Public Lands in Public Hands & 101st Anniversary
by John Berge

Come on out to Colonial Park on September 30! We are gathering with Racine's City Council, Mayor, park staff and the general public to stress the importance of keeping "Public Lands in Public Hands" and to recognize and celebrate the 101 years Racine has had an official governing board for our public parks. Come to Colonial Park at the foot of West High Street in Racine for a light breakfast at 8:30 a.m.
followed by a few, short talks, a couple of award presentations, a walk in the woods and then, all who are interested and able, can join in removing some alien plant species in the Park.

September 30 is National Public Lands Day, the nation's largest hands-on volunteer effort to improve and enhance America's public lands. Last year nearly 90,000 people around the country participated in trail or historic site maintenance, tree planting, trash and weed removal, habitat restoration, and accessibility improvements. "Public Lands in Public Hands" is a campaign initiated by the Sierra Club's America's Wild Legacy Committee to coincide with National Public Lands Day. The campaign has two major objectives: "to raise awareness about recent attempts to give away our national public lands and to engage our communities in local restoration projects". The Southeast Gateway Group applied for and received a $250 grant for this activity in Racine and will stress the second objective as a continuation of our project to remove alien, invasive plant species from Colonial Park and to replace them with native species.

Actually, we see three major threats to our Parks, the latter two of which are of greater concern in southeast Wisconsin. Privatization of public park lands is more of a federal problem. Invasive, alien species and budget cuts at all levels of government are major threats.

The second emphasis at this event is a celebration of the establishment in 1905 of a Parks Board in Racine to acquire and manage the fine network of parks that we enjoy today. The Board's responsibilities have since grown to include Recreation and Cultural Services as well as Parks.

So with apologies from the Conservation Committee for the late notice, we invite all Southeast Sierrans to join us at 8:30 a.m. in Colonial Park on September 30 for the kringle and coffee, the short program, a hike through the woods and the work session afterwards (Bring work gloves, loppers, clippers and/or spades if you can.) This does not replace the usual work day on September 23 at which we plan to prepare for showing off our efforts to date and the need for further efforts on our part and that of the community.

CALENDAR

September 30: Public Lands in Public Hands plus 101st Anniversary event in Colonial Park starting at 8:30 a.m. Breakfast, short program and work day.

October 5: There will be NO Conservation Committee meeting this month because of the proximity to the Autumn Assembly.

October 6-8: Autumn Assembly. See The Muir View for complete information.

October 12: Executive Committee Meeting at Olympia Brown Unitarian Church (downstairs), 625 College Ave., Racine at 7:00 p.m.

October 14: Highway 38 Cleanup. Meet at Bob and Betty Gericke's home,
3927 North Lane, Franksville for equipment and assignments at 9:00 a.m.
There will be a potluck lunch after the cleanup. Call Bob or Betty at
(262) 886-9057 for directions or additional information.

October 19: Our regular monthly meeting night. Apple Holler is running an apple picking and scarecrow festival all month long from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., so come as early as you would like to take part in the festival. We will meet for dinner in the restaurant at 5:00 p.m. Apple Holler is located at 5006 S. Sylvania Ave., on the west frontage road off I-94, just north of KR, in Sturtevant. I am trying to arrange a tour of Stericycle, our local medical waste facility, after our dinner at Apple Holler. I have not received word if we will be allowed to tour the facility or not as of publication date. Stericycle is located west of Sylvania Ave. north of Apple Holler. E-mail Juanita at JJP72696 AT aol DOTcom if you need to know if the Stericycle tour is on or not.

October 21: Third Saturday Hike and Lunch, 10:00 a.m. Price Park Conservancy, Walworth County. Come explore this nature-based recreation park that includes the Sugar Creek floodlands and shoreline, various wetland plant communities, including sedge meadow and shallow marsh, and uplands, including oak woods, pine plantations, open field grassland and agricultural lands. Contact Dana Huck at (262) 639-0465 for more information or to sign up.

October 28: Make a Difference Day in Racine. Instead of working in Colonial Park, we will be attacking invasive, alien plant species around the pond at the Racine Zoo from 9:00 a.m. to noon. Call Melissa Warner at (262) 639-0918 for additional information. Wear appropriate attire and bring work gloves, spades, loppers and/or clippers if you can.

November 1: Southeast Sierran Deadline. Send articles, etc., electronically by using the information on the back page, or send by mail to: Gary Zumach, 2548 Pinehurst Ave., Racine, WI 53403.

November 2: The Conservation Committee will meet at the Caribou Coffee Shop, SE corner of Highways 11 and 31 in Racine, starting at 7:00 p.m.
This will be an important meeting as we will be setting priorities for 2007 and our budget request. Call Nancy Hennessy at (262) 639-5639 for additional information, agenda items and any questions concerning this meeting.

