(bells chiming)
(upbeat music)
- Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Low.
This week, meet the woman who helped blow the whistle
on political corruption in Wisconsin.
Then an earthworm invasion, see how European earthworms
could destroy the North Woods as we know it.
And experience the extreme moves of dancer
Lee Shao Ping and the tragedy that threatened to
ground her for life.
We'll also enjoy a delicious sunset
along the Bruell River in Wisconsin.
- Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided
by the people of a lion's energy who brings 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.
UW Health, providing specialty in primary care
for all ages throughout Wisconsin.
Information on UW Health Physicians and Clinics
and on University of Wisconsin Hospital
is available on the web.
Wisconsin's Technical Colleges, providing local education
for the crucial occupations essential to our communities.
Wisconsin's Technical Colleges, Communities First.
- Political corruption at the state capital
is in the news again.
On Tuesday, a Department of Administration employee
was indicted on two federal felony counts
in connection with the awarding of a state travel contract.
The indictment alleges that Georgia Thompson
altered evaluation scores to give Adelman travel of Milwaukee
the contract with the intention of causing political advantage
for her supervisors.
Unfortunately, criminal charges against data officials
are nothing new.
There have been other charges and some guilty verdicts
against legislators from both parties
in what's known as the caucus scandal.
This week's indictment came the day after a grassroots
campaign reform group called the People's Legislature
met at the state capital.
Testifying at the event was Lindy Woodliffe from Milton.
You may not recognize her name, but in a sense,
Lindy Woodliffe's actions were how this whole chapter
in Wisconsin's political history began.
Producer Art Hackett reports.
- Lindy Woodliffe got a standing ovation
before the People's Legislature.
Who is she?
She was in the news in 2001 when she was known
by her maiden name, Lindy Wall.
- In 2000, during the campaign season,
I worked at the Assembly of Public and Caucus.
And in March of 2001, after the campaigns were done,
I resigned and delivered undeniable evidence
about the long-running scheme to defraud you,
the taxpayers of Wisconsin, through illegal campaigning,
where in the legislative leaders continually used tax dollars
to work against the democratic processes,
they had pledged to uphold.
- Woodliffe delivered what she calls undeniable evidence
to reporters for the Wisconsin State Journal,
what was known as the Caucus scandal in sued.
Two Republican lawmakers with whom Woodliffe worked,
Stephen Foti and Bonnie Ladwig have already pled guilty
to charges of using state resources for campaigns.
- Yes, sir.
- A third, former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen
is to go on trial in February.
If you had been in possession of such a bulk of information,
what would you have done?
I think that most people, if they had not been political,
all their life, and they came in and saw this,
they would be appalled.
And if they had the actual information
'cause they were instructed to take it home
and get it off-premises, what would you do?
I mean, it would be weighty on you, and I...
No, I'm happy I did it.
- This is the first time Lindy Woodliffe
has walked through the doors of the state capital
since she resigned in March of 2001.
- It's one of those things, you know, when you're very afraid
of something or very, have a lot of anxiety
about doing something, it's good to actually get over
that hurdle, so walking up the steps
and just opening up the door and seeing that nothing happened,
you know, no bombs went off or anything crazy.
It felt good.
- But bombs have continued to go off,
figuratively speaking, since Lindy Woodliffe left.
The investigation by law enforcement,
which followed newspaper reports generated
by Woodliffe's boxes of documents,
eventually snared to democratic state senators as well.
Brian Burke?
- I will impose a sentence of six months.
- Informer majority leader, Chakwala.
- How do you wish to plead to that charge?
- Deal to you.
- Woodliffe has troubled that the cases
have been settled by plea bargains.
- I have a lot of mixed feelings about it, I guess.
- You stole money from the taxpayers who was absent
to fund your run for higher office.
In some ways, the punishment doesn't fit the crime.
If you were a communist citizen and let's say
you had 15 counts of theft, would you get off
with just one count?
I mean, it's kind of difficult for me.
From that standpoint, and from the other side of it,
my biggest goal, I suppose, in what I wanted to happen
from all this wasn't just people going to jail.
It was the public knowing.
- Letting the people know was the reason
Woodliffe was attracted to what the people's legislature
called a public telling, as opposed to a public hearing.
- And don't be deceived.
There is still a problem.
A problem of conscience or a lack of it.
Our leaders, many of them, seem to have no shame.
No concern for the issues that matter to us.
- Woodliffe does not support all of the people's
legislatures agenda.
It supports taxpayer funding of campaigns.
Woodliffe does not.
- And it might talk a lot of people
because they would think, "Well, that's a great
method of reform."
