Glenn Stoddard, Defender of Wild Places

Glenn Stoddard, a progressive environmental attorney fights the giant electric transmission line slicing across northwestern Wisconsin because he’s from a long line of conservationists trying to protect the land. Nick Vander Puy from the Superior Broadcast Network talks with Glenn Stoddard at his family’s nature preserve Wolf Spring’s Forest, located in northwestern Wisconsin. To Listen to a "Live Stream Broadcast of this story, click here

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A "Most Sacred Place" in Northwest Wisconsin

        Glenn Stoddard is a progressive environmental attorney, a partner in the Madison law firm Garvey and Stoddard. Stoddard’s father Charles Hatch Stoddard was a highly placed conservation official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.  The younger Stoddard today fights against Wal-Mart, against the Crandon mine, and against building the Arrowhead Weston electric line through northwestern Wisconsin.   Nick Vander Puy from the Superior Broadcast Network talks with Glenn Stoddard at his family’s nature preserve Wolf Spring’s Forest, located in northwestern Wisconsin, near Minong

A mature cedar tree stands next to the spring.  The small pond is surrounded by other cedar, moss and ferns, some maple,  and lush green water cress.

Glenn Stoddard reaches for a cup hanging on the old cedar tree. 

“Well, we’re at what we call the spring here.  And it’s the springs that come out and feed the ponds and the small lakes my Dad built.  But this is what we call “the spring” because we’ve got a little waterfall, it’s really the most sacred place on our place, we come here and drink the water and eat the water cress, and just appreciate nature.”

The water cress tastes peppery.

This land was salvaged by Glenn Stoddard’s father, Chuck Stoddard from the early twentieth century timber industry cutover.

 

Back in the nineteen thirties, Chuck  Stoddard studied forestry and natural resource economics at the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin. He nurtured this land back to health through  pond building and selective, sutainable timber harvest. During World War II  as a Naval officer he ran a sawmill in the Solomon Islands. He went on to work as a private forestry consultant. 

He managed the Bureau of Land Management under President Kennedy and served as a conservation advisor to both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

 

Probably Chuck  Stoddard’s most famous action was, in the early nineteen seventies, stopping Reserve Mining Corporation from dumping asbestos mining wastes  into Lake Superior.

The names of other Wisconsin progressives, Bob Lafollette, Aldo Leopold, Martin Hanson, Gaylord Nelson, are still uttered around here.

“So I see myself as part of the chain of people from earlier generations to future generations who are going to have to fight these battles, against businesses, and industry’s, and politicians, who are just plain greedy.”

Less than mile away from where we’re standing, the American Transmission Company is trying to build a fifteen story tall, high voltage, electric line between Duluth and Wausau.  The Wisconsin State Public Service Commission has approved the route.

Glenn Stoddard spent his youth here.  The line route doesn’t cross Stoddard’s place.

“But the neighbors around here would have to deal with it.  There’s a little road here we like to walk on ride our bikes, and pick berries on, when I was a kid we used to ride our horses,  and it goes right over that road, uhm, I wouldn’t want my kids to go down there and pick berries,

and do the things we did when I was a kid, so it would take away, that experience I had for them.  They’d have to look up at a big line and worry about the effects.”

Looking at a map of northwestern Wisconsin the Arrowhead Weston electric line crosses several rivers and streams. The proposed route  also slices across more than sixty miles of deep wetlands. The swamps and wetlands here are considered the lungs of the earth.

“It’s gonna cut a big swath through this area.  And it would sort of cut through the heart and the soul of this country.  That’s why we have to stop it.  It’s not going to be consistent with anything we know here.”

But until the line is built or stopped….. Madison attorney Glen Stoddard and his family leave the belt-line behind and attempt to return to the northwoods,  as often as they can.

“You know when you live in a city, when you’re on the job going from thing to thing, issue to issue, you’re really not free, you make choices but you’re not free, when you’re out on the land, you’re out in the woods,  you can understand what we have in this country, as human beings, what we should have all over the world, shouldn’t matter what country you’re in, everybody should have the kind of freedom, that comes with being part of nature.”

I’m Nick Vander Puy for the Superior Broadcast Network.

Photographs by Sandy Lyon

To view photos of Glenn Stoddard and Gaylord Nelson and hundreds of others protecting Northern Wisconsin from "Manitoba Hydro's Extension Cord" 345,000 volt bulk transfer, for profit, transmission line: simply click here.

The link will also provide additional information about the issues behind the resistance to the 170 foot tall "Arrowhead-Weston" line, Wisconsin's first move toward California style de-regulation.

To read a pdf file of Garvey-Stoddard's firm's filing to appeal the transmission line's PSC "permit" (CPCN), click here .pdf\7-23-04 SOUL filing.pdf

 

Robert Kennedy Jr. was introduced at the Fighting Bob Fest in Baraboo in Sept of 2004 by Glenn Stoddard. When Kennedy asked Stoddard how long and "how far" should he take the speech, Stoddard replied, "let 'er rip". Kennedy's speech can be heard by clicking here.

To read the most recent essay by Kennedy, where he continues to "let 'er rip" click here.

To Contact Stoddard;

 

 

 

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