Every Day is Earth Day in Florence
By Flo | florencewi.com
Today the internet is full of people telling you to care about the planet.
Up here, we don't talk about it much. We just do it.
Florence County has been doing it for a long time — not because someone told us to, but because this land is how we live. The loggers who work these forests aren't the villains in somebody's Earth Day post. They're the reason these forests are still here.
Sustainable forestry isn't a buzzword in Florence County. It's a business model. You don't clearcut what you intend to come back to. You don't poison a river you fish in. You don't kill a forest your kids are going to work in. The people who have logged this county for generations understood something that takes other people a long time to learn — you take care of what you need.
More than half of Florence County is publicly owned forest. 250,000 acres. The Pine and the Popple are two of only three rivers in Wisconsin designated Wild Rivers — meaning undeveloped shorelines, no roads running beside them, just water doing what water does. Trout Unlimited named us a Conservation Town. Not because we applied for it. Because the brook trout are still here.
None of that happened by accident. It happened because the people who live here — the loggers, the fishermen, the hunters, the farmers — have always understood that you don't separate making a living from taking care of the land. Those aren't two different things. They're the same thing.
So yes, today is Earth Day.
But honestly? Up here, every day is.
— Flo