Introduction and Prologue

from Poisoning Paradise: An Environmental History of Madison

By Maria C. Powell, PhD

Coming “home” to the beautiful “best place to live” city

In 1998, 147 years after my great-great grandparents came to Madison from northern England, I moved with my husband and nearly one-year old daughter moved to the city to attend graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As veteran environmental activists, my husband and I were very excited to move to Madison, with its widespread reputation as a hotbed of citizen engagement, democracy, and environmentalism—and its beautiful Yahara Lakes.

Though I had grown up in Green Bay, moving to Madison in 1998 was a homecoming of sorts. My father was born and raised in a house that is still in downtown Madison (now student rental apartments). My parents regularly drove with the whole family to Madison to see relatives when I was a child, and I have fond memories of swimming in the lakes. Driving into Madison from the north, our family had a contest–which of us would see the State Capitol first. We cheered when we first sighted it. Madison was a magical, mysteriously powerful place to us.

The Ho-Chunk Indians who lived in the Madison area for thousands of years also considered it powerful and sacred place, building many of their effigy mounds here. European Americans who founded the city in the mid-1800s, after the Ho-Chunk people were forcibly removed by the government, also considered the city a unique and special place. In its early years it was dubbed a “Model City” and “The Athens of the West.” In 1948, Time Magazine dubbed it the “ideal” city, and it has been voted “best of” one thing or another in numerous U.S. city ratings since then.

City leaders, the Chamber of Commerce, local media—and many residents—are very smug about Madison’s specialness. In 2021, Madison was voted the most “livable” small to mid-sized city in yet another city rating contest (no other Wisconsin city rated in the top 100). A local TV station gushed: “A new survey…confirmed what we all knew: Madison is the best place to live.” The Madison Chamber of Commerce President went further, saying the survey rating “proves” that Madison is “the place to be.”

My alma mater, the flagship University of Wisconsin, was located in Madison years before the city was even incorporated (in 1856), and is central to these repeated “best of” ratings—and also to the city’s privilege, growth, and demographics. The 2021 “most livable” rating was in part based on Madison’s “long-standing reputation as the one of the best college towns in America.”  The same year, UW-Madison was rated as the country’s top public university in the country by a college rating guide.[i] Numerous successful biomedical and engineering companies thrive in the city, many created by university graduates who, like me, came here for school and never left. The city has a very high per capital rate of PhDs, doctors, and lawyers compared to other cities of a similar size.

Not surprisingly, given that the university shapes its demographics, many Madisonians are privileged–and politically most lean liberal to left, as do its elected officials. Because of its “high rate of employment, resilient economy, excel(lence) in nearly every category” Madison is “great for recent grads and retirees alike,” the 2021 city rating survey concluded. The Chamber of Commerce President added to this, alluding to Madison’s privileged, engaged, and “do-gooder” residents. “With the nation’s most sector-diverse economy,” he said “locally built companies exporting global solutions…and countless opportunities to drive positive change, this is truly the community where you can make a career, make a life and make a difference.” The city is predominantly white, though in recent years it is becoming more racially diverse. In a vague nod to the city’s recently increased attention to racial equity and justice, he highlighted the city’s “intentionality toward being a more just place.”

Last but not least, Madison’s physical beauty, centered on its lakes, has always been central to its appeal and key to its many “best of” ratings over the years. “The natural beauty surrounding Madison, highlighted by lakes Mendota and Monona,” the 2021 news story noted, “didn’t escape the judges’ eyes either. Nor did the hundreds of miles of hiking and biking trails allowing people to take it all in.”

Madison’s unrecognized “not best of” side

These gushing promotionals, of course, do not mention the city’s glaring dark sides. The city and the county it resides in, Dane County, have some of the worst race and class disparities in the country. As more low income people of color move here from big cities like Milwaukee and Chicago, and other nearby industrial cities, these disparities are growing.  

The city’s glowing economic and technological success, and rampant urban growth, have slowly polluted the city’s drinking water wells, drawn from deep under the city. Toxic chemicals were detected in the city’s deep wells decades ago and in recent years several have had to be shut down; many others have expensive contaminant filters. The city’s lakes, and creeks that flow into them, were polluted within a few decades of the city’s founding, and now are heavily contaminated with highly toxic “forever chemicals” called PFAS and a stew of other poisons. The fish, consumed by shoreline subsistence anglers—most of them low income people of color–are on advisory for mercury, PCBs, and PFAS. Many more toxic chemicals are in these fish, but they are unmeasured.

How can these glaring contradictions exist in the same city—especially one with so much privilege, a major research university and a “progressive” liberal populace and political leadership? This book explores this question, tracing the history of how our waters and fish here were poisoned, along with the histories of the corporate and government actors–often in bed together—who both created and ignored this poisoning. It centers on two large, powerful corporations that have polluted Starkweather Creek, the largest watershed flowing to Lake Monona and downstream lakes, for over 100 years. It tells stories of the many people here, including myself, who have struggled to do something about this poisoning.

My ancestors arrive in Madison in 1851

My great-great grandparents came to Madison, Wisconsin in 1851 from the village of Millington, in Yorkshire, England. Their oldest son, my great granduncle, reminisced decades in a 1921 Wisconsin State Journal article about his arrival in Madison at age 13 with his parents and five younger siblings. He described the beautiful landscape on his family’s journey in a horse-drawn carriage from Milwaukee to Madison. Coming into Madison, as they crossed Starkweather Creek and the Catfish River (now called the Yahara), the carriage driver pointed out effigy mounds built by Ho-Chunk Indians, who lived in the area for thousands of years until not long before my ancestors’ arrived.

Arriving at last in Madison, an unincorporated village of 2,306 people,[1] my great great grandparents and their children stepped off their carriage—in my grand uncle’s words, “with English shoes on our feet” – right about where the current Madison city and county government building now stands. The same day, “before the first curfew bell had rung,” my great grand uncle wrote, his siblings took their first swim in Third Lake (Lake Monona). In 1853, the last child in the family, my great grandfather, was born–the first and only child in the family born in Madison.

Like many other early Madison settlers, my great granduncle was enamored of the beauty of the lakes amongst which the city was created; his newspaper article began with a poem, “To Lakes Monona and Mendota”:

Seventy years and I have parted,

Since first your grassy banks I trod,

And how we’d cleave the refreshing waters

‘Neath the fair bright sky of God.

O! ye lakes of tranquil beauty.

I linger yet, and smile anew

For by your waters, music’s daughters,

Sing their songs as I do now.

Here alone I love to mingle

Amid the beauties that around me cling,

Here alone a boy I’d wander,

And list to songs the wild birds sing.

Faces dear and fair before me passing.

In the deepening twilight hour;

With their smiles upon me flashing,

As they smiled in love’s first sweet hour.

Voices soft and low and sweetly gentle

Come whispering through the flight of years;

The joys, the sorrows, and the partings

Still linger and mingle with my tears.

With the flight of years I am drifting,

And soon from this fair scene be gone,

For through the tears the mist is rifting,

To you, dear lakes, my song is sung.

My great grandfather and his siblings grew up swimming and fishing in the lakes, later dubbed the “Yahara Lakes” by European settlers. When they arrived in Madison, though it was a growing village, wildlife was abundant, old growth trees scattered the landscape, and wild rice grew in marshes and along shallow lake edges. The air was so clear one could purportedly see thirty miles in all directions from high spots in the center of town. Abundant springs that fed the lakes provided fresh drinking water; some just scooped water directly out of the lakes and drank it. Fish were notoriously huge. In 1862, a small piece in Madison’s Evening Patriot reported that my great grandfather, a child at the time, caught a nineteen-pound pickerel while “trolling in Third Lake…The fish was nearly as large as its capturer.”

Why I came to Madison for graduate school

Like many others who move to Madison, I came here to go to the well-reputed University of Wisconsin-Madison—and specifically, to the Institute for Environmental Studies, now called the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies (Nelson Institute), named for one of the state’s great environmental leaders, Senator Gaylord Nelson. I had been in a doctoral program in molecular biology at UW-Milwaukee, but my academic and environmental interests had widened to environmental health risks and risk communication related to toxic chemicals, so I transferred to UW-Madison, where I received a joint PhD in 2004 in environmental studies and communication from the Nelson Institute.

My doctoral work focused on the risks and risk communication related to the consumption of fish from the Great Lakes, which are contaminated with PCBs, mercury, and other toxic chemicals. This research focus was inspired by my own personal story. I was born and grew up in the Green Bay, Wisconsin area, and found out while studying biology at University of California in my 20s that the Fox River and Green Bay—which I grew up swimming in, and eating fish from—were so contaminated with PCBs that they were deemed Superfund sites in the 1980s.

I also knew from my studies that at least some of the PCBs that I had consumed all those years were still in my body, and I was slowly feeding them to my infant daughter every time she nursed. This made me indescribably sad. I was also deeply angered that I, my seven siblings, and my parents did not know this all those years we swam in Green Bay and ate fish caught from it at Friday fish fries. Why didn’t anyone tell us so we could avoid these exposures? This sadness and anger motivated me to want to understand the health risks associated with these contaminants, and the role of the media in educating the public about these health risks.

Two corporate polluters and Starkweather Creek

From 1998 to 2005, my family lived in rental apartments in a neighborhood on the east side of Madison, the Atwood-Schenk neighborhood, known for its progressive, environmentally engaged residents.  Our first apartment was along Starkweather Creek, the biggest watershed leading into Lake Monona. My great-great-granduncle described his family crossing the creek as they rode their horse-drawn carriage into Madison in 1851.

As I began my graduate work, we became very engaged in neighborhood and city issues, as well as grassroots environmental work. In the early 2000s, I co-founded the Friends of Starkweather Creek with other community members.

Shortly after settling into our new apartment in 1998, we learned about a metal die-casting factory built in the neighborhood in 1902—Madison Kipp Corporation, also called Kipp or MKC—which spewed a plethora of highly toxic chemicals into air, water, soils, and groundwater in our neighborhood. Much of Kipp’s pollution had oozed over many decades through a variety of pathways into Starkweather Creek and Lake Monona, building up in sediments and fish. Kipp’s air stacks emitted chlorine, hydrochloric acid, dioxins, and myriad other contaminants. Inside the factory, Kipp’s non-unionized, poorly paid workers inhaled toxic chemicals and endured unsafe working conditions, causing numerous injuries and some deaths.

Having some knowledge of the health effects of these chemicals through our previous environmental work, we joined neighbors working for better controls for (or elimination of) Kipp’s air pollution. While working for years on Kipp’s air pollution issues, unbeknownst to us, the powers-that-be were tracking toxic groundwater pollution under the plant, which they knew was vaporizing into the factory and nearby homes. In 2011, we uncovered this and made it public, eventually leading to a successful class action lawsuit against the company.

Before we arrived in Madison, many other neighbors had already been working to try to stem Kipp’s noise and pollution—organizing meetings, writing letters and petitions to public officials, submitting press releases, and much more. Anne Chacon moved into a home she purchased next to Kipp in 1980 with her young son, and played a crucial role in much of the neighborhood activism against Kipp in the 1990s and beyond. Sharon Helmus lived next to Kipp since 1941 when her parents brought her at age one to their new home right under Kipp’s “central melt” stacks, where aluminum was, and still is, melted before it is casted. Sharon’s mother got involved in neighborhood activism to reduce Kipp’s noise and emissions in the 1980s, and Sharon became one of the most vocal neighbors on Kipp issues after her mother passed away in 2008.

We quickly learned, as veteran neighborhood activists already knew, that we were very tiny Davids going against a behemoth Goliath more often than not protected by the powers-that-be. The family that owned Madison-Kipp was a very powerful entity in the city and closely allied with the Republican Party and right-wing think tanks in the state and country since the early 1900s. The corporation had endless financial resources to pay powerful law firms and public relations professionals to fight our efforts. Purportedly “progressive” and liberal city and state government agencies, with some exceptions, were rarely our allies in this work; instead, more often than not, they turned a blind eye to problematic toxic chemical emissions and obvious regulatory violations by Kipp.

