Leader of anti-conservation group speaks at timber conference sponsored by UW-Madison center

The executive director of American Stewards of Liberty, a right-wing anti-conservation organization, spoke at a conference Tuesday morning held by the Rhinelander-based Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association (GLTPA), alleging that environmentalists are atheists and casting conservation efforts as a plan by the federal government to take power from property owners. 

GLTPA is a non-profit that represents the interests of the Wisconsin and Michigan forest products industry with the stated mission of “enhancing multiple-use forests for future generations.” On Tuesday, the organization held its “spring celebration” at the Island Resort and Casino, a towering complex sprouting between the trees of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula less than a mile from the line that divides the central and eastern time zones. This part of the state is dotted with remnants of the timber industry and yard signs pleading for the protection of the Menominee River. 

One of the event’s sponsors was UW-Madison’s Kemp Natural Resources Station. Kelly Tyrell, a spokesperson for UW-Madison said in a statement that the speaker at the GLTPA conference is chosen by a committee and that the university hosts speakers on a viewpoint neutral basis. 

“Kemp Station hosted the lecture series as a stand-alone event prior to 2015, to a small audience, but now provides funding to the Great Lakes Professional Timber Association for a speaker during the organization’s conference to allow for a larger audience,” she said. “The GLTPA conference attracts an average of 500-600 forest professionals from WI, MN and MI. The Hamilton Roddis speaker is selected by a conference planning group. The speakers have covered a variety of topics in the past 10 years, including carbon credits and trends in the forestry business. As a public land-grant university, UW-Madison hosts speakers in a viewpoint neutral manner and highlights speakers with a variety of viewpoints to promote discussions on a range of topics.”

Past the banks of glowing and ringing slot machines in an auditorium that advertised previous performances by the Blues Brothers, the Doobie Brothers and watermelon-smashing comedian Gallagher, ASL’s executive director Margaret Byfield was given an hour to speak on Tuesday morning. 

Byfield and ASL have been involved in anti-conservation efforts across the country. In Nebraska, the group worked to change state law to give individual counties the ability to halt private conservation easements. Here in Wisconsin, Byfield and ASL were intimately involved in the effort to gin up local opposition to the Pelican River Forest project, which with the assistance of a recent federal grant will be the largest land conservation effort in state history. 

Taking the stage after a target shooting-themed motivational speaker, Byfield attacked efforts by the Biden administration to increase the amount of protected land and water across the U.S., claiming that these efforts — like the Pelican River project — stop the lands from being used for any human purposes. The Biden effort, 30×30, aims to protect 30% of the country’s land and water resources by 2030. 

“30 by 30 is an international agenda to permanently protect 30% of the world’s lands and oceans by 2030,” Byfield said. “And when I say permanently protect, these are lands … their ultimate objective is no human use. These are lands that can be set aside for nature and no human use including hunting, recreation, not just the productive uses like oil and gas, raising timber … no human use. These are lands to be set aside for nature.”

Actually, conservation easements and protected lands don’t generally thwart all human uses. The Pelican River Forest, for example, will remain a working forest with the explicit goal of supporting the area’s timber industry. Part of the negotiations in creating that easement involved planning with local snowmobile clubs to establish trails through the forest. Logging projects regularly take place in state forests and state parks, which also offer numerous recreational opportunities. 

Charles Carlin, director of strategic initiatives for Gathering Waters, a non-profit aimed at promoting the state’s land trusts and conserving natural areas, was at the conference. He says the “straight up false” claims Byfield and ASL make about 30×30 serve to “muddy the waters” in local communities by giving residents the baseline belief that conservation efforts are some sort of global conspiracy. 

“We are constantly having to push back against sort of lies and misinformation and mischaracterizations of conservation work,” Carlin told the Wisconsin Examiner, adding, “I think the agenda here is to confuse people.”

“She says that there’s going to be no hunting, no recreation, no timber, and that was just straight up false,” Carlin continued. “So when we go to a community to talk about a conservation project, in process, and now somebody raises their hand and they say, ‘Well, isn’t this part of that international conspiracy of 30 by 30?’ We have to dig out of this hole of just establishing some basic facts about what we’re doing before we can even have a meaningful conversation about the merits of the project or real concerns that folks would have.”

