Letters to the Editor: Canada wildfires, national politics | Opinion

The following are Letters to the Editor published in the pages of the Star-Observer last week.

Readers wrote about the Canadian wildfires. One reader discussed how the U.S. isn’t as polarized as it may seem. And another discussed President Donald Trump.

Read all the letters below:

Where there’s smoke

It is certainly ironic — and surely not lost on Canadians — that American Republican “leaders” are threatening Canada with increased tariffs in retaliation for some wildfire smoke that drifts south to the U.S. 

This threat comes from a nation that has pillaged the planet for mineral and petroleum resources, poisoned 99% of the Great Plains with herbicides and pesticides, created massive dead zones where our rivers flow into the seas and subjected people across the globe to our napalm and bombs. Countless communities have been ruined by our insatiable quest for more and cheaper stuff.

The bill to establish increased tariffs comes from a MAGA supporter and former car dealer who took up residence in our U.S. Senate last year. Another lickspittle of President Donald Trump touting the president’s “agenda.”

In the U.S. that I grew up in, our leadership would have asked our northern neighbors, “How can we help?”

Now they ask themselves, “How can we make media hay with this catastrophe?” 

I’m surprised they haven’t blamed the wildfires and smoke on “Communists.” Or “Antifa.”

Maybe that’s the Republican plan for the coming days.

Roald Evensen

River Falls

What smoke signals

Smoky skies aren’t going away anytime soon and neither are temperatures in the mid-90s.

I don’t have air conditioning, so during the worst of the heat and smoke, my husband and I close our windows and hunker down in our lower level. We’d all like to think this is a one-time event, just as we did in previous years, but, folks, it’s only going to get worse due to climate change, which fuels both conditions. 

Here’s what I learned from sources including CBS, NPR and The Guardian, as well as governmental agencies such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Rising global temperatures create longer and more intense fire seasons by drying out forests, making them burn much easier. All it takes is a tiny spark to turn a dry forest into a massive fire.

Science also indicates that the average temperature of the planet is higher, so heat waves reach 90 degrees or more much faster. Heat waves also last longer, making them hit harder.

The atmosphere holds more heat overall, and smoke makes the summer heat much more intense. 

We simply can’t ignore the reality of climate change. It affects all of us; Republicans as well as Democrats; red states as well as blue states; billionaires as well as those earning minimum wage. 

It’s time to stop bickering over whether climate change is real or not and instead address ways to remediate the damage. We need to act now to save the planet and ourselves.

Pam Fricke

New Richmond

Smoke on the water

Another summer of wildfires. We hear of a friend’s daughter caught in a canoe on a smoky lake in Ontario, her YMCA camp evacuated. She and her fellow campers paddle exhaustedly to avoid the burning shore and are finally rescued after thirty-plus hours.

Hundreds of miles south, our own skies go hazy with “very unhealthy” particulate matter. I hear President Donald Trump call for Canada to be punished for the wind-borne pollution of those hundreds of fires out of control in the dry extreme heat. This is the same president who has denied our responsibility as chief contributor to global climate change with one disastrous executive order after another. The administration’s hypocrisy is another kind of smoke, shrouding the reality of our role in the conditions leading to the fires.

Even the historically failed Richard Nixon presidency moved environmental science in America forward with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Now the Trump administration aggressively erases that progress, to the advantage only of polluting energy industries and exposes us all to health hazards from which we’ve enjoyed virtual immunity for the better part of the past 50 years.

It’s especially horrifying at this late date to watch this rollback of environmental progress threatening the health and survival of future generations. As far back as the early 1950s scientists were able to accurately predict the trouble we find ourselves in now. The prophetic environmentalist Rachel Carson wrote in 1953, when then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced Interior Department professionals with big business appointees, that “a politically minded Administration returns us to the dark ages of unrestrained exploitation and destruction.”

Ms. Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring alerted the American public to the environmental dangers of pesticides widely used at the time, urged us to consider the damages those substances were inflicting not only on bird populations but ultimately on ourselves.

As the summer wildfires rage and fill our sky with toxic particles, I wonder what Carson would say about the harm our evident disregard for the earth is doing to our fellow creatures, the birds and insects, on whose health our health depends, which have no voice but what we think to give them in our public policy making. In reality, whether or not we know it, we are all in the same canoe, paddling for our lives in the middle of a smoky lake.

Thomas R. Smith

River Falls

Drawing down Lake Mallalieu would have been mistake

The Lake Mallalieu Association (LMA) complains its consultant couldn’t inform local governments about its proposed Lake Mallalieu drawdown because our St. Croix County Board rescinded conditional permission for a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) drawdown permit application.