And I don't think that it is because I think what
we need is less money.
I wish that these companies, instead of giving
campaign finance contributions to legislators,
would pay their workers more, or start investing
in their companies and create more jobs.
That's what they all say they want to do.
- Woodliffe would like to see come out
of the people's legislature is people,
people willing to run for office.
- We're always talking about, we have no options.
Nobody's running.
Where are the good people?
The good people might be in that room.
There certainly might be in their homes
and they're working today.
So it can happen.
I believe it can happen.
But what I saw in this building was lawmakers
who were lawbreakers, men and women who thung their nose
at the very laws they created.
And when exposed, complained that the laws
that they had made were too complicated
for them to comprehend.
(audience laughing)
If we reach deep down inside of our own selves,
we can do a better job than they have done.
Don't you believe that?
Don't you all think that you are a people?
(audience applauding)
For any one of you who wonders how I can have the courage
to do what I did, it comes straight from above.
My maker, my creator, love me and gave me a purpose
and that was to fight for justice.
And I'm gonna do that, even in my own feeble way.
But I'm gonna do it and I'm not gonna give up
and I don't want any of you to give up either.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
(upbeat music)
Invasion of the Earthworms.
It sounds like a title for a horror movie, right?
Well, it's not a fantasy from Hollywood,
it's really happening in our northern forests.
Earthworms from Europe have made themselves at home.
The problem is they're appetite.
An appetite that's already had a devastating effect
on native plants.
Producer Joanne Garrett digs in for the details.
This is a tale of two forests, running on either
side of a gravel road.
Think of it as forest A and forest B.
Two forests that together tell a story.
We're in the great divide ranger district
of Swamagan, Nicolay National Forest in Bayfield County.
This is pretty typical northern hardwood forest
of sugar maple dominated forest.
Steve Spickerman, a plenty collegeist
with the United States Forest Service is very unhappy
with the part of the Swamagan that we call forest A.
This is very unhealthy.
You see virtually nothing of what should be here.
Look down.
The thing that I'm looking at here is the ground.
The story is in the ground.
Kind of an invasion front moving through the forest.
An invasion in the soil.
To see how it works, take a look at the floor of forest B,
the healthy forest.
Forest B has Duff.
And what's Duff?
Duff is the accumulation of leaves
and other organic material that have fallen.
It creates a layer over top of the mineral soil.
It can be anywhere from an inch to 6,78 inches deep.
Duff is not the same as soil.
It sits on top, kind of like frosting.
Take a closer look at forest A, the unhealthy forest.
Forest A is losing its frosting.
And so what's happened over the course of, say, the past
20, 30, maybe 100 years, is a soil has literally changed.
It's gone from a soil that was very deep in leaf litter,
the stuff from the trees, to a soil that's
literally just dirt.
The Duff has vanished.
It's down to bare dirt, contrast with forest B.
When you have Duff, the soil becomes almost spongy feeling.
Forest B, the healthy forest, still has the right stuff.
Duff, what happened to forest A?
We've been wormed.
Worms, that's right, earthworms.
To the dismay of foresters, any colleges like Spicermont, the
forests of Northern Wisconsin have been invaded by
seven different species of European earthworms.
And they're plowing through this Duff layer, like contestants
at a pie eating contest.
They literally eat it.
They pull it down, they digest it, they consume it.
What? Weren't there always
worms wiggling through the North Woods?
Answer no.
These trees are rather recent.
8,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, this was covered by
a mile thick sheet of ice.
And that ice melted, the glaciers retreated over
several thousand years.
This area went from barren to tundra to boreal forest,
probably 3,000 years ago.
The species that we see here now moved in and
established the forest.
The forest was established in the absence of earthworms.
In their natural state, the woods are warm free.
And this is where conventional wisdom.
The assumption is that worms are a good thing.
Collides with reality.
Many of the plants that evolved in this kind
of system need the Duff.
They just won't do well on raw mineral soil.
Without Duff, some plants can die, plants
like spring ephemeral.
White trillium, nodding trillium, yellow violet,
blue coax, wild leeks, spring beauty, blood
root. These spring ephemeral blossom
in spring, and then they fade.
Now they seem to be gone for good.
Those plants have simply ceased to exist here.
Spickerman sifts through the evidence in the
wake of the worms.
Another tall tail sign that there are worms
here is what look like small sticks are actually
the ribs of last year's leaves.
All they left behind were the ribs of the leaves.
And the loss of these downed leaves, the Duff,
can affect standing trees.
Take a look at the base of the sugar maple.
You can see the moss, which should be
naturally on this maple.
Kind of an align along the bottom of the tree.
Well one of the things that's happened here is the soil has
literally gone from here to there.
We've seen places where the four or fours literally dropped
six, seven, eight inches.
And you lose the soil around your base.
It's going to have some real effects.
I'm actually seeing trees that are maybe half this diameter
begin to topple over because they no longer are
rooted in what they need to be rooted into.
They need the Duff.
It's true for standing trees.
It's true for seedlings.
But if you imagine something that's younger than this, trying
to get started out on this bare dirt, the moisture on
a summer like this summer where we had almost two months
without rain here, a young tree is simply not going to be
able to survive on this bare dirt.
Those seeds will desecate, die.
And you lose that too many summers in a row.
You lose a generation of trees.
You lose the animals that burrow and live
in these downed leaves.
Salamanders, spring peepers, wood frogs, small mammals,
like voles, different types of mice that would be living in the
leaf litter that are obviously not here because that leaf
litter is gone.
So if the worms aren't native, how did they get here?
When the first farmers came from Europe to North America, they
brought plants, they brought animals, they brought worms.
Following the cut over here, around 1900, this area, a lot
of it was sold off its farms.
There were farms dotted all through the Chihuahua
Mignico National Forest.
And brought worms.
And fishing brought worms.
You get done with your day of fishing, you pull back up to
the boat landing, what do you do with the worms?
And I'll admit I'm actually guilty of this too.
I haven't done it in a number of years now, but
you dump the worms out.
Some great spots there.
Worms are going to probably burrow in,
they're going to live.
Well, you've just introduced a non-native invasive
species to the North Woods.
We've brought them here.
What's next?
Two years ago, we walked over 4 or 5,000 acres
right in this area and tried really hard to find
places that didn't have worms.
And we were unsuccessful.
And our supposition is that it might be only about 10 to 15%
of the forest now without worms.
I'd hate to take a guess on how many worms are here, but
it might be in the hundreds of thousands or millions per acre.
Some of those numbers, solutions, are in short
supply, and forest be may soon resemble forest
day. Worms are something
you don't see.
There's something you don't typically think about.
And changes that they're doing are so profound in
changing the entire soil structure over multiple
states. It's literally a problem
from the east coast to the west coast, being
done by species that we can't see.
When I first moved here and we bought our farm, the first
thing we did is we dug in the soil and we found worms in
our first response list.
Oh great, we have worms.
And now in my job, I dig in the soil and I
go, "Oh, great, worms."
[Music]
We head indoors now for a story about the unpredictable and
sometimes tragic role of fate.
Michelle Ping is a dance professor at UW-Madison.
She's known nationally for her extreme move style of dancing.
I had the opportunity to talk with Lee about her distinctive
choreography and a tragedy that could have frozen her
artistic expression forever.
[Music]
I just love to move.
It's that obsession with movement 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 Lee Chao Ping's 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.
Lee Chao Ping 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, Lee 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 Lee's 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 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.
So there's no weight in those knees.
Well, I'll say you train Chao Ping for us for four years
because she had never studied dance before and I say anybody
could have trained Chao Ping.
Like her legendary leaps, Lee's professional career exploded.
The New York Times called her work "Momentus" ingenious.
There was a fellowship at the Kennedy Center, the formation of
her own company, Lee Chao Ping 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.
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.
That seems to scary, that's too hard, that's, I don't
know, strong enough, something.
But they find out later that they can go there.
And Lee herself is going to new places.
Her 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, you know, just seeing the speed of the
feathers falling down, you know, they're floating
down 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
in to 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, 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, you know,
that are left around them or between them.
Lee'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, you know, 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, you know,
very blessed to have had the opportunity to grow from
this and learn from this.
But on the other hand, I, you know, 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.
Chao Ping's 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.
Chao Ping says 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.
If you'd like to see Lee Chao Ping's most recent work, her
next performance will be held on the UW-Madison campus in May.
For more details, check out our website at www.wrg/inwisconsin.
That's our show this evening.
We leave you with a lingering sunset on the Bruell
River in Douglas County.
For Inwisconsin, I'm Patty Lo.
See you next week.
[Music]
Major funding for Inwisconsin is provided by the people of
a Lyon energy who bring safe, reliable and environmentally
friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods,
and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
A Lyon energy, offering energy-saving ideas on the web.
UW Health, providing specialty in primary care for all
ages throughout Wisconsin.
Information on UW Health Physicians and Clinics and on
University of Wisconsin Hospital is available on the web.
Wisconsin's technical colleges, providing the people of
Wisconsin with the knowledge and skills they'll need for
the economy of tomorrow.
Wisconsin's technical colleges, communities first.
[Music]