(upbeat music)
- Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Lowe.
Election day finally came and went earlier this week
in a few minutes a report from Art Hackett
on a congressional race that made history here in Wisconsin.
Also this week, meet a nationally renowned dancer
whose extreme moves and drive have propelled her through
great personal tragedy.
Find out who owns the most acres of forested land
in our state.
You might be surprised to discover
it's not the state or federal government.
And sit back and enjoy a rare view
of one of the nation's environmental jewels
located right here in Wisconsin.
Stay with us for all this and more.
(upbeat music)
- Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided
by the people of a lion's energy who bring safe, reliable and
environmentally friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods,
and life in Wisconsin running smoothly,
a lion's energy, offering energy-saving
ideas on the web.
Wisconsin voters made history on Tuesday,
not because of voter turnout or the results
of the presidential race, but because of who is elected
in the fourth congressional district.
Voters in Milwaukee gave Democrat Gwen Moore
a resounding victory, making her Wisconsin's first
African-American member of Congress.
That seat had been held for the past 20 years
by Gerald Clutchka, who is retiring.
Art Hackett spent Tuesday's final campaign moments
with Moore and has this report.
- Be out, seat here.
Vote, carry, go.
- Sometimes candidates have to rent a soundtrack
to put a notable message on the streets.
In North Milwaukee, near the Atkinson Branch Library,
where state Senator Gwen Moore votes,
a soundtrack wasn't needed.
Inside, the citizens of the fourth district contributed
to Gwen Moore's winning 70% of the votes,
making her Wisconsin's first African-American member
of Congress.
- It could be.
- Midway through election day, Moore stood in the foyer
of a restaurant on the far south end of the district,
working to get out the vote.
In many cases, she was too late.
People had already voted for her.
- Hi, voted for you.
(laughing)
- My classmate elected me as the most likely
to become the first woman president of the United States.
And so, I don't know who thought that was funny.
I can tell you, I've spent my entire life
preparing myself for this day.
- In a city where North used to mean black
and South meant white, Moore's high-touch campaigning
in the south end of town might once have raised eyebrows.
- You wanna know, I've been black for 53 years.
Well, I'm a little overwhelmed by what that means.
It should be no surprise that I am in this position
because I'm following a path that Wisconsin voters
and Milwaukee voters have followed a formula
that they have followed for years.
And that is that the state senator
that has the biggest base, the longest-serving state senator
who has done good work in the community gets the nod.
And that's who I am.
- Moore was first elected to the assembly in 1988
and to the Senate in 1992.
You can tell something about what she's done
by seeing where she turns up in our videotape archive.
- I said it, I'm sorry.
- In 2003, she was meeting with an activist
for the developmentally disabled.
- I don't think we need another prison.
- In 2001, she was complaining that the state
bought another prison.
In 1993, she was arguing that expanding healthcare
would get people off of welfare.
- We have also been very generous as a state
with our Healthy Start program.
Looking at preventing enrollments
on an even more costly program, the AFDC program,
healthcare has no gender, no race, no color,
and the job.
- Jobs.
- Moore knows about welfare.
She was once on it herself.
- As a parent, on welfare, one of the things that was
extremely terrifying to me about leaving welfare
was losing my healthcare.
- I have a daughter who's now 35,
who has and has been had a chronic problem with asthma.
And, you know, so the prospect of taking some job,
say in a restaurant where I have no healthcare
was not an option for me.
? You're to get to like a hair ?
- Her daughter is now the lead singer
in the band, Fats And Witch.
They played it Moore's Victory Party.
? Oh ?
- I think I'd for a disposition where I have enough
hutzpah to actually run, but enough humility
to actually serve people.
- Moore says she learned something from her campaign.
Why people don't vote.
- They don't vote because they don't think
it makes any difference.
I literally raised a million dollars.
I'm a million dollar girl.
And during that entire time, I never called
one of the 8,000 people who had no gas and electricity.
I not once called anyone who's unemployed
and asked them for money.
I am promising to keep those people very close to my heart.
We've talked a lot about my making history
on, you know, that today being a history-making day
for Wisconsin.
And, you know, my fervent goal is to make today
be a make a difference day.
It's more important to me to make a difference
than to just make history.
- When I saw those record numbers of people
turning out to vote, it filled my heart with hope
that we are gonna take this country back.
Thank you so very very much.
(audience cheering)
(upbeat music)
- It may feel like the year of politics,
but 2004 is also officially the year of Wisconsin forestry.
This is the 100th year since the state hired its first
forester, EM Griffith, and began the state forestry program.
Today, Wisconsin has 16 million forested acres.
The county, state, and federal governments own
a good chunk of that land as does the timber industry,
but by far, the largest amount of forested acres
are privately owned.
As reporter Liz Kerner found, there are many reasons
these owners choose to invest in forested land
and many land management styles from which to choose.
What comes to mind when you think of a forest?
A place for a peaceful stroll?
Or the source of wood products and jobs?
Perhaps you think of it as a home for animals and plants?
Whatever image comes to mind, what goes on in our woods
affects everyone in Wisconsin.
Consider the economic impact alone.
According to the Department of Natural Resources,
forest products generate a total of $20 billion a year
in Wisconsin.
Tachon another 5.5 billion for forest-based tourism
and recreation.
Trees cover 16 million acres in Wisconsin
and private owners control almost 60% of that land.
Owners like Dale and Fay Lightfuss.
They bought a large farmstead in Wapaka
County almost 50 years ago and planted the fields
in Pine, a lot of Pine.
While we planted the bought 250,000 trees under property,
and it takes about 20 to 25 years to get the first harvest.
Growing healthy trees might seem as easy as falling off a log,
but over time, questions do come up.
For answers, the Lightfuss has joined
one of the many educational organizations in the state,
the Wisconsin Woodland Owners Association.
They also became members of the American Tree Farm System.
They must be doing something right.
They've been repeatedly named one of Wisconsin's
outstanding tree farmers.
You want to thin it out enough so that
the good trees continue to grow in diameter, not just in height.
They're growing good grounds.
They're still pointy.
They're still reaching for the sky.
And you take out the trees that are spindly,
the double tops, the ones that are too close together.
You can see the large fork on that tree
causing it to be a high-risk tree for splitting.
In the late 90s, the Lightfuss is enrolled
in the managed forest law.
A state program that reduces their property taxes.
As part of the program, their local DNR Forester
helped them create a management plan.
The plan includes a timetable for cutting their trees.
I guess we've got probably about three, four years
yet before we come here and do what's
spinning on this.
A quarter of a million people own private woods in Wisconsin,
but only about 30,000 participate in this
tax relief program.
Although in recent years, property tax increases
have doubled the number of applicants.
We've got 150 square feet base area.
I think the biggest concern is the length of time
that you have to sign up.
It's a 25-over-50-year contract.
And many people have a hard time planning that far ahead
into the future.
And there are some significant penalties
if you pull out before the end of that time.
So it takes a commitment.
You really do have to be interested in the long term.
Nice day for a walk out here anyway.
Yes. The Lightfusses now
enjoy the rewards of their long-term commitment.
They built a home in their woods and moved there
when Dale retired.
Today, we think of the trees as a supplement to the income
that we have.
To do something we wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.
It's an income which is a wonderful plus right now,
but it was not an income that we ever depended on.
Owners like Dale and Faith Lightfuss
buy hundreds of acres of land in the country
and then plant trees.
We need to know what that bird is.
Others, like Dale Anderson and Lynn Goese,
buy only a few acres just for the freedom
to walk in their own woods.
It's fun to walk around in a woods.
It's just fun.
It smells good.
It's just fun to be outside and to know
that your own little piece of heaven is really neat.
Basically, I do amateur wildlife photography, mostly
the birds, and I've probably got over 125 different birds
and a lot of different animals too.
So that's a particular interest to me
to draw some more wildlife in.
A few birch trees poke up through the brush
on the Anderson Goese property.
They brought in a machine planter to
fill in the open strip on the edge.
Because they were new to the neighborhood,
they signed up with Wisconsin family forests.
And the main mission is to tie woodland owners
to their communities and have a community-based approach
to taking care of your woods.
Because I think neighbors, they don't know each other,
as well as they used to.
People move around a lot more.
And I think by having a common thread,
then people-- I mean, you go up
to a woodland owner and you may have an
immediate contact.
You've planted trees, you've done things.
It's just a contact and it's connecting to the lands.
Actually, it is.
Because we are from town.
And when we came out here, as you know,
you were quite spread out from each other.
So you don't meet a lot of people, especially
if you're busy.
Events like field days bring neighbors together.
Hello, and welcome to our field day.
Very good day, good.
At the field day, everyone learns a little
and gets their hands dirty.
We'll open up the slot with a tree spot.
This is ideal weather for plant trees.
It's cloudy, it's wet.
The roots one dry out.
And you bring it back up.
It's the same height as the ground is.
And you just push them tight.
That's it.
You planted a tree.
Yay! Yay!
And are they mostly pines?
Or are there some hardwoods in there too?
I got all pines today.
I got a few.
Tamrac I brought along.
And by the way, there's the white screws in
the Norway pine today.
Yeah, the blue screws, pattern.
Yay! Are these trees--
Are these trees getting-- What systems--
--what are the fragile as they appear?
No, no.
You can be pretty rough with them.
They're rather rough.
You don't break them.
The last field day we had was about managing your forest,
knowing what to cut and when to cut it,
to make a nice, healthy woods.
That's probably the most important thing as
far as I'm concerned.
Is a healthy, healthy forest.
Anderson and Goese enrich their woodlands
and get to know their neighbors during the field day.
And even though they don't own enough land
to make much money from future lumber sales,
they're committed to planting trees.
Their main motivation is enjoying their woods today.
Whether woodland owners take on less than 10 acres
or more than 1,000, their land management decisions
have the economic and ecological potential to affect us all.
We'll bring you more reports in the coming weeks
on the forest industry in Wisconsin.
Another of Wisconsin's national treasures
is the Apostle Island's National Lakeshore.
It's home to a rich cultural history,
as well as a cornucopia of animal, bird, and plant species.
But as reporter Joanne Garrett shows us,
the lakeshore area is perhaps best known
simply for its stunning beauty.
Water and light.
It's the signature of the Apostle Islands.
Some call them our jewels, the Apostles,
the 21 islands and 12 miles of lakeshore
that make up the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
Even from the air, it's hard to grasp the scope of it
to take in the wealth of what we own.
Here's a way.
Take a sunset over Sand Island, where every minute
brings a different picture, vained with gold.
Sky paintings.
Free and fleeting.
Just a little reminder of what we own.
We move now from the natural beauty of the Apostle Islands
to the beauty of the human form.
Leach Outping is a UW-Madison dance professor
who has earned national recognition for her creative
and energetic, extreme move style of dancing.
I had the opportunity to talk with Leach Outping
about her distinctive dance moves and a tragic experience
that could have silenced her unique artistry forever.
[MUSIC]
I just love to move.
I love to move and it's that obsession with movement,
I think, that has fueled my drive.
She was a rising star in international dance circles,
known for her tremendous physicality, risk-taking,
what became known as Leach Outpings Extreme Moves,
but then came an extreme twist of fate.
Well, it shook me to my core.
It was something that dancing was something
that I wanted to do for most of my life.
Leach Outping was born in 1963 in San Francisco,
a middle child of Jin Nung and Kim Harley
who had emigrated from China.
As a young girl, Leach excelled in gymnastics,
a passion she shared with her father.
She especially loved the floor exercise
with its graceful leaps and elements of dance.
She was the kind of student every teacher wants.
Ruth Solomon was Leese Dance Professor
at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Not only could I count on her to encapsulate my movement
or anything I created, but where I'd needed feedback
from the dancers, she would come up with some great ideas
and they were usually in the aesthetic
that I was working with on a particular piece.
To the back.
Oh, where are I?
I'll leave it down.
Good. Control.
Control. So there's no
waiting those knees.
People say, I will you train Chao Ping first for years
because she had never studied dance before.
And I say anybody could have trained Chao Ping.
Like her legendary Leeps, Leese professional career
exploded. The New York Times called her
work momentous, ingenious.
There was a fellowship at the Kennedy Center,
the formation of her own company, Leach Outping Dance,
nearly 60 works produced in choreographed.
But on a snowy January night in 1999, everything changed.
A near fatal accident left Lee with a mangled leg
and shattered foot.
There were fears she would never walk much less dance.
It really rocked me and it made me wonder what I would
ever do again, you know.
If I was going to be alive.
