Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 31. Sunrise is 7:15 and sunset is 4:20 for 9 hours 5 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 62.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1864, during Sherman’s March to the Sea, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army troops reach the outer Confederate defenses of Savannah, Georgia.
Wisconsin’s Knowles-Nelson Stewardship conservation program looks likely to expire at the end of this year:
The looming shutdown of Wisconsin’s decades old Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program has put conservation projects across Wisconsin at risk as land trusts attempt to muddle on without the program that has protected more than 700,000 acres of land in the state.
Without the stewardship fund, projects to conserve 1,300 acres of Northwoods forest near the headwaters of the Wisconsin River in Vilas County, hundreds of acres of “ecologically significant” wetlands in Door County and dozens of acres of prairie and grassland in Dane County could go unfinished.
“It’s a bit bleak and it’s so disheartening to know that there’s so many beautiful, wonderful places kind of on the chopping block right now all across the state,” says Emily Wood, executive director of the Door County Land Trust. “It’s not just us. We hear from our partners that there are hundreds and thousands of acres that are just not going to be protected if [the program] goes away, and that’s going to have such an impact, domino effect, on future generations.”
The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship fund was created in 1989 to fund land conservation in Wisconsin. The program provides grants to local governments and non-profits to cover some of the costs for purchasing and conserving land that can be used for recreation, preserving animal habitats and supporting local industries such as forestry.
See Henry Redman, ‘Just don’t kill it’: Wisconsin land trusts face 2026 expiration of Knowles-Nelson stewardship fund, Wisconsin Examiner, December 9, 2025.
See also The Push to Save a Wisconsin Conservation Program.
Regrettable, but predictable: Wisconsin doesn’t have a bipartisan politics.
CCTV shows moment powerful earthquake hits Japan: