8 O'Clock Buzz

On June 22, the Wisconsin Assembly voted 61-37 to pass Senate Bill 119, which would penalize municipalities who seek to cut their police budgets.  The bill would cut state shared revenue payments if a municipality reduces their funding to police and would redistribute that money to other communities.  The bill now heads to Governor Evers’ desk.  Joining us once again with a perspective is Tamarine Cornelius, research analyst for Kids Forward.

Photo Credit: Ken Fager (CC-BY-NC-SA)

Two Wisconsin icons, dairy cows and fresh water, appear to be at war.  Two new studies from USDA scientists finds that, in Northeast Wisconsin, cow manure flowing into drinking waters accounts for 76% of human gastrointestinal illnesses.  Worse yet, the normal response — digging a deeper well — may be of little protection.  Thousands of private wells in Northeast Wisconsin have been declared unfit to drink and the new studies call into question the effectiveness of regulations to protect drinking water.  Coburn Dukehart from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism joins us with the story.

Two Wisconsin icons, dairy cows and fresh water, appear to be at war. Two new studies, one from U.S. Department of Agriculture research engineer Tucker Burch and one from USDA microbiologist Mark Borchardt, find that in Northeast Wisconsin cow manure flowing into drinking waters accounts for ~76% of human gastrointestinal illnesses. Worse yet, the normal response — digging a deeper well — may be of little protection. Thousands of private wells in Northeast Wisconsin have been declared unfit to drink and the new studies call into question the effectiveness of regulations to protect drinking water. Coburn Dukehart, Digital and Multimedia Director from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism has the story.

Photo Credit: Tad Dukehart for Wisconsin Watch

Source: WCIJ | Cow manure predicted to cause most sickness from contaminated wells in Kewaunee County

WORT 89.9FM Madison · Rob “DZ” Franklin Talks About New Concert Series Taking Place In Downtown Madison

The Mad Lit Event Series is a new free concert series that will feature live music and highlight local artists and businesses of color and will be taking place every other Friday starting July 2nd and running through October 8th on the 100 block of State Street in downtown Madison.

Rob “Dz” Franklin, a local hip-hop artist, the Media Projects Bubblerarian for the Madison Public Library, and one of the coordinators of the Mad Lit Event Series. Rob joins Friday Buzz hosts Austin Exum and Ankur Malhotra to talk more about the series.

 

 

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(Image courtesy of Robert Franklin)

WORT 89.9FM Madison · City of Madison Engineering Division Aquires Their First Ever Beehives

The City of Madison Engineering Division has received its first set of beehives. The hives were supplied with the help of Operation Fresh Start and are now located in a non-residential area near Nesbitt Road and Maple Grove Drive, where the bees will have access to 10 acres of forage habitat and several prairie ponds.

Hannah Mohelnitzky is the Public Information Officer for the City of Madison Engineering Division. Hannah joins Friday Buzz hosts Austin Exum and Ankur Malhotra to talk about the newly acquired hives.

 

 

 

 

(Image courtesy of Hannah Mohelnitzky)

(Image courtesy of Bianca Ackerman on Unsplash)

Gowri Ramachandran, Counsel at The Brennen Center for Justice, talks about a recently published study entitled “Election Officials Under Attack“, a cooperative study of current and past election officials. The study identified four areas of concern for election officials:

1. Threats to personal safety, in which 1/3 of officials felt unsafe and 1/6 of officials had received threats following the 2020 election,

2. Disinformation regarding vote counts and voting result security,

3. Threats to their political independence, and

4. Talent pool challenges to hiring and keeping well qualified individuals as election officials.

Today on the Tuesday 8:00 Buzz with Sikowis (in exile) …  

Christine Diindiisi McCleave, Ethel Blind, and Janna Pratt join us to talk about “Residential Schools” and working towards truth, justice, and healing from genocidal policy set forth by the US and Canada that allowed christian clergy to neglect, rape, torture, and murder Indigenous children.

Christine Diindiisi McCleave is Chief Executive Officer of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and an enrolled citizen of Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Nation. She has dedicated her life and work to pursuing truth and healing for the Indigenous survivors of historical trauma at the hands of colonialism and settler-states. In 2020, Christine was instrumental in writing H.R.8420 – Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy Act—the first-ever bill introduced to establish a commission addressing boarding school policy in the U.S. 

Ethel Blind is a nehiyaw-iskwew from the George Gordon First Nation in Canada and is a residential school survivor herself and uses that experience to help heal others. She is a registered social worker who has worked many years in First Nations communities in Saskatchewan, Alberta and the NorthWest Territories. She has 28 years of experience as a contracted mental health therapist with First Nations and Inuit Health through Indigenous Services Canada. Her work focuses on life events on ancestral and historical trauma: childhood issues, grief/loss/ suicidal ideology/depression, substance abuse, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, and the residential school legacy.

Janna Pratt is from the George Gordon First Nation in Treaty 4 territory. Janna is a fourth-generation residential school survivor, whose passion is to raise residential school awareness. As a Storyteller, she shares her love of her People’s history and the stories they have told. Janna believes a better understanding of History will bring all Canadians together and move forward to reconciliation, which can’t be done until all stories are heard. She is currently working on a project about the Muskowekan First Nation residential school in order to tell the radical truth of what happened there and was inspired to tell this story by her grandmother who went to this school. 

The CDC eviction moratorium is due to expire on July 31.   University of Wisconsin Law School Professor Mitch will tell us what that will mean.

On June 24, the U.S. Center for Disease Control extended a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures until July 31.  The CDC ordered the one-month reprieve to give time for states to distribute billions of dollars of federal emergency rent assistance to those who need it.  Some 7 million tenants nationwide are behind on the rent, and many states have doled out only five percent of their allocation of emergency assistance.  Given all that, will one month be enough to get people straight with their landlords and creditors? Or are we facing another massive homelessness crisis as millions get thrown out of their homes?  Mitch is a clinical law professor at the University of Wisconsin and is the director of the Neighborhood Law Clinic.

 

Cover Photo by Eryka on Unsplash

Should humans retreat from climate risk zones?  The University of Miami’s Katherine Mach tells us what a managed retreat would look like.

A new draft report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sounds the direst warnings yet about the impacts of a warming earth on human populations.  The report was leaked to Agence-France-Presse in advance of this summer’s Glasgow climate talks.  The draft warns that ecological tipping points — cascading environmental effects that cause irreversible and dramatic changes to the earth’s biotic systems — could come sooner than anticipated, possibly within the next 30 years.  Rising sea levels, extended heat waves, wildfires, agricultural and ecological collapses all threaten human populations, especially in dense cities and especially near the coasts.  Katharine Mach is an Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Miami, who believes that relocating our settlements — engaging in what she calls a “managed retreat” may be necessary to save our cities from the coming climate onslaught.

 

Photo of Miami tidal flooding:

B137, public domain,  via Wikimedia Commons

 

WORT 89.9FM Madison · District 6 Alder, Brian Bendford, On A Truth And Reconciliation Process in Madison

Alder of Madison’s District 6, Brian Benford, joins Friday Buzz host Dylan Brogan to talk about Madison’s need for a truth and reconciliation process.

 

 

(Image courtesy of Brian Benford)