Transcript
Smoky Logic About Canadian Wildfires (Hour 2)
Mornings with Pat Kreitlow · Tue Aug 19, 2025
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You're listening to Mornings with Pat Kratlow powered by Up North News.
Now, for my Lake Minnesota studio, here is the founding editor of Up North News, Pat Kratlow.
Well, hey, good morning.
Nice to have you back on this Tuesday morning, August 19th, 2025, 7.06 the time here.
And as I was looking to tell you what's coming up this hour, it occurs to me, poor Parker Olson, who
produces this program down in Madison Studio A2.
I don't know if you should believe me when I tell you what's coming up this hour because I looked back at the plan for what I was going to talk about last hour.
Yeah.
And I accomplished almost none of that.
Yeah.
New Coke wasn't
I did not have new Coke on there.
I did not have Derek Van Orden trying to sneak into Eau Claire last week and giving him an earful on that.
We did not say much about Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley, accepting tens of thousands of dollars in trips during her time on the bench.
And we have not really gotten into the Trump Zelinski meeting and him attacking mail-in voting, though we will get to that with Dan Schaefer in our eight o'clock hour.
So what I think we're going to be talking about this hour, unless again, I need to give Parker Olson a history lesson and we have to throw the script out the window again, is we'll be talking to Dan Hagen from
WJFW News Watch 12 in Rhinelander and we'll be talking to former legislator Fred Clark who now lives way up north and had quite an online column directed toward Wisconsin Republicans who were sending sternly worded messages to Canada that the wildfire smoke was such a bother to them.
And Fred Clark's response was just great.
And I asked him to come in at 730 and we'll talk more about that.
But first, let's talk about the weather that we've got right now.
And what's obstructing our view is not wildfire smoke this time.
It's just good old fashioned fog because there's been a lot of rain, a lot of moisture out there.
And Brittany Merleau is here to tell us more about that.
And hopefully the drier details of what lies ahead, right,
Brittany?
So much better forecast for you today.
Just besides that dense fog advisory up northwest until nine o'clock today.
Hey word, Rice Lake Eau Claire visibility is pretty bad for you.
Otherwise still very soggy out there.
We got a good four to eight inches of rainfall that fell in pockets from I-80 to I-88 where some of the heaviest storms hit yesterday with torrential rainfall.
So a lot of basements do have some water in there.
We are looking at some cropland flooding as well.
The rivers are rising to Fox River at New Munster, Kickapoo, the Trempelo and Black Earth Creek.
over by Madison.
It is just hit record levels here this morning.
So flooding on the rivers is still going on today.
We're also looking at Lake Michigan.
Very rowdy beach hazard statement out there three to five foot waves.
from Milwaukee into Racine and Kenosha.
I would avoid the beaches there.
Be careful.
But we do have this high pressure system that settled in.
The cold front has cleared the state.
We've got more and more sunshine peeking out by this afternoon.
Calm or winds.
The only thing that could happen today is maybe a spotty sprinkle.
And I think that'll stay more towards the north this morning.
And then a chance kind of moves over towards Lake Michigan this evening as the winds start to shift off the lake.
So Lake Breeze expected later and a few spotty showers.
But otherwise highs today come
comfortable in the mid seventies to low eighties, much crisper conditions moving in that humidity leaving us alone.
And we've got this high pressure system here all week.
Our next chances of rain, real rain rolling through isn't until Friday.
And behind that, it kind of feels like fall over the weekend.
Well, it's funny that you would say that because that's that's exactly what Rob is saying from Tigerton.
Looks like an autumn type weather that is coming to ramp up the month of August.
Good morning from Tigerton.
Rob writes it's cloudy and 61 degrees, picked up six tenths of an inch of rain yesterday, work around the home and some paperwork for my mowing jobs today.
They're mowing jobs in Wittenberg.
Let's see.
He also said as we talked a lot about New Coke last hour, he said, so I am strictly on a diet.
sun drop, mountain dew and mellow yellow is too sweet.
So it's diet sun drop for him, not mountain dew, not mellow yellow.
He's in tiger tent.
Of course you love your sun drop.
You have to.
Yeah.
Yes.
That's, that's, that's great.
Uh, let's see.
And, uh, Brittany was right on the money with where the heavy rain set up.
So there you go.
So that was, that was really nice.
And let's see what else was in the mail bag.
We, I asked people about, you know, to help educate Parker about new Coke and we're still on.
Well, because again, people responded.
Brittany, were you were you aware of the whole thing with New Coke back in the mid 1980s?
Had you heard of it?
Is that when the recipe changed?
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
See, she knew that that that's when the recipe.
Anyway, from from Jim in Brookfield on the text line, he writes in the mid 80s, New Coke was launched, tasted just like Pepsi.
I remember the Pepsi ads that said the other guy just blinked.
Laurie and Hayward.
Good morning, Pat.
I remember when Coke
changed its product.
And at the time, I was an avid Coke drinker.
My sister was an avid Pepsi drinker.
Well, a month or so later, we met each other and she was drinking Coke and I was drinking Pepsi.
Neither of us realized that we'd made the change as the original Coke disappeared.
From David New Berlin, I recall what happened was Nuke Coke was later rebranded as Coke 2 when Coca-Cola Classic was launched.
Yes, Parker, this gets even sillier.
When Coke went back to the original formula of the new Coke, they branded it as Coke 2.
Like it's a movie sequel.
And it was Coke 2 for years.
Yes.
What are
Oh, yeah.
Let's see.
And then this is why I love Mornings with Pat Krightlow.
Come for the soda talk.
Stay for the truth talking about Derek Van Orden.
OK, well, see, we've got that.
And Mathers, Luke Mathers.
I don't fault Parker for not knowing about a pop culture reference that's old enough to be his father.
Pop
culture.
Oh, oh, pop culture.
Oh, Brittany, you caught that.
Oh, all
right.
There we go.
Thanks on it.
Thank you, Brittany.
We'll talk to you next hour.
Sounds good.
As always, we invite you to join us at UpNorth News on our website, UpNorthNewsWI.com.
You can subscribe to our newsletters.
You can also check us out on social media.
There's a lot going on there.
As Sharita Booker, our social media manager, every week gives me a rundown of some of the more popular stories from the past week.
Now, to nobody's surprise, the flash flooding in Milwaukee
was far and away one of our most engaged posts on social media.
But there were other things as well like, well, George Webb.
George Webb restaurants, 23 of them tomorrow in the Milwaukee area are going to be giving away free burgers from two until six tomorrow afternoon.
And I understand they've also given out all the free vouchers that they were going to be giving for people who want to get burgers later on.
So that was a very popular post on Facebook on Instagram.
There's a story about Ryan Sternid, a beer vendor at Brewer's Games who has announced his candidacy for governor.
And there was a popular post about the Milwaukee Bucks Bobby Portis Jr.
who's long been involved in the fight against hunger and his work with Feeding America.
And that includes leading the PB&J Challenge, which raised millions of sandwiches for kids and funding something like 185,000 meals through the Bobby Portis Foundation.
So again, that was one of our more popular posts.
So you can read all of what we do all across social media.
We are on Blue Sky now too, as well.
If you're looking for an alternative to the Dumpster Fire, formerly known as Twitter, and of course, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.
talk.
We're there.
We're everywhere.
So come follow up with news along the way.
So yeah, as I was saying last hour, we were going to get into some of the other discussions about things that were in the news.
And they included a story from Dan Bice in the journal Sentinel about State Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley.
And this is about the trips that are taken by
politicians and elected officials like justices.
And there's conferences that you can go to.
There, there were conferences that I went to as a state legislator, but those things were pretty much official business, some things that were covered by the legislature, some things that you had to pay on your own if you wanted any extras to go along with it.
That's a little different than, you know,
liberal or conservative outside groups or think tanks paying for your travel.