In 2005, we bought a home on the north side of Madison, about four miles from Kipp and less than two miles from another long-time Madison corporate industrial powerhouse—Oscar Mayer and Company, at the time owned by Kraft-Heinz (hereafter referred to as Oscar Mayer). Oscar Mayer was a giant international meat packing and food processing corporation that also housed its own scientific research labs and manufactured pesticides, plastics and other chemicals. Beginning in the 1920s, the City of Madison allowed the company to sink several private water supply wells in deep aquifers under the north side—causing extreme water drawdowns in a large part of the north and east sides. This drawdown of the aquifer dried up springs that fed Starkweather Creek; the creek slowly became a stagnant ditch.

Oscar Mayer also generated prolific animal and industrial wastes and sewage, most of it contaminated with metals and other toxic compounds. These wastes were piped or hauled to the sewage plant northeast of the factory site and spread there, adjacent to residential neighborhoods. Directly or indirectly, significant amounts of these contaminated wastewaters went to storm sewers that led to Starkweather Creek and Lake Monona—causing several large fish kills. Toxic chemicals and particulates were also emitted from the factory’s many air stacks and onsite power plants. Oscar Mayer’s workers were unionized, but like Kipp workers they endured unsafe, toxic conditions in the factory; many worker injuries and occasional deaths occurred over the company’s decades of operation.

Madison/Midwest Environmental Justice Organization

In 2005, the same year we moved to the north side, my husband and I co-founded the Madison Environmental Justice Organization (MEJO) with Jody Schmitz, a social worker and food pantry coordinator at our neighborhood community center, and Hmong community leaders Kazoua Moua and Vameej Yang, who were concerned about Hmong people’s subsistence consumption of contaminated fish. For several years, MEJO focused on actions, communications, and policies to inform and engage vulnerable anglers to understand and prevent fish consumption risks. But eventually, tired of telling vulnerable people what they should or should not eat, we decided to focus instead on sources of toxic pollution—corporate industrial polluters like Kipp and Oscar Mayer.  

We began battling Madison Kipp’s pollution in 1999, six years before MEJO was founded, but didn’t get involved with Oscar Mayer until about 2019, years after it had closed up operations and left Madison. At that point, the corporate entity that purchased it for development, Reich Rabin, hired environmental consultants who found extensive soil and groundwater contamination at the site and beneath it in the groundwater. So at that point the work was (and still is) primarily to push government officials to hold the company accountable for the toxic pollution it left behind. As one of the largest (at times the largest) private employers in the city, during its operations Oscar Mayer & Company (and its owners, General Foods, Phillip Morris, Kraft Heinz) was largely allowed to pollute Madison’s air and waters with impunity. Few citizen activists, and none of the city’s large environmental groups, were willing to stand up to the company while it was in operation, and many people living near the pollution-spewing factory worked there and needing their jobs, were unwilling to “bite the hand that feeds.”

How did this happen?

Years into fighting these corporate polluters, and learning about all the toxic pollution they spewed into the lakes, I became increasingly intrigued by the long histories of these companies in Madison. I began submitting open records requests, reading any and all histories of Madison I could find, and poring through newspaper archives. I wanted to learn how these corporations get away with polluting our “progressive” community despite local, state, and federal laws intended to prevent this. What roles did government agency officials play over time? The media? What did citizens do in the past to fight this pollution, if anything? Who was most affected by it? Did they know about it? Did they have any voice in decisions? My longer historical research has shaped and shifted my understanding of how deeply embedded the protection of polluters is in our entire system and among elected officials on the right and the left.

No happy ending

Madison’s purportedly progressive, environmentally-conscious community and academic institutions have been of little help to us as grassroots activists fighting these corporate polluters and government agency enablers. Larger mainstream environmental groups in Madison didn’t support our efforts at all, focusing instead on environmental problems elsewhere in the state or on broader policy issues. University of Wisconsin researchers, with abundant scientific, financial, intellectual and other resources at their disposal, steered clear of the Madison-Kipp and Oscar Mayer and their poison emissions altogether, afraid of getting tangled in controversial political issues, appearing not to be objective, and losing their funding. So we and our small groups of unpaid citizens were mostly on our own, without the support of Madison’s abundant environmental, intellectual, and financial resources.