But with or without a pending WDNR drawdown permit application, the LMA could share any LMA consultant’s report with anyone, at any time, in any forum. 

And anyone may read all LMA consultant reports in public WDNR drawdown permit application files at this link: permits.dnr.wi.gov/water/SitePages/DocSetView.aspx?DocSet=IP-WC-2025-56-01948&Loc=undefined.

Our County Board was informed by these LMA consultant reports when it voted to rescind conditional permission for the LMA’s WDNR drawdown permit application. 

The August 2024 LMA consultant report to WDNR contradicted LMA claims that the Little Falls Dam project deposited soft sediments in upper Lake Mallalieu and greatly reduced water depths. Comparing 2024 measurements of water depths and soft sediment deposits to 1970 WDNR baseline data showed that, over 54 years:

• Most upper Lake Mallalieu water depths were unchanged, some areas were 1 inch to 6 inches shallower and few areas were up to 2 feet shallower.

• Soft sediment deposits were widely scattered and not very deep.

• It was impossible to determine either sediment sources or when sediments were deposited.

The April 2026 LMA consultant letter to WDNR said drawing down Lake Mallalieu would flush thousands of cubic yards of sediment containing from 6,676 to 12,352 pounds of phosphorus into the already phosphorus-impaired Lake St. Croix portion of the St. Croix River.

St. Croix County’s long-standing policy is to reduce phosphorus loads to Lake St. Croix.

Our County Board understood all Wisconsin-permitted point sources discharged a total annual average of 9,456 pounds of phosphorus to Lake St. Croix; while in comparison, the LMA consultant estimated drawing down Lake Mallalieu would flush from 70% more to 130% more pounds phosphorus into Lake St. Croix.

Our County Board considered in its Land & Water Conservation Administrator’s report that drawing down Lake Mallalieu would significantly set back progress toward achieving County phosphorus-reduction goals for Lake St. Croix, made since 2013 through 373 conservation contracts at a cost of $4.4-million taxpayer dollars.

Our County Board had all information necessary, including the LMA consultant’s, to rescind conditional permission for drawing down Lake Mallalieu and to prevent flushing County conservation work and our taxpayer dollars down the river.

Celeste Koeberl, JD, MA and John Gostovich, MS

Town of Hudson

LMA Members and former LMA Director and Office

U.S. isn’t as polarized as you think

Americans agree more than our politics suggests — and the data proves it.

Voters for President Donald Trump and 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris split sharply on candidates and policy. But look past the labels and most are worried about the same things: prices, jobs and whether they can afford daily life. Both sides want a country that feels stable and fair. Both show strong support for protecting Social Security. And in one national survey, overwhelming majorities of both Trump and Harris voters agreed that Americans should put country over party.

Pew Research found that 93% of Trump supporters called the economy “very important” to their vote — but so did 68% of Harris supporters, who ranked it alongside health care and abortion. Both camps were anxious about prices, jobs and financial security.

That last finding matters most. It suggests the divide isn’t really about what we care about — it’s about which party we trust to fix it.

Underneath the specific policies, both groups expressed a similar longing: for leaders who “care about people like me” and won’t let powerful interests run roughshod over ordinary families — whether those interests are framed as “big corporations” or “Washington elites.”

This isn’t a hunch. Political scientists at Tufts University’s Cooperative Election Study — including Professor Brian Schaffner, who co-directs the project — have used data from tens of thousands of voters to show that shared concerns run deeper than partisan rhetoric implies. Inflation, uncertainty, fairness, competent government: these pressures don’t sort themselves neatly by party.

None of this means our disagreements aren’t real. Voters differ honestly on solutions and that’s worth debating. But we’d debate better if we started from what we share, not from the assumption that the other side is alien. Most Americans want the same basics: a decent life, a fair shot and leaders who put the country first.

If we want a government that works for us, we should start acting like we’re on the same side — because on the issues that matter most, we already are.

John Krizek

Hudson

Responding to response

I would rather be called a gadfly than a bully, for sentimental reasons.

I got called this for pointing out the amateur arguments (Responding to “Are we free?” Print edition, July 11) in Laurie Harmon’s letter to the editor, “Are we free?,” for saying she did not understand the topic she was writing about.

Name-calling is the go-to of the left. The more effective you are, the more name-calling and vitriol get slung at you. Politics is often called a blood sport and it is common “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

If Harmon wants to call that bullying, then in debate parlance, the point flows to her. I am that bully.

The point she was making in her letter to the editor was that America is a Democratic Republic. After calling my argument bullying, Harmon repeats the very confusion I criticized. She wrote that the people elect presidents and therefore authorize appointments. But the president is not elected by direct national majority. The Electoral College elects the president and the Senate confirms appointments. That is republican mediation, not direct democracy.