And according to the Dan Bistory, he writes that since being appointed to the court by former Governor Scott Walker, Rebecca Bradley has reported that several conservative groups or legal centers have picked up nearly $52,000 in lodging, meals, airfare, and other expenses so she could attend 20 out-of-state conferences and seminars since 2015.
No other sitting justice reported receiving even a third of Bradley's travel expenses that were covered by outside groups.
And yes, this does have Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito vibes very much so, with trips to Alaska, Hawaii, Florida, Utah, Colorado, Puerto Rico, Laguna Beach, California, and more.
So Rebecca Bradley issued a statement that defended the trips and criticized her potential opponent, Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, who announced her own candidacy several weeks back.
Next highest on what Bice calls the judicial junket list is conservative Brian Hagedorn, who has accepted $14,000 in conference and event expenses since he joined the court in 2018.
At the bottom of the list is Liberal Justice Jill Karofsky who has reported zero event expenses picked up by outside groups since she was elected to the Supreme Court back in 2020.
Now Rebecca Bradley has still not made a formal announcement on whether she is running for another 10-year term on the state Supreme Court in April of next year.
Now, I am not here to tell you that all of these trips are necessarily wrong.
There's a reason why they have to be disclosed.
And I think all of us understand whether it's the need for continuing education to go to a conference here and there, or maybe somebody actually wants you to speak at a conference because of your level of expertise on a particular subject.
And then for every voter,
for everybody, for that matter.
There's a line somewhere.
There's a line at which, below which, you're saying, okay, well, this comes with a job.
You go to conferences and things like that.
And somewhere above that line is, this seems awfully gratuitous.
And in the case of Rebecca Bradley, again, as a state Supreme Court justice, it all is supposed to be reported.
So now it's out there.
And now there's this newspaper article about it.
And now people can decide for themselves whether that's an egregious amount of travel that you're letting political outside groups pick up when you're supposed to be, you know, a state Supreme Court justice who hears all cases fairly, even cases that might be brought by conservative legal groups.
But it's all out there for the voters to decide if what Rebecca Bradley did was above board or not.
at least it has to be reported unlike the U.S.
Supreme Court and that's where all the controversy is right now with Clarence Thomas and Justice Alito and more accepting all kinds of luxury trips and some of them were barely reported and some were not reported at all but there really isn't a code of ethics or any kind of a
disciplinary matter.
You're certainly not responsible to the voters because it's a lifetime appointment.
And so when it comes out, again, this is my age.
I was raised and much of human history prior to that is that if it's been discovered that you have received this much luxury travel around the world as a U.S.
Supreme Court justice, that's a scandal.
And you normally feel a sense of shame and step down.
But the day and age we live in now is you simply wait for attention to die down for people to get distracted by some other story and then you just go on as if nothing happened and maybe that's how Clarence Thomas and and Alito and the other Justices have been able to get by so far, but it's no less a scandal and There's no reason like today's report to remind us all that we have a court
in Washington DC that is fatally compromised and corrupt.
A local update is next for some of you.
Others will visit with Dan Hagen from Newswatch 12 in Rhinelander.
I'm Pat Crichtlow.
This is the Civic Media Radio Network.
You're listening to Civic Media.
Stay up to date on the latest news and information for your local community and Wisconsin by signing up for our free email newsletter.
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started.
on this Tuesday, it's August 19th and our friend Dan Hagen is here from NewsWatch 12, double JFWTV.
How are you, sir?
I'm doing great,
Pat.
How are you?
I'm doing fine.
I see the the Patagonia jacket is back out.
This is this is nice.
It's a lovely orange and black combination here that you've got.
You
know, 60 degrees here in Rhineland or overcast skies.
It kind of seems like follows here, but I know.
We were having that discussion earlier about, you know, maybe we're getting this early taste of, you know, the fall weather.
And that's, you know, when you've, when you've done nineties as long as we have, you know, that's, that's totally understandable.