This story does not have a happy ending. Citizen activists’ hard work has resulted in a few reductions in Kipp’s pollution. In 2013 the company agreed to pay $7.2 million dollars to neighbors of the factory who filed a lawsuit against them, and in 2016 Kipp finally stopped using chlorine. Regardless, much of Kipp’s most dangerous pollution remains in the soils and groundwater beneath the neighborhood, where it will be for decades to come—perhaps forever. Persistent toxic chemicals from Kipp are in sediments of Starkweather Creek and Lake Monona—and will be taken up into fish for years into the future. Toxic chemicals and metals still spew from the factory’s stacks feet from the home where Sharon grew up and lived in for decades as an adult. Government agencies continue to protect the company—and mostly dismiss or ignore citizens’ concerns about health risks.

Over the years, informal neighborhood surveys compiled reports of hundreds of serious health problems that community members believed were related to exposures to Kipp’s toxic pollution.  By the early 2000s, the local public health department felt that enough legitimate health complaints had been submitted by neighborhood residents and began to plan a formal health study, planning to coordinate with the Wisconsin Department of Health Services and University of Wisconsin. But the health study was abruptly shut down—many believe, under pressure from Madison-Kipp behind closed doors.

When it abruptly left Madison in 2017, Oscar Mayer left significant and disturbing, though still largely unmeasured, toxic pollution behind in soils and groundwater at its sprawling site and well beyond it–at the former sewage plant and landfill to the northeast, in Starkweather Creek sediments and all the lakes downstream. Many people in the surrounding neighborhoods were—and still are–exposed to the company’s poisons in various ways. Some are likely breathing vapors seeping into their homes from contaminated groundwater beneath them. But nobody is testing, so nobody knows. The city is planning to develop dense residential housing, mostly “affordable” housing, over the former factory site.

Starkweather Creek has been, essentially, a toxic stormwater ditch since early in the 1900s. The creek, downstream lakes and their sediments are heavily polluted with mercury and other metals, PCBs, and PFAS, and all of the city’s deep municipal wells are contaminated with a complex stew of poisons. Fish in the creek, Lake Monona, and the three lakes downstream of it are all on advisories for contaminants. Groundwater is drawn into the lakes instead of feeding them via springs; city leaders and government agencies apparently accepted this reality decades ago. The city continues to grow with abandon, and the Madison Water Utility will need to sink even more deep wells to serve these new residents, which will draw more pollution downward into the wells to poison future generations.

Most sadly, Anne and Sharon, who became my close friends through years of difficult Kipp activism together, are now both gone. Sharon died in March 2018 from complications after an operation for colon cancer (her third cancer diagnosis since 2012), and Anne died the same year in November from auto-immune hepatitis (liver disease), which she had struggled with for some time. Cancer and auto-immune hepatitis are both strongly associated with exposures to PCBs and other chlorinated compounds emitted from Kipp.

January 2023, I was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer—which has been associated in recent government studies with PFOA, a type of PFAS. I will not survive the year. As I write this in spring 2023, becoming more ill by the day, I am coming to terms with the fact that I will not live long enough to finish this book.

Since 2018, when I first learned about PFAS, the bulk of my community activism has been focused on trying to reduce exposures to PFAS—including very high levels of PFOA–spewing from Dane County Regional Airport and Truax military base (Truax Field) just a couple miles from my house. The people most exposed are the low-income people in the neighborhoods next to the airport and base and downstream along Starkweather Creek. Private and public drinking water wells on the north and east sides have been contaminated by the PFAS plume emanating from Truax Field. My family, who got our drinking water from several of these wells, unknowingly drank a significant amount of this PFAS in our 25 years in Madison—along with a myriad of carcinogenic poisons in Madison’s deep aquifers. One public well closest to Truax Field was eventually shut down due to MEJO and community advocacy, but unfortunately, our responsible government agencies and the U.S. military have done very little beyond that to protect the most vulnerable people from exposures. As I write this, sick and dying, I am not hopeful that they ever will.