November 9: Executive Committee Meeting at Olympia Brown Unitarian Church (downstairs), 625 College Ave., Racine at 7:00 p.m.

November 16: Come and learn about the Citizen Based Stream Monitoring Pilot Project at our regular monthly meeting. Our speaker will be Frank Fetter, who is the statewide coordinator for a citizen-based stream monitoring pilot project under a partnership between the WDNR and the River Alliance of Wisconsin. Before the meeting, we will meet for dinner at 5:00 p.m. at the Gateway Cafe, 3619 30th Avenue, Kenosha. After dinner, we will move to the Kenosha Public Museum, 5500 First Avenue in Kenosha. We will meet in the Daimler-Chrysler Hall for our program at 7:00 p.m.

November 18: Third Saturday Hike and Lunch, 10:00 a.m. Visit to the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, 111 E. Brown Deer Road, Milwaukee. In addition to a spectacular educational center, the Schlitz Audubon Center includes a nature preserve with marked trails for self-guided hikes and an observation tower. Fee: $4 for adults, $2 for children under 12.  Lunch will follow at a local restaurant. (This outing was originally scheduled for February and was canceled due to weather.) Contact Dana Huck at (262) 639-0465 for more information or to sign up.

November 25: If the weather cooperates, we may have a Work Day at Colonial Park and Pringle Nature Center from 8:30 to noon. Wear appropriate attire and bring work gloves, spades, loppers and/or clippers if you can.

Fresh Wisconsin Cranberries for the Holidays! Order now!

We are again offering fresh cranberries direct from the growers, Wetherby Cranberry Co. in Warrens, WI. This family-owned grower offers plump delicious cranberries packaged the day that we pick them up. You won't find cranberries this fresh and high quality in the grocery store at this price! Delivery will be in November sometime before Thanksgiving but is dependent on when they ripen and are able to be harvested.

$3.50 for each one pound bag

Encourage your friends, family, neighbors and co-workers to place orders! Aside from getting great cranberries, this is a fund raiser for our group so that we may continue to do our important work.

Place your order by calling Jeff Sytsma at (262) 637-6845 or by email at Jeff12759 AT aol DOT com.

Pinecranapple Sauce
This is my all time favorite cranberry recipe. I have a ton of recipes.
If you need more, or are looking for a particular type of recipe, let me know and I’ll see what I can dig out. I've been filling a recipe board at my farm market for going on 30 years, so my recipes probably number in the gazillions. And I'm the one that doesn't have time to bake, or anybody to eat it with me! This recipe is simple, and goes together in a flash.

1 bag fresh cranberries, washed
1 can (20 oz.) crushed pineapple, in its own juice
2 large apples, washed, cored, and chopped
2 Tablespoons lemon juice
1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar, or to taste

If you use golden delicious apples, which are sweet, you may be able to reduce the sugar. Do not use red delicious as they don't cook up. Any other kind of cooking apple will work fine. Combine everything together in a pot (best not to use aluminum, because it reacts too much with the acid in the fruit), and cook until soft. Refrigerate. Serve warm or cold. This can be used as a side dish, or as a topping for pancakes, waffles, pound cake, short cake or ice cream.
…Juanita Paterson

Highway 38 Cleanup

The Highway 38 cleanup originally scheduled for September 30 has been rescheduled for October 14 because of the conflict with the breakfast, program and work day that is part of the "Public Lands in Public Hands"
campaign of the Sierra Club's America's Wild Legacy Committee. September 30 has been designated National Public Lands Day across the country and so the group's Conservation and Executive Committees adjusted our schedule. The time and place is the same, 9:00 a.m. on October 14 at Bob and Betty Gericke's house (see the calendar for address and telephone number). The usual delicious potluck lunch will follow.

From the Chair
by Nancy Hennessy

As I write this, summer is winding down and yellow is the color of the day. Bees are buzzing around the goldenrod, goldfinches are plucking seeds from the yellow coneflowers. Determined to bring a bit of summer gold indoors, I have just picked a bunch of downy sunflowers. But as summer is slipping away another season has been humming along and it will reach a crescendo in November.

By the time you are reading this newsletter, summer's flowers will have gone to seed and the election season will be in full force. The media blitz will be inescapable and political ads will be full of questionable charges. When you are not sure what to believe and you would like to be more informed about how our Wisconsin state legislators voted on conservation issues, one source you can trust is the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters. Take a look at the Conservation Scorecard at http://conservationvoters.org/scorecard

Throughout the legislature's two-year session, the League of Conservation Voters tracks each and every conservation bill. The Scorecard reports on the most important of those bills that were voted on in the full Senate and Assembly and in the Joint Finance Committee.

The goal of the Conservation Scorecard is to provide objective, factual information about the voting records of Wisconsin's legislators. You will find descriptions of key conservation bills and a chart that shows how our legislators voted. It will help you to distinguish the true stewards of Wisconsin's environment from those who just talk about it.

Be informed, get out and work to elect candidates who are committed to protect the environment and don't forget to vote!

National Parks Suffer Under Bush Administration
by Lila Berge

Have you vacationed in our National Parks lately? Did you notice changes for the worse? Jim Hightower has collected a lot of facts and figures to support his statement in the September 2006 issue of The Hightower Lowdown, "These political powers are...failing past generations who fought to establish this magnificent system, and failing our children and all future generations who should receive America's public-park heritage in even better shape than it came to us. For a nation of incredible wealth, this political failure is a damning stain on our professed ideals of the common good and of good stewardship."

He further states, "There are 388 of these public spaces, and they are widely used, especially by middle-class and lower-income families who count on them for recreation, vacation, education and more. An astonishing 280 million visitors a year find their way to these forests, scenic rivers, historic sites, mountains, seashores, canyons, volcanoes, monuments, islands, artifacts, glaciers and other wonders--more people than attend all football, baseball, and other professional sports events combined."

The maintenance backlog has been allowed to swell to an estimated $7.1 Billion--that is with a B--and still Bush is calling for a 20?30% cut in funds for the Park Service. This means reduced hours, discontinued tours and talks, closed trails, unrepaired storm damage, boarded-up historic structures, leaky lodges, shuttered visitor centers, curtailed education programs, crumbling boardwalks, neglected campgrounds, dilapidated bridges, eroded roads--and of course ever-rising fees.

The Bush agenda, besides cutting funds, has brought in commercialization, privatization and even Christianization. Key positions have been filled with "ideologues and corporate servants", who are attempting to rewrite the historic mission of the National Park Service (NPS). They would weaken the original purpose--the preservation of America's natural wonders for future generations--by adding a new purpose, providing access to interests that want to use the parks for their own gain. Corporate advertising appears more and more in national parks and plaques sprout up to honor "Proud Partners" such as Ford and Coca Cola. And have you noticed the 80-foot high cell phone tower right next to Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park? How could you miss it. At last count there were five such towers in Yellowstone. The ring of the cell phone now intrudes into the solitude of the back country in Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Everglades, Mojave, Big Cypress, Mammoth Cave and more. Because of the way the deal was worked out with the cell phone companies, even the NPS doesn't know how many there are or where they are!

In 2003, a Bush administration privatization plan would have transferred more than half of NPS's jobs to low-bid contractors. Congress stalled this, but NPS is required to "study and test" this privatization scheme.
The Forest Service has been compelled to consider privatizing more than two-thirds of its employees, despite a study which found no identifiable savings.

In one of the main Grand Canyon viewing areas on the South Rim, there are three bronze plaques with Bible verses. They also are selling a book in the visitor center entitled "Grand Canyon: A Different View", a creationist book asserting that the canyon is not the product of geological forces in geological time, but instead was created by Noah's flood and is only 6,000 years old. It didn't look like that to those of us who rafted the Canyon.

To view the entire article from which this article was excerpted, go to www.hightowerlowdown.org or e-mail them at lowdown AT pipeline DOT com to subscribe.

Another Problem With Rising Carbon Dioxide
by John Berge

As if global warming due to increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere wasn't enough of a problem, now we can expect bigger and more toxic poison ivy. Jacqueline E. Mohan, formerly at Duke University and now at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, showed that poison ivy grows twice as fast in air that contains about 50% more carbon dioxide than current levels...a level expected to be reached by the end of this century if we don't do something about it. Not only did the poison ivy grow faster, but it produced about one-third more unsaturated urushiol. The unsaturated forms are more likely to provoke painful skin reactions in more people.

Other studies have shown that vines receive a greater growth boost from increased carbon dioxide than do woody plants which put much of their carbon harvest into support structures such as tree trunks. Mohan reported that vines received nearly five times the boost that is seen in some trees. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have shown that forest honeysuckle vines also have much greater growth in carbon dioxide-richer atmospheres. Increased vine growth relative to tree growth could have severe consequences in forestry and forest ecology.

One also shudders to think of kudzu, that scourge of the south, growing any faster than it does now. I have yet to see any studies on the effects of increased carbon dioxide on garlic mustard, dames rocket and other alien, invasive plant species which only a few years ago were much more rare around here than their current state.

Bike Ride Closes Autumn Assembly

Sunday, October 8, 11:00 a.m.: Ride will follow the lakefront from Carthage College to Chiwaukee Prairie--or wherever riders want to turn around and head back to Carthage College. Distance one way is 10 miles.
Food available on the route at Common Grounds or Mo's. Terrain--flat.
Contact Milie Carlson at (262) 652-8121.