But I also, I wanted to get you, I wanted to get your thoughts on the comparison there of the Fred Flintstone.
Is that folks watching on social media against orange and black?
In the picture here, the, the tie is purple, but usually it's kind of that light blue of what you got going there.
I mean, you kind of see it, don't you?
Maybe the designer got inspired by this.
I could see it.
You know, people often say look like Scooby-Doo.
Um, or Shaggy rather?
I don't know.
But,
uh,
I'm a cartoon character apparently.
You know what?
There are, there are worse things to be compared to.
Trust me.
I have been
that
when my hair is long.
So maybe you and
do
like a Halloween.
I could totally see that.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
Generic white man with brown hair.
Well, if I let the scruff come out.
Yeah.
Okay.
We're seeing it now once he lets the hair down.
Yep.
fact of the matter is we're we're all characters are in our own way and especially here in the mornings where we get the letter hair done we're not we're not these ruggedly handsome news anchors like Dan has to be in the evening time here so um what kind of stories are you working on over there these days it
well it takes a lot of work to be ruggedly handsome i my makeup artists you know
spend a couple hours your team you got a team that you spend in the chair there yeah
so my team you know spends a couple hours making me presentable um
You know, Pat, it's kind of interesting.
I don't even wear makeup on TV.
I don't know if I should be admitting that, but did you?
Yeah, I've watched your clips.
I've watched your clips.
I could give you a few pointers here.
Yeah, it's okay.
Now, there is nothing like when there's a new male reporter and like the first time that they're maybe filling in as a news anchor and
they see they look back at the tape and you see the you know the oily forehead or you see the little red patches on the cheeks and there's nothing like when when um it's kind of like walking a kid to kindergarten on the first day of school when we would walk the reporter next door to Walgreens and we'd head over to the cover girl section
He says opening his desk drawer and pulling out our little powder puff here and trying to get the right shade.
Let's see my my shade here is a 535 medium light is is what it is.
It's a cover girl clean mat that gets put on every day and when it was on TV there'd also be like a little liquid foundation on the beard you know to keep that at bay and if you if you miss a day if suddenly you're rushed breaking news or something people right in they're like
What happened to you?
You're very swarthy.
Did you are you drunk?
Like, you know, I just forgot makeup that day.
That is funny.
People always say I look better in person, which I don't know how to take that.
But I think it's because of my lack of makeup.
I might need to I should probably wear some on TV.
You know, a little bit never hurts to get rid of the shine.
But again, we you and I both seen plenty of people who overdo it.
who looked like maybe a little less spackling went into this.
Well, I do want to share a cool story, Pat, if you'll
allow me.
So up here in the Northwoods, we have this Northern Highland Fishery Research Area.
It's in the Northern Highland American Legion State Forest, which is DNR operated.
And this
Research area has been doing uninterrupted research since 1946.
So it's been doing, it's been looking into area lakes and doing fish production kind of studies.
And they did this really cool study recently on Sanborn Lake.
And all they tried to do was restore like natural decay in the lake.
So.
pretty much all the lakes nowadays.
They have humans all around them and people don't want leaves in their lake.
They don't want downed trees in their lake.
But they put in more than 100 downed trees into the Sanborn lake.
They let the leaves go in as well.
And it doubled.
Well, I shouldn't say that correlation does not mean causation, but it correlated with a doubling of fish production in the lake.
And as we know, that's a huge issue nowadays.
There's so much stocking going on.
So some pretty promising research.
there with uh with boosting fish populations.
So you know that's interesting this whole again restoring thing we talked about this with the Milwaukee flesh floods last week about how they were turning uh you know river channels into concrete channels basically because people didn't like the the muck and the trees and the way it would flood and so they essentially monkeyed around with mother nature and you know to to to its detriment and there's now this move to kind of get things back to a
more natural state.
So this is a very nice development up there.
Yeah, pretty cool.
And the next thing that they're working on, they're going to try to mimic what Mother Nature was like before climate change.
