Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 42. Sunrise is 5:59 AM and sunset 7:46 PM for 13h 47m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 12.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1985, Coca-Cola changes its formula and releases New Coke. The response is overwhelmingly negative, and the original formula is back on the market in less than three months.
Cara Buckley reports The Giving Forest (‘The Menominee tribe has sustainably logged its forest in Wisconsin for 160 years. But that careful balance faces a crisis: too many trees and too few loggers’):
MENOMINEE COUNTY, Wis. — Amid the sprawling farmlands of northeast Wisconsin, the Menominee forest feels like an elixir, and a marvel. Its trees press in, towering and close, softening the air, a dense emerald wilderness that’s home to wolves, bears, otters, warblers and hawks, and that shows little hint of human hands.
Yet over the last 160 years, much of this forest has been chopped down and regrown nearly three times. The Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, its stewards, have pulled nearly two hundred million cubic feet of timber from this land since 1854 — white pine cut into museum displays and hard maple made into basketball courts for the Olympics.
Yet the forest has more trees on the same acreage than it did a century and a half ago — with some trees over 200 years old.
The Menominee accomplished this by putting the well-being of the forest and their people ahead of profits and doing the exact opposite of commercial foresters. They chop down trees that are sick and dying or harvest those that have naturally fallen, leaving high-quality trees to grow and reproduce. It is regarded by some as the nation’s first sustainable forest.
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Left alone, the forest will grow dense, stunting the growth of some trees and inviting invasive diseases and pests, which are already an increasing menace because of climate change.
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An hour’s drive northwest of Green Bay, the Menominee forest is so lush it pops in images from space. At 235,000 acres, it’s home to about 4,300 tribal members and roughly two dozen species of trees, hardwoods and softwoods like red oak, pine, maple, aspen and hemlock that fill 90 percent of the land.
See also from PBS Wisconsin Menominee History:
Along the banks of the Wolf River, tribal elder and preservationist David Grignon tells the oral tradition of the Menominee people. Grignon shares not only who the Menominee are, but why they’re in Wisconsin, and how he is striving to preserve their traditions.
Harvesting “mad honey” is a high-risk job: