I grew up on the outskirts of Sun Prairie. As a kid, I spent most of my time on my granddad's farm. It was a great time. I learned machinery and a work ethic, no doubt about that.
Joe Hovel Conover, WI
I think it also laid a groundwork for a land ethic, even though I probably had no idea of it back in those days. His farm had a woodlot and that was where the adventure was — we would go into the woods and explore. I think experiencing his farm gobbled up and developed by the city played into my eventual commitment to land conservation.
After high school, I played football as a freshman in college at Stevens Point. Before returning as a sophomore, I broke my left arm while playing touch football in Madison. It needed three surgeries, and I didn’t go back to school in Stevens Point because of that. Instead, I took up a job at Oscar Meyer in product control because I had a forearm that I couldn’t use heavily. That was a disgustingly horrible job.
Those were wild and restless days, too. Friends — a lot of close friends from high school and grade school —maybe did and maybe they did not return from Vietnam. So, it was a troubling time.
My wife Mary and I married young, in 1969. In the spring of 1970, we had a fresh baby daughter, we pulled up stakes and just escaped the city. With a friend, we bought 40 acres in the far northwest corner of Marquette County in the bluff country of the Central Sands region. In those days that area had a great mix of woods, fields, and brushy pasture. By 1972, I was logging full-time as a contract cutter. In 1973 there was a recession in wood products, and I had to do something with the wood I was responsible for. I found an old sawmill and got it running, and I started sawing lumber. Real soon I found out that, well, if logs don’t sell, there’s a reason. That’s because lumber also doesn’t sell. That was a hard lesson, but then I started adding value to the wood by building with it. I built hay racks and calf feeders for farmers, built picnic tables — whatever we could do to make something that was useful to people. And that clicked big time. I was making something most every day. The same farmers kept asking for more and more different things. By the next year, I started to build log cabins. That just took off; the demand was unbelievable. We called them log cabins, but we’d use logs and large timbers and we’d incorporate a lot of stone and things like that, all local resources.
The cabins were humble, rustic, and charming all at the same time. The method I most used was flattening the logs top and bottom. And then I’d get a lot of bearing and keep a real nice thick wall. I would dry the timbers fully before use. That worked great and turned into a long career. It was hard work, but it was a gratifying career. I’ve built more than 300 unique cabins in Wisconsin including the Big Bear Hideaway complex in Boulder Junction.
Early on there were times when it was only Mary and I working on the cabins. The biggest crew I had was maybe four people. Things were going well for us. Still, something didn’t seem right to me. In the flats, there was a lot of clearing of the woods and pasture areas to turn into these massive corporate farms that grow crops using irrigation systems. I viewed this frenzy as a threat to sustainable country living, as I would later see the development frenzy as a threat to rural culture. The land and groundwater were being changed, and not in good ways. The quiet country scenario, with inspiring odors from fresh cut alfalfa, prairie, and woodland plants was being replaced by spray planes and pesticide odors.
Large-scale farms were often growing potatoes, and the potatoes weren’t even grown to be eaten whole, they were grown for the junk food industry. The horror in this was all the pesticides that were being used. The pesticides were showing up in the groundwater. Our own water was safe because we were up on a bluff and our well was 220 feet deep. The scary one was Aldicarb, which was eventually banned because of the toxic risks it posed to humans, especially children.
In 1980, I made a four-by-eight plywood sign that simply said, ‘Caution, you are entering chemically contaminated Coloma flats.’ I put it on the edge of our property on the west side of the bluff where the road was leveling off and going toward a big open area that had just been cleared off for a large potato farm. What a shitstorm that turned into. I was everything from the best guy in the world to people that agreed, to the worst guy in the world to people that didn’t. That started a whole new chapter in my life, a sideline career in environmental and conservation work.
I came from a big family, and from what I know about my family roots, there was some level of social consciousness in our history. I had a great-uncle who was a Jesuit priest, and he worked many years ago on a social justice encyclical with the Pope. My granddad with the farm in Sun Prairie was involved in a Christian social justice movement years ago. So, maybe there was something bred into me. For it to blossom into a land ethic, one needs to experience nature and the outdoors. I think that's very important.
In the summer of 1982, I went to a groundwater meeting by Hancock. This is in the Central Sands, a region of 1.75 million acres east of the Wisconsin River. There was a nice old guy there who came up to me and said, ‘My place is right next to the farm by Almond where they’re going to have Farm Progress Days Expo in October. When people come to the Expo, they’re going to drive up the road and they’re going to come to this T intersection. My property is in the top front of the T intersection. If you’ve got any ideas to help raise awareness for what’s going wrong here, I’m listening.’ So, I went and paid a visit with the guy, and found out he couldn’t drink his own water because of the pesticides.
The guy said, ‘Hell, I never used pesticides, but my neighbors sold out to large farms, and now it’s a big corporate nightmare.’ This sparked my conscience. So, we made another larger sign; it was similar to the first, but it was twice the size. It basically said, ‘Caution, the Central Sands are chemically contaminated’ and so on. It was graphic and there was incredible response. The sign had a brown background with yellow lettering – all kinds of fluorescent touches showing the pesticide drips and stuff like that. Oh my God, the reaction that created was unbelievable.
The Farm Progress Days Expo organizers tried to reroute the traffic through a field so people wouldn’t see the sign, but cars got stuck. A wrecker had to come pull them out. It was a nightmare for them. There was hardly a reporter that didn’t find us; they were taking pictures of the sign. It was successful, and it raised a lot of awareness about what the problem was. The sign made such an impact that following threats to the old farmer we propped it securely on the back of my flatbed truck at end of day one. I drove the few miles to the expo office at a crawl in order for everyone to see the sign and to give the boss my opinion on their threats to the old farmer. The man at the door would not let me in the office until a deputy showed up, and then the boss scolded me with words I won’t repeat. Leaving, the deputy helped me lay the sign flat on the truck bed and whispered ‘Keep it up, somebody needs to say this.’ The Farm Progress Days Expo was tainted, ironically as was the central sands groundwater. Over the next several years we used the truck with the sign at several legislative hearings at the old Sentry Building in downtown Stevens Point. All this sort of embedded this activism that I haven’t been able to let go of ever since.
Accepting the fact there was environmental degradation in the Central Sands, was emotionally draining and caused me great anxiety. I was not happy. I also had a growing family to consider and longed for a better place to live. Using and loving timber made the lure of the Northwoods an apparent path.
In the early ‘80s an opportunity arrived that when I look back, it was almost like divine guidance for us to move north where we are now. We still own 140 or so acres in the Central Sands area and we still manage it properly. By 1983 we began buying property in the north and moved the sawmill there and settled permanently to Vilas County by 1987.
We live between Conover, Star Lake, and Land O’Lakes. It truly is an absolutely beautiful part of the state, but it’s becoming degraded by development to an extreme that’s almost frightening. People buy chunks of land, close it to public access and build places that stand empty most of the year. I’ve shifted my activism towards protecting the land from fragmentation – from being chopped and developed. I am protecting land here as I did in the Central Sands but from different threats. I am very comfortable in this, it’s a positive effort. Conserving land is very gratifying as the results are tangible.
By 1990 I was very busy and doing quite well with business here. The supply of sustainably harvested logs was abundant, and I was building great things. The Big Bear Hideaway complex in Boulder Junction is a 12,000 sq ft project I created with my mind and hands. It is a showcase of sustainable local resources enhancing a community. My creativity in building was reaching a whole new level, because I was in a new area that had an abundance of really nice and sustainable timber available. But while doing this work, my conservation ethic also blossomed.
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I feel a responsibility to see future generations have some of the same opportunities we have enjoyed. I’ve had some incredible experiences in the outdoors, from running wild rivers to exploring untamed places. I won’t accept the thought that all this could be trampled by man so that future generations can’t enjoy it. I'm very concerned about the future.
Joe’s story was produced by Scott Schultz. It is part of a collaboration with the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters and its Wisconsin Climate Stories Series.
You can find the link to order this book, and Joe’s other books, on the Northwoods Alliance website.
Carbon capture and storage has the potential to help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere. Wisconsin’s forested lands can play an important role. WASAL worked with a team of forestry experts across the state and you can read their recommendations in this Wisconsin’s Forested Lands: Opportunities for Carbon Sequestration and Storage report.
The Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts & Letters (WASAL) is bringing together leaders who have a deep connection with forested land. Through the speaker’s stories, you’ll discover how climate change has impacted their work and personal lives. You will hear firsthand accounts of the challenges they have faced and the solutions they found. You can learn how we can all take action in their Climate Fast Forward Action Plan.