Ice out time.
So the time when ice is off of
a
lake in the spring has varied a lot more because of climate change.
So they're actually going to
Change the temperature of the water in a few lakes to see if it will help walleye production because a big theory is that you know walleyes spawn in the spring But with this varying ice out time they get off cycle from like zooplankton and other Other food that small walleye would like to eat so they're actually going to try to change the temperature in some of the lakes to see how that impacts walleye reproduction So that could be fascinating as well
it is fascinating because again we you know we we don't get to enjoy these things if a changing climate you know continues to do a number on everything from you know seasonal snowfall to whether you even get ice on some of these lakes or not with the warmer winters so I'm really happy to see these things and glad that you're following it there up at WJFW that's News Watch 12 in Rhinelander where Dan Hagen follows along and is also a good sport as we talk TV makeup tips you know we cover it all and just
10 little minutes every week.
So I should cover more, you know, but you know, no, no, you're beautiful.
Don't ever shave.
All right.
Have a great day and we'll be back with more live from Lake Wasota here on the Civic Media Radio Network right after this.
Kritho, where we
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There was supposed to be this doubleheader today at Wrigley Field between the Brewers and the Cubs.
There was one game, the makeup game from an earlier rainout, and then the second game was rained out.
But in the first game, Freddie Peralta, six innings of one hit shutout ball.
The Cubs only got two hits for the entire game.
The Brewers coasted to a seven to nothing win in the series opener home runs by Bryce Terrang and Caleb Durbin.
And then game two was rained out.
So once again, we're facing a day night double header at Wrigley Field because they've got to get in five games in four days.
And so the first game, again, pregame at 1245 this afternoon.
And then game two, that pregame coverage will begin at 630.
And the weather is a lot nicer.
They will almost definitely get in both games of that double header, you know, unless of course, Chicago is again looking for a way out of it as they seem to do sometimes with the weather.
Let's talk about the weather and the climate and the changes up in Canada that have led to a summer of wildfire smoke that has affected us here in Wisconsin.
Certainly those wildfires have affected folks in Canada a lot more.
They're hurting right now.
These are forests that are way up north, not the kinds of things that are easily managed.
And then of course there's a changing climate that Canada had much less to do with than say certain other industrial countries.
But that didn't stop some politicians from complaining about it anyway.
There was, for example, Congressman Tom Tiffany and other members of Congress who signed on to a sternly awarded letter to Canada about the wildfire smoke and their helpful advice on what Canada could be doing differently.
And Dan Hagen is sticking around with us from NewsWatch 12, WJFW and Rhinelander.
And Dan, the same could be said, there were state legislators that kind of wanted to play me too on this as well, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Representative Calvin Callahan is Republican from Tomahawk and he sent a strongly worded letter.
I think he put in a formal complaint as well.
Yeah, we've been dealing with that smoke for most of the summer, unfortunately.
Yeah, he wrote the letter to Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the International Joint Commission calling for an investigation into Canada's wildfire management practices.
Well, it seems like we would all benefit from folks who
maybe know a little bit more about the subject and could, you know, help our Canadian neighbors to better educate some of our legislators and lawmakers here.
And Fred Clark is just that kind of a person, a former state legislator from the Baraboo area, who now lives up in the Bayfield area.
And I saw that on, on Substack, he has a column entitled Our Smokey Summer, The Fine Art of Schooling Our Canadian Neighbors.
And Fred, nice to have you back here again.
Thanks for being here.
Pat.
You make clear in no uncertain terms what you thought of these kinds of, you know, sternly worded letters to Canada and what it is they're exposing about their lack of knowledge when it comes to, you know, firefighting and to woodland management.
How would you describe just the overall thesis of how you describe
the opinions in these letters?
Well, to begin with, it's insulting to suggest to our neighbor to the north, which is undergoing a natural disaster of really, this is the second year in the last three years that Canada's had just record breaking number of fires.
And we're complaining right now about smoke around our barbecues.
