Green Politics in Rock Springs

The Baraboo Range, located in Wisconsin's Columbia and Sauk Counties, is about 25 miles long and varies from 5 to 10 miles in width. Consisting of highly eroded Precambrian metamorphic rock, it is considered a "monadnock" which is an isolated hill, knob, ridge, or small mountain that rises abruptly from a gently sloping or virtually level surrounding plain.
(click to enlarge and read) The Mounds of Central Wisconsin ; Slideshow on Photobucket.
The rocks of the Baraboo Range are among the oldest exposed rocks in North America consisting mainly of pink Baraboo quartzite and red rhyolite.

Rock Springs, so named, because of a good sized spring that still flows year round on the west side of town. Hinckley Spring Water is right at the base of the Ableman's Gorge (excellent link) hike also supplies the free spring across the street year round alongside the Upper Baraboo River.
There is much quarrying in the area so that the bluffs do not look as they once did, but the springs still remain the same and are a great way to quench your thirst. (Dells History by Ross M. Curry)

The Baraboo River divides the range in half, flowing through Upper Narrows Gorge near Rock Springs and travels onto its confluence with the Wisconsin River downstream from Portage through the Lower Narrows.
Devils Lake was formed from terminal moraines blocking access to its outlet, creating what is today an endorheic lake, which is a lake lacking a surface outlet to the world's oceans.

Baraboo is in the center of the valley. This region is ecologically significant because it contains the largest stand of deciduous forest in the upper Midwest.

My first visit to Rock Springs was in the fall of 2006 when I brought a group of 8 of us up for the weekend to camp, hike and rock climb. We camped at Mirror Lake State Park. Due to our schedules, we decided to climb on Sunday with Vertical Illusions. When we first camped at Devils Lake we had very little understanding of outdoor rock climbing. We looked around and found information on the Internet about a business in the Dells called Vertical Illusions. The owner, Easton Dreher, had just opened his business that had been a project in which he had drawn up in a college class his junior year at Northern Michigan University.

The word "environmental" is a very "in word" today. It strikes up a lot of emotion in people. When I was checking out of a store recently, the sales woman read the title of my husband's business on my charge card and she got really excited. She was so proud to talk to someone who was working in or related to the environmental business.
Many have reported that the environmentalists today are merely touting a "political ideology." Rather than an environmental movement there is more of a political activist movement.

Our family attended the "Earth Day" celebration in Rock Springs in 2007. Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" was being shown. Our family wasn't interesed in watching it although we are very concerned about many environmental issues. Easton was offering free climbing at this very cliff (picture) and Gander Mountain had kayaking on the nearby Baraboo River.

Green politics is advocated by supporters of the Green movement,which has been active through Green parties in many nations since the early 1980s. S. Michael Craven, in his 7/9/07 article "Responding to 'Green Politics,'" has concluded that environmentalism offers an ideal moral alternative in today's world because it comes across as being motivated by a noble interest in innocent nature and opposes human greed. He goes on to conclude that this moral system will have some distinct characteristics: it will avoid traditional moral positions, such as sexual ethics, or anything that imposes boundaries upon man's selfish appetites and proclivities. Responding to Green Politics


The "Transworld News" reported recently from Atlanta that the Weather Channel founder John Coleman called global warming a fraud on Wednesday and wants to sue former Vice President Al Gore for his promotion of the phenomena. He was referencing what some call the Weather Channel's global warming alarmism. Coleman advocates suing people who sell carbon credits, including Al Gore, because the attention in the courts could "put some light on the fraud of global warming." Coleman also mentioned that billions of dollars are being made over global warming and that is indeed the impetus for the alarmism associated with it. Tens and thousands of jobs depend on global warming right now. It's a big business.

When it comes to green, "we all have a lot to learn." According to physical climatologist Eric DeWeaver from the University of Wisconsin, "Climate modeling is not unlike other "predictive sciences" like weather forecasting and economics.... Due to the variability of natural systems and the difficulty of mathematically representing such complex systems, all models contain some element of uncertainty.... "It's impossible to make a perfect representation of climate... DeWeaver, the physical climatologist on the International Polar Bear Science Team and a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences in the University of Wisconsin-Madison, evaluated existing climate models to identify those that best represent observed changes in sea ice - a crucial component of polar bear habitat - and which are expected to best predict future conditions in the Arctic."

Interestingly, In the February 25th edition of the "National Post" we read that "the ice is back." They inform us that not only were the records that were used to alarm us only dated back as far as 1972, but that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past. Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

The "Daily Tech reported on February 6 that "Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling." This twelve month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming." Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history.

....North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on. " All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down. Scientists quoted in a past Daily Tech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases and that past warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were "beneficial for civilization." Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.


Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...