Solomon, who has written extensively on dance injuries,
was shocked at the catastrophic nature of Lee's injuries.
We have the repetitive, what we call micro-traumatic injuries,
so that the bodies wear and tear, the repetition,
all takes its toll on the bodies.
Yes, meniscal tears, yes, stress fractures.
But the kind of injury that Chao Ping had, which
meant reattaching all those tendons, the
result was so traumatic.
We don't have those kinds of injuries in dance.
Thank God.
There have been nine surgeries, countless hours
of physical therapy.
Then, in 2001, Lee returned to the stage.
What I was forced to do afterwards
was to draw on my dancers.
Draw on them physically for their abilities.
Draw on them emotionally.
Draw on them as artists.
So it actually helped me grow as a choreographer,
because I became much more visual in the
sense that I worked.
I became much more spatially aware.
I became more architecturally aware about the way
that I wanted to my choreography to inhabit space,
to activate space.
We turned to other people to be inspired by them,
to be pushed by them, to be challenged.
And so I am pushing them to work more towards their limits
and to question their own senses of what they
think that they can do.
So oftentimes, they may feel uncomfortable.
No, that seems to scary.
That's too hard.
That's, you know, I don't-- I don't-- I'm not
strong enough, something.
But they find out later that they can do-- they can go there.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And Lee herself is going to new places,
like television, a place much different than the stage.
And it's very intimate.
And of course, you can do things with video or film
that you can't do on stage.
I mean, you can just see the speed of the
feathers falling down.
They're floating now quite slowly.
So even that kind of thing, you know, is wonderful.
You can really enlarge the moment.
You know, enlarge the moment and also bring the audience
into the moment in a different way than you can on stage.
And you can direct the audience's eye even more
powerfully, I think, than you can on stage.
And sometimes, the artist directs her own eye inward,
as she did in residues, a piece that
aired on Wisconsin Public Television.
Oh, boy, I made that after the accident sometime.
And I was interested in investigating
the relationship between these two people
and two people who are pretty intimate.
And one that maybe is not necessarily just loving.
So there's some different colorations,
I think, of that relationship in that piece.
Again, investigating a kind of physical, gymnastic,
acrobatic kind of partnering with lifts and things like that.
And at the same time, finding different ways
that these two bodies can be intertwined in the spaces that
are left around them or between them.
Leigh's artistic vision is shaping
the next generation of dancers.
As an associate professor of dance at UW Madison,
she's teaching the extreme moves that have become her signature.
They know that I'm really there to help guide them.
And as their guide, I can just take them
on these different journeys and show them some possibilities
and hope that they'll take the opportunity.
And I-- like my dancers, I try to inspire them and push them.
As she has pushed herself.
In part, I mean, to be perfectly honest,
it's something that I struggle with.
It's something that I oscillate between feeling very blessed
to have had the opportunity to grow from this
and learn from this.
But on the other hand, I am sad and angry about the loss
that for me of my dancing in the way
that I had been dancing.
So it's something that I don't feel absolute
about in one direction.
I think that it's something that I can embrace more readily
at some times.
And then other times I sit in my grief.
I knew what she was going through.
I've written papers on the psychological aspects of dance
injuries. Child pigs unique in that
many people would not have come back to full-out
dance and choreography after that kind of an injury.
They would have maybe gone to yoga, one of
the somatic practices in order to continually
be involved in movement.
But she chose to come back as a dancer, performer,
and a choreographer.
And I think that determination, that strength inside of her--
that comes from some psychological place
that I'm almost not familiar with.
That's unique.
That is very special.
Lisa, as the accident, has given her a greater
sense of community.
She no longer sees herself in isolation.
Also, I feel like I am more interested in
celebrating humanity in my work.
So I'm more interested in not just the struggles
of the individual in our world, but also
just celebrating how all these individuals
are doing that together.
That's our program for this week.
Thanks for joining us.
We leave you now with a look at the Upper Mississippi Wildlife
Refuge in Trimple, O'County.
For In Wisconsin, I'm Patty Lo.
See you next week.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the people
of a lion's energy who bring safe, reliable,
and environmentally friendly energy
to keep homes, neighborhoods, and life in Wisconsin running
smoothly, a lion's energy, offering energy-saving ideas
on the web.
[MUSIC PLAYING]