And
Not to minimize the fact that smoke impacts are real.
It affects the health of many people and it is inconvenient, but imagine what the Canadians are experiencing right now.
We have a long history of cooperation with Canada in firefighting and fire management.
We share resources back and forth across the border all the time.
Congressman Tiffany and his colleagues simply picked up the phone and had an hour long phone call with Canadian natural resources ministers.
or the ambassador, they would have learned a lot and maybe would have written a very different letter if they'd been interested in it.
But instead, as you write, they instead relied on false social media posts that conflate the difference between human caused fires with arson and that, you know, they need to do a better job of what patrolling these woods.
And I mean, these woods, these are not what we typically think of as woods or even what you'd think of and say Southern Canada.
Northern Canada is a different beast altogether, right?
What we're talking about here are the boreal forests of far Northern Canada that grades into the subarctic region.
These are sometimes called the taiga forests, small sparse trees, very scattered on the landscape.
very different than the forests that you and I and most Americans are used to.
And the key point here is that these are large roadless areas that are essentially almost impossible to access except with float planes or boats in many cases.
So they seem to have this idea that the logging equipment could just be driven all around Canada that then these woods out.
In fact, most of these areas are unmanageable for a variety of reasons.
Believe me, the Canadians know how to do resource management.
If you want to go to British Columbia and look at the mountainsides there, they know how to log in Canada.
But these areas, a totally different game.
It's about half of the United States is in this kind of condition that's essentially roadless and sparsely forested and very difficult to manage.
And now they're undergoing a historic drought that is leading to these wildfire conditions.
the ignition sources will always be there and it's really climate change that is driving these extreme fires that are happening all over the world.
This is not unique to Canada.
So Fred, would you point out a different solution to Canada?
It seems like they know as
as much as they know, and they're doing everything they can.
But I know in these letters they're saying that Canada could be more active, but you're saying it's impossible for them to even actively manage.
Congressman Tiffany seems to think that there'll be loggers in every community ready to just go thin these trees if we just let them.
In fact, there's no industry.
There's no forest products industry in that entire region of Canada of the scale that would be needed to even do forest management.
And the reason there isn't is because the trees aren't there.
So that's not a possibility.
Any thinning or prescribed fire that could be done to reduce fire risk is all cash out the door, hugely expensive work.
And we're talking again about an area about half the size of the United States.
So Canada knows full well that this is a giant natural resource challenge for them.
They have a all of society approach that they're trying to take.
Many of these are, much of these lands are indigenous lands that are in the control of First Nations in Canada.
It's a hugely complex and expensive problem to solve.
I think what
US members of Congress should be doing is trying to understand this issue better and offering to cooperate, which is what we've always done with Canada historically.
And we are seeing that cooperation in terms of, you know, there are firefighters from the U.S.
who are going there.
Folks in Canada are very grateful for that.
But we also have to be mindful that there are lessons to be learned here.
And in my mind, lesson one would be not to gut the budget of the U.S.
Forest Service, because what's happening there, you know, with a changing climate, could just as easily, you know, be our problem in some future summer.
Yeah, just days before this letter was sent, these representatives voted for the big, beautiful bill that among other things that eliminated almost all of the subsidies for renewable energy that would have helped us reduce our climate emissions in the United States, which is a key driver to climate change around the world.
And they supported the
Elon Musk's monkey wrenching of federal agencies, including the U.S.
Forest Service, our lead wildfire control agency has lost more than 4,000 experienced firefighters in the last six months.
In what world does that logical, logically makes sense to do that and then send a letter like they did?
We're talking to Fred Clark, former state legislator from the Baraboo area, who now is writing and living in the Bayfield area, and talking about wildfires up in Canada that have, by the way, this isn't just a bunch of trees up north that are burning.
This has dislodged or displaced, I mean, how many people like 40,000 Canadians have had to find new place?
They've lost their homes or their communities, right?
Entire communities have been evacuated.
