State of Our Lakes

Fewer Madison residents swim in the lakes now as compared to ten years ago. The Journal’s recent series of articles concerning the safety of Madison’s drinking water has raised serious questions regarding the quality of our drinking water. We read almost weekly of special interests encroaching on public access to our lake shores by increasing property acquisitions and to expanding existing docks and wharves.

It’s normal at about this time of the year to read in our Madison newspaper that certain public swimming areas must be closed owing to pollution or worse. We read that our mayor is considering sacrificing more of the people’s lake shore access in order to meet city expenses. Our City Council continues to allow private property owners to spray poisons and lethal toxins on their lawns. These “fertilizers” then continue to run into and poison and pollute our lakes. As a result the dark green stringy weeds grow ever thicker and deeper and encroaches ever further out into the center of our lakes. The truth is that Madison Lakes are indeed in trouble as public access shrinks and the over all quality and purity of our lake water and aquifers continue to be under assault by private interests and poor private land and water stewards.

I enthusiastically agree with Bill Parker of the Madison Parks Commission, which he leads, when he recently stated, “Thus, we should not limit our options relating to land we own publicly or waver from our vision of greater access to city lakeshores, and adding open space in an increasingly dense urban area.”

During my first year in Dane County, I was struck by two main impressions of the City of Madison. First, how richly blessed Madison was to lie in the midst of so many miles of beautiful shore land. Secondly, how sad and unjust, it seemed, that the average Madison resident had public access to so little of it.

I strongly recommend that the City of Madison and Dane County adopt much more stringent land and water stewardship ordinances that will stop deleterious building, gardening and lawn management practices that pollute our lakes and aquifers and continue to threaten the health and safety of our drinking water for generations to come. Meanwhile I choose to envision that during the next fifty years, Madison will increase its public lakeshore access in the form of more parks, swimming areas, green space areas, and walking and biking trails.

My dream and vision for Madison is that when the citizens (including your grandchildren and mine) of Madison celebrates its bi-centennial in 2056 they can proudly boast that, through their representatives, they finally asserted and reclaimed their natural right to greater public stewardship of Madison’s water resources, and significantly broadened their conservation and preservation responsibilities. I know with out any doubt that if there was a referendum to this effect today, the people of Madison would overwhelmingly support it. In keeping with its central mission, I would like to see the Madison Parks Commission initiate such a referendum.

One way to help ensure that the citizens of Madison do begin to take back part of their lakeshore would be to measure and announce the present overall quality of the drinking water and the public’s existing shoreline access now, and then publicly announce a goal to significantly improve both during the next half century.

Martin Luther King, when talking about the need to change our values, said, “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation (I would add here, ‘and as a city’) must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. He then went on to say that when profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Let us support “the people’s revolution” and say no to the further contamination of the health and safety of our drinking water, and the diminishment of the people’s access to this beautiful and enticing lake shore. For our grandchildren, let us begin, as a city, to say no to the further privatization and degradation of our local water space and resources before it’s too late.

If we succeed, then we can triumphantly acclaim “our Madison as radiant city on the lakes,” and mean it!