She wrote that I did not read or understand the U.S. Constitution, then remakes the claim that the people elect the president. In the Constitution, it says we have an Electoral College that elects the president. It is up to the reader to decide which way that point flows.

Why am I so passionate about someone calling America a Democratic Republic? It seems we are merely quibbling over words. However, Democrats — and especially the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) wing of the party — use democracy as a giant soviet or committee, to run the country as a collective Marxist dictatorship.

If you think I am being hyperbolic, I will leave that up to you to decide. About eight months ago, because of the rise of the DSA, I started reading the DSA’s various websites, sites they link to and other sites whose members say they are part of the DSA.

Here are examples readers can check for themselves: Red Star Caucus has an article literally titled “Communists Belong in DSA.” Red Star also says it is a Marxist-Leninist caucus in DSA. Marxist Unity Group says it works inside DSA and describes its maximum program as communism. Bread and Roses says it is a Marxist caucus within DSA. Socialist Majority is another DSA caucus site readers can review.

I have also been on the local Twin Cities DSA website and have been reading the articles posted there. One article I thought was interesting and frightening at the same time said that the Jacobins and the DSA have a lot in common. The Jacobins are the people who brought you the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, with over 16,000 publicly executed by guillotine and blood in the gutters of Paris becoming one of its enduring images.

The DSA has a calendar of events and there was an event called “Beer with Comrades.” I was seriously thinking of donning a Che Guevara T-shirt, wearing my old beat-up straw fedora and talking Marxist dialectic with them. But I had conflicting appointments. I hope I can attend the next one.

I will give Harmon this: I am a bully. Her point from the initial letter has not been proven. She cites examples of federalism and calls them democracy. I am the bully for pointing this out.

Rick A. Coalwell

Somerset

With Trump, it’s been one betrayal too many

“One Betrayal too many” is the title of a book written by a former MAGA podcaster.

If you’re trying to understand why people voted for the current administration — or if you voted and are now disappointed — I recommend this book.

I’m a family doctor and understanding the motivation behind people’s choices helps me be effective at my job. I appreciated this chance to better understand why people supported, sometimes still support, an administration that strikes me as self-serving, cruel in execution and unwilling to engage with the concerns of average Americans.

What I took away was a simple message: we all want to be heard. People joined MAGA in part because of promised independence from the established two-party machinery. As the administration unfolded, it became self-serving and elitist — arguably more so than before.

In any group — social, political, religious, professional — a degree of groupthink takes hold. When promises go unkept, it’s natural to make excuses; we’ve all done it. The book describes the courage it takes to question, to admit promises weren’t kept or facts were skewed. It captures how lonely it is to step away from a community and the unpleasant emotions that result.

This book helped me understand my fellow Americans more deeply and eased some of my anxiety about toxic polarization tearing at our country. Most of us want safety, a clean environment, affordable housing and health care. We’d all benefit from calmer conversations about how to get there. There’s more that unites us than divides us.

Mary Landwehr

Chippewa Falls

Smoking gun

Six Wisconsin Republican congressmen — Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Scott Fitzgerald, Glenn Grothman, Tom Tiffany and Tony Wied — recently sent a letter to the EPA blaming Canada’s wildfire management for the toxic smoke affecting our state.

The letter, however, makes no mention of climate change. While management practices matter, climate change is the primary factor behind Canada’s megafires. As Natural Resources Canada explains: 

“Warmer-than-average temperatures, decreased levels of snowpack, low soil moisture and elevated drought conditions are indicators that climate change is impacting the frequency, size and range of wildland fires in Canada. For example, the number of over-wintering fires is increasing.”

In fact, NASA reports that, due to human-induced climate change, “Extreme wildfire activity has more than doubled worldwide.”

More intense wildfires are just one symptom of a much larger problem. A study in the journal Science concludes that global soil moisture is in permanent decline because of our warming climate.

The drying of continents, driven by increased heat and evaporation, has been so pronounced that the transfer of water to the oceans has altered the distribution of our planet’s mass and affected Earth’s rotation on its axis.

As continents dry and water resources are polluted and overused, researchers conclude that the world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy”, in which critical water systems can no longer realistically recover to their former state. 

Water bankruptcy is already evident in the U.S. America’s largest groundwater reserve, the Ogallala Aquifer, that supports Great Plains agriculture, is being pumped far faster than it can recharge. Water levels have fallen by hundreds of feet in some areas, with portions now effectively nonrenewable under current climate conditions and irrigation practices. 

As Wisconsinites, we must insist that our legislators stop pointing fingers north of the border and act to cut emissions, conserve water and protect Earth’s life‑support systems on which we all depend. 

Terry Hansen

Grafton, Wis.