And the only reason that number isn't larger is again, because most of these areas are very sparsely populated and mostly roadless, but entire communities have been displaced.
Yep, it's been inconvenient for people in the United States.
And at times it's a health risk to have that wildfire smoke coming down here, but just imagine the impact on Canadians and what they're dealing with.
Let's think about our obligation to our neighbors.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, that's Fred Clark.
And I'm also joined by Dan Hagen from WJFW News Watch 12 on this Tuesday morning here across the Civic Media Radio Network.
And Dan, again, we have the wildfire smoke that's coming down from Canada.
But much like 2023, when this was happening as well with a massive wildfire season, I'm sure it has sparked no pun intended conversation in your part of the state about, again,
making sure that the resources are there to fight wildfires as they break out, you know, in North Central Wisconsin.
Yeah, and if you look at these letters sent by the legislators, climate change.
is not mentioned in them, right?
And that's a big part of this problem, perhaps the biggest part.
So I want to go back to Fred here.
Fred, can you just draw a clear line for us between climate change and these fires?
Because I know we've had droughts before, but what makes it different in the late in 2020s?
Yeah, well, what's driving the extremes is the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that is contributing to
these climactic and weather extremes and in this case it's contributing to the extended drought that has these forests just tinned or dry and all it takes is a spark in many cases to set off some of these blazes but the research on this is clear and there is lots of climate science work that
basically teases up the impact of climate change toward driving these more extreme conditions.
And the take on message is, this isn't a one off.
This is what we can expect to see more of in the years ahead.
And, and it's a global problem.
This is not just a Canadian problem.
No, far, far from it.
And the extremes, I mean, again, are self evident.
Look at the flash flooding in Milwaukee, where you've got this once in a 1000 year rainfall, we get heavier rains.
We get hotter, longer droughts.
You get storms that explode now in growth.
Look at Hurricane Erin right now.
Went from a nothing, a tropical depression to a category five hurricane faster than any other storm.
And this is this.
Fred is kind of our new normal that these things are going to to spread.
And I'm not in any way suggesting that we're necessarily helpless about it.
But I just, I wanted to make sure that people understand that, you know, for the moment, this is kind of a new normal and it doesn't make sense to just say to Canada, hey, could you, could you keep the smoke down over there, please?
You know, it's just not very feasible.
We're talking to Fred Clark, former legislator about the situation up in Canada.
We've been joined by Dan Hagen from NewsWatch 12, WJFW and Rhinelander.
Dan, again, it's great to catch up with you.
Thanks for sticking around so we could visit with Fred and we'll talk to you again next week.
Sounds good.
All right.
And we will continue here with Fred.
Some of you will have a local update as well.
And then in our eight o'clock hour, we will be talking to Dan Schaefer.
He's the political editor for Civic Media and founder of the Reconbobulation Area.
I'm Pat Crichtlow.
This is the Civic Media Radio Network.
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So welcome back at 752 to what would be our way up north segment.
but we started way up north way too early because we wanted to spend some extra time with Fred Clark, who is way up north now in the Bayfield area, but weren't always the case as a state legislator in the Baraboo area from 2009 to 2014.
So Fred, before we get back to Canadian wildfire talk and things like that, what's a nice young legislator from Baraboo doing way up north now?
I can completely see why that is and I can completely see why you and others were so
bothered with this talk from politicians about smoke when what they were getting at, and I didn't want to put words in your mouth too soon, but now that we've gone into this conversation a bit, I'm going to go ahead and put words into Tom Tiffany's mouth.
And in response, say, you know, the answer to preventing fires is not to clear cut everything and pave it over.
I know that some people would love to do that.
I mean, there's not a piece of land that I don't think Congressman Tiffany wouldn't like to see strip mined at some point.
or paved over in the name of development.
But that's really not how we like to practice things up here.
And when we're talking about fire management, I know there's this focus on what they like to talk about in terms of management techniques.
To me, that's just a sneaky way of saying, yeah, if you would just let more industry in, that would solve things.
