be wary and strategic about issues like this that are bipartisan,” she said. “They’re actually non-partisan. They are successful community building issues. So I think that’s a little bit where your leverage is to lean in hard. How popular these are.”
Aside from the stewardship program, the society members lobbying in the Capitol Wednesday were pushing for the state to increase protections for wetlands and grasslands, advance sustainable practices in the state’s agriculture and forestry industries and grow renewable energy production.
On Wednesday morning, the administration of President Donald Trump announced a proposed rule that would rescind habitat protections for endangered species across the country.
Marnie Urso, Audubon Great Lakes’ senior director of policy, said that with the federal government retreating from conservation efforts, state level efforts have become more important.
“With that uncertainty, this kind of work is even more important, for state lawmakers to be on the path to conserving our natural resources,” Urso said. “The Knowles Nelson project program is bipartisan. It always has been a permanent foundation. So we know it has wide, widespread bipartisan support.”
Urso said leaning into that popularity could help advance the group’s priorities.
“Even Trump voters like the Knowles Nelson Conservation Fund,” she said. “So we’re confident that by coming and talking, telling our story and getting to understand what’s important to our lawmakers, we can inform those decisions. And now it’s more important than ever to have state conservation programs continue.”
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