A personal story, a people’s story

My activist battles against Kipp, Oscar Mayer, government and military polluters have shaped my life—and my husband and daughter’s lives– in countless ways. I am deeply embedded in this story. I am not a trained historian and didn’t use formal academic methodologies in researching the histories I write about. Most of what I wrote is based on actual events, newspaper articles, my own community work and experiences, written communications among activists and government officials, and published documents from a wide variety of sources. I make no claims of objectivity. This is a personal story.

But it’s more than just a personal story—it’s a people’s environmental history of sorts. Along with describing the lies and obfuscation of the powers-that-be, and the ways they both created and ignored toxic pollution gushing into Madison’s air, waters and fish, I tried to highlight the failed and successful struggles of courageous individuals and groups of citizen activists to hold powerful corporate polluters and other powers-that-be accountable for their environmental pollution. To the extent possible, I tried to tell stories people who are rarely, if ever, mentioned in environmental histories or the media—low-income people, women, people of color. These marginalized people are, in most cases, the most exposed to toxic pollution; these disparities are at the core of all environmental justice work. Finding a way to tell these stories was challenging because they are so infrequently mentioned or quoted in the available public records, including the media.

Once I became an activist here myself, and especially after MEJO formed and I began working with people from many different incomes and backgrounds, I had first-hand connections, and even friendships, with Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) and learned some of their stories. I was sometimes cited in news stories myself. But these mentions were few and far between, and were often a tiny soundbite of what I know and have to say about the injustices I observed and experienced. BIPOC people I worked with and in the community were mentioned even less often than me—for years, not at all. Many times I asked reporters to talk with one of the people of color MEJO was working with rather than myself, but few did so.

Beyond telling my own and other people’s stories, this saga reflects deep systemic failures of our environmental regulatory system and those charged with implementing it—and the power of industries and corporations to influence this system. The media also played significant role in influencing how environmental pollution was addressed (or not). Much of the story, especially the older historical sections, relies on newspaper stories; the fact that these often were the only sources of information available to me implicitly reveals the power of the media to influence environmental politics and history.

Last but not least, this story raises deep questions that I have yet to answer—they plague me to this day: how could this scenario play out the way it did in America’s “best of X, Y, Z” city, known for its environmental consciousness and thriving democracy?  If this can happen in a “progressive” city like Madison, with so much privilege, many highly educated people, and abundant social, intellectual, and political resources, it can happen anywhere.

Are there any silver linings in this story? If nothing else, perhaps in the lessons learned. People are naïve and sorely mistaken if they believe that their governments—left, right, Republican or Democrat, progressive or liberal or Green—will hold powerful corporations that drive our capitalist economy accountable for toxic pollution. Our environmental regulators, captured by corporate power, aren’t protecting us or the environment—nor are our environmental laws. The system is beyond broken. To have any change of improving things, however miniscule, ordinary people must engage in grueling, usually unpaid, and often demoralizing grassroots activism to raise public attention to this pollution, going up against powerful corporations and demanding that government officials who are supposed to protect public health (but often don’t) hold them accountable to clean up their toxic messes.

On a broader level, the story illustrates that the current system of techno-industrial corporate capitalism that drives our society, supported by the ways we all have become accustomed to living—technology-based and fossil fuel-driven –cannot be sustained if we want our children and grandchildren to have a livable city and planet. We have to learn to live differently.

Thank you Anne and Sharon, Jim and Sierra Powell

I started this book several years before Sharon and Anne died—and I always expected to celebrate its completion with them. Both of them read and provided insights and helpful advice on many of the chapters on Madison-Kipp Corporation. After their deaths, I couldn’t work on it for well over a year—it filled me with too much sadness. I am heartbroken that they will never be able to read the finished story. I am heartbroken that I will die before finishing it.

I dedicate this unfinished writing to Sharon Helmus and Anne Chacon, and especially to my wonderful husband Jim and daughter Sierra who supported me in my decades of activism (and actively participated in it at times), are helping me pull together the writing I did finish, and are taking care of me as I die of this brutal, painful cancer. My deepest thanks and gratitude go to these amazing people.

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[1] Durrie, p. 226

[i] Winter 2021 edition of OnWisconsin

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