And there's a, I want to make clear, I'm not talking about, let's just have old growth forest with no management.
There's room for a balanced approach here.
And there are many parts of the Western United States, for example, where selective thinning can be an important tool in reducing fire risk.
We know that.
The science is there.
But it's not a one size fits all.
It's not a solution that works everywhere or even could be applied everywhere.
And in Northern Canada, again, these are very sparsely forested areas where there's trees and there's wetlands and there's shrubs.
There's a ton of carbon stored in these lands, but most of it's below ground.
So it's a totally different set of tools in the toolkit and not as many tools available to help manage this problem.
And the irony here is that the president's budget, for example, well, not only have more than 5,000 people left the United States Forest Service in the last six months, many of them were experienced wildfire.
people who now we've lost their expertise and their skill set.
They also want to eliminate the research program in the US Forest Service, which most people don't know about.
You think about national forests, but the United States Forest Service Research Program is the largest natural resource research program in the world.
It does important work on wildlife and climate change, and they want to eliminate that too.
So we're just stumbling our way into this future.
with no resources with no knowledge.
And here we're going to go try to tell the Canadians how they ought to do
it.
And by the way, it's not just that one as as you make note by President Trump withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords.
It also helps dismantle other climate programs and renewable energy initiatives, including all kinds of other research that was being done on climate science.
And now again, all of that wouldn't wouldn't stop this year's fires.
But it would certainly help
find ways to stop making the problem worse, but also to mitigate the impacts that are going to be happening for the near future because of a change in climate.
We need science and research and just strategic thinking about this question more than ever.
And at the very moment when we need these things the most, we're walking backwards.
I've called this
the JD Vance School of Diplomacy.
Basically screw everything up at home and then let's go tell our neighbors how they ought to do it better.
It is something that we've seen in
in many recent events and some that we're going to be talking about in our next hour with Dan Schaeffer as well from the reconbobulation area.
But Fred, I really appreciate you taking some time to talk to us about that.
It's been great having you make this relocation up here.
And, you know, another time down the road, I want you to come back here and we're going to talk about 2026, some of the people that you're talking to up there and what the political landscape is going to look like because I may be wrong.
But I think there's still a little bit of a
a political animal in you as well.
And I don't doubt that there's going to be conversations about how that's all going to go to make sure that there's good representation up in the Northwoods next year.
Oh, without a doubt.
Fred Clark.
Great to visit with you.
Thank you again so much.
Have a great day.
See you soon.
Thank you.
Yep.
So Fred is part of our way up north segment that we started a few weeks back.
And it was actually Fred and a few other folks who reached out to me and said, Hey, you need more voices from our part of the state from, you know, Hayward and Ashland and Bayfield and superior places like that.
And I said, Great.
Come help me.
And so we've had this wonderful cycle of voices.
There was Jeff Renneke last week from the Friends of the Apostle Islands talking about the Wave Boy system that is helping keep boaters safe up there as well.
So we are always looking for your suggestions.
And by the way, not just for way up north, it's kind of like kind of like up north news itself where people say, aren't you guys just do news up north?
No, no, no.
We're America's up north, all of Wisconsin.
is America's up north.
And so we're looking for stories all over Wisconsin to do.
So whether it's way up north or whether it's way down in places like Lake Geneva and Janesville, Beloit, which by the way, for the rest of the country, that's still up north.
There's plenty of people that think of Lake Geneva.
They're going there.
Hey, we're going up north to Wisconsin.
Wherever you'd like to see some stories done, have some ideas for guests or topics.
We would love to have your suggestions, get into the comment sections on Facebook or YouTube, or send us an email radio at upnorthnewswi.com.
When we come back, we're going to be talking in our next hour to Dan Schaefer from the recon population area about Congressman Brian Stile.
And is he sending signals that he'd like to help President Trump
who once again signaled that if it were up to him, he'd get rid of mail-in balloting.
I'm Pat Crichtlow.
This is the Civic Media Radio Network.
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