Environment

James Madison Park, located on Madison's near east side and running along the lovely shores of Lake Mendota, has long been a green gathering space for students playing frisbee or football, families with young children who enjoy the playground equipment, people reading on benches, and folks wishing to rent canoes at the boathouse. It used to be the site of WSUM's Party in the Park, and usually hosts a few other festivals and gatherings throughout the year. It's a great resource, and one example of city ownership of lakeshore land in the interest of keeping it publicly accessible.

The state of the park and the various historic buildings that lie in and around it, however, is somewhat up in the air these days. Mayor Dave and certain development interests appear keen on moving those historic buildings, selling some of the land, and re-purposing sections of the park.Click here to read more...

The headlines read like opening lines from a science fiction novel: Lake Delton is gone. Sadly, the disappearance of Lake Delton wasn’t caused by a mad scientist with a Lake Stealing Ray, it is a traumatic reality. Early in the morning on June 9 residents around the Sauk County lake began sandbagging. Their valiant efforts were unable to keep up with the rising waters and shortly after 10 a.m. the lake washed out enough land to cut a new channel around the dam and began flowing into the Wisconsin River. The center point of a billion dollar Wisconsin tourism industry and daily backdrop for thousands of residents had been reduced to mud and sediment. Governor Jim Doyle has pledged to rebuild the dam and refill the lake, but that isn’t enough to stop the shock and bewilderment Wisconsinites are feeling after the loss of the 81-year-old man made lake. Estimates suggest the lake won’t return until 2009, in the meantime, residents plan to make the best of it with a massive “clean the lake bottom” campaign. Over the years a large number of items had sunk to the bottom of the lake and on Saturday from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. anyone who wants to don booties and trudge through the mud can help.Click here to read more...

It was a motley group that gathered Wednesday for the Second Annual Nelson Institute Earth Day Conference at the Monona Terrace: scientists, urban planners, transportation experts, public health advocates and educators; 400 people in all maxed out the conference’s registration limit.

While the conference as a whole focused on solutions to the environmental and economic impacts of climate change in Wisconsin, the keynote speech in the morning tackled the “uncertainty” of climate change predictions and what this actually means.

When scientists say they’re uncertain about projections from their climate change models, skeptics use it unfairly as a reason to discount all climate change science or at least downplay potential risks, according to keynote speaker Jay Gulledge, senior scientist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.Click here to read more...

Growing concern over the potential risks that nanotechnology might pose to the environment and human health have some lawmakers and state agencies looking into how they might regulate the technology, which is already being used in more than 1,000 consumer and food products, though many researchers say regulations are premature.

“Right now there’s just not enough information on the toxicology of any of these nanomaterials to make any rational basis for developing any kind of regulation,” says Robert Hamers, a UW-Madison nanotechnology researcher. “We certainly see some toxic effects of nanoparticles, but from what we’ve seen in experiments, the concentrations to reach toxicity are actually pretty high.”Click here to read more...