Throughout her speech, Byfield reiterated her belief that federal conservation “isn’t about conservation. This is about control.” She lamented  the fact that under federal  programs, the land “has to be managed from a sustainable perspective.” She claimed that sustainability measures are less about protecting resources and more about draining small, mostly rural communities of their industries.

“These conservation programs are really utilized to lower production,” she said. “That’s one of the results. If not completely eliminated, lowered production. So that takes dollars out of the local economy right there. The second thing that happens is it devalues the land, so it reduces the property tax. That takes more dollars out of the local economy. It also increases food prices and lumber prices, construction materials, because when there’s less area to produce, the value of that product goes up and it costs more to buy that. But importantly, how that impacts your local community is that means there’s less dollars for the schools, the hospitals, the emergency services, the roads, all of these necessary things that the local governments provide.”

“The cycle they’re creating is a consolidation of land into environmental organizations or government,” she continued. “The consolidation of power and dependency of the American people on the federal government. That’s where all of this is headed.”

Small communities dependent on industries such as timber are already facing economic pressures because of climate change. This year Wisconsin experienced a record-breaking warm winter, with much of northern Wisconsin having little to no snow pack. Those conditions directly affect the bottom line of timber companies because projects often require that winter logging only take place if the ground is frozen or covered in snow. 

Throughout her talk, Byfield repeatedly said “there’s no nature crisis,” which Carlin saw as an effort to sanitize her organization’s climate denial. But he said it’s irresponsible that the GLTPA would endorse those beliefs when its industry is dependent on the continued existence of a healthy environment in northern Wisconsin. 

“So setting aside the fact that her economic arguments are wrong, and bogus, it baffles my mind that a timber professionals organization that relies on healthy, strong forests would give a platform to a climate denier,” Carlin said. 

Along with reduced snowfall and freezing weather, timber companies must now grapple with the spread of invasive species that can better survive a warming climate, he added.

 “That’s a very real problem that is already undermining our forest products industry. And so we should all be rallying together to address climate change across the board, through natural solutions through decarbonizing our transportation and our energy systems,” Carlin said. “And I would expect that at a bare minimum, our industry associations are helping to lead that charge.” 

In a part of her speech in which she attempted to explain the beliefs of environmentalists, Byfield claimed that half of them are only interested in money and power while the other half are “typically atheists” who worship “Mother Earth” and believe humans don’t have a right to live on the planet. 

“Those who truly believe in the agenda, the environmental agenda, typically are atheists,” she said. “So their god is Mother Earth, you will see this in all their literature. So they don’t believe in the Creator; they worship the creation, which is why everything has to be protected, protected. It’s also the reason why they have no problem with population control. And so something that may insult us I see quite a bit ‘What do you mean food production?’ You know, we believe in life and humanity and we want to feed the world. That’s offensive to us, and we don’t really understand it, but just to understand their perspective. They think there are too many people on the earth, harming Mother Earth, and therefore saying that we might have to control agricultural production and food is not a problem.” 

Henry Schienebeck, executive director of the GLTPA, said in an email that he wouldn’t comment on what Byfield said during her speech, but said the organization’s members are committed to managing Wisconsin’s forests sustainably.

“Our members are leaders in and committed to sustainable forest management,” he said. “Without a healthy and sustainable forest our industry would cease to exist. Multiple members are 3rd, 4th and 5th generation logging families who are proud stewards of our environment.”

Byfield closed her speech with a statement she attributed to her father, stating that “either you have the right to own property or you are property.”

Carlin called the statement “appalling” in its disregard for the value of public lands that protect resources for future generations. 

“Public lands are widely accepted as America’s best idea,” he said. “The public lands that we all collectively own together are our national treasures. You know, they’re the jewels of the national parks, but they’re also the ecosystems that sustain all of us. Nature works for us every single day, it cleans our water; it cleans our air; it provides the materials upon which we all depend for our daily lives. And that is a collective inheritance and responsibility that we all share and so it’s just an appalling level of entitlement that Byfield was sharing, to say that all land should be in private hands and if you’re not fortunate enough, if you’re not rich enough to be a landowner, then you’re nothing but property. That’s nonsense. And it’s disrespectful.”