What would you do with 3,000 gallons of waste vegetable oil every month? If you were thinking like a casino—in particular, like the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe’s Akwesasne Mohawk Casino—you’d take that oil and turn it into energy. (more…)

Given the prominence of our lakes and fishing to Minnesota’s way of life, it’s really no wonder that mercury has been a giant issue of concern the last many years.  Most of the times that researchers look for mercury in a Minnesota lake or a big fish, they find it.   This is why our Department of Health has issued statewide advisories on the quantity of fish each of us should eat in a week or month.

Mercury has also been a topic of much controversy.  Finding mercury in our water at unsafe levels meant that our state needed to create a “Total Maximum Daily Load” (TMDL) plan for every body of water affected - in other words, to figure out where the pollution was coming from and how to get rid of it.  Because mercury is basically everywhere they look and because the mercury in our lakes and rivers primarily comes from the mercury in our air, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency opted to create one, statewide TMDL plan for Minnesota.  Whenever a TMDL is created, it is submitted for approval to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  Tuesday, the EPA approved Minnesota’s Mercury TMDL.

Despite all of the previous controversy, now comes the really hard part.  Now it is time to implement the clean up plan.  The MPCA is looking to help smooth that process by creating a couple of stakeholder groups - a smaller one to be more engaged and a larger one for advice and guidance.  It is modeled after the original working groups that put together Clean Water Legacy, which was, as this will be, convened by Minnesota Environmental Initiative. 

Questions remain of course - such as how to address the fact that the clean-up target number corresponds to a number of fish eaten by the average Minnesotan, not those who rely on fish as a part of their culture or as an affordable meal and therefore tend to eat more fish.  Hopefully, the implementation plan will be created quickly though, and be comprehensive enough to fill in the holes. 

The Healing our Waters Coalition has a new report out detailing participation in the Federal Farm Bill for states around the Great Lakes.  Admittedly, there is not a tremendous amount of farming going on in the Lake Superior watershed, but there is a lot in Minnesota and the health of Lake Superior is connected with the health of the Great Lakes as a whole as well.  The report has some interesting details about how many Minnesota farmers - and how much acreage - have been denied participation due to inadequate funding of the Farm Bill.

You can download the report with this link (PDF).

The Senate DFL likes to talk about the need to clean up our lakes and rivers.  We are, after all, the land of 10,000 lakes and photos of algae filled lakes and stories of sick children don’t really bring in the tourist dollars.  But I’m beginning to feel more and more that the Senate DFL caucus might just be all talk.
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While it may seem that once funding recommendations are made by the LCCMR to the legislature, there are still more hurdles to overcome. (more…)

Dave Varney passed a group of rooting hogs, crossed a small creek and came to a stop in a riot of vegetative life. The southwest Wisconsin farmer contemplated his surroundings.

“I’ll bet we could rattle off 12 different food crops that are all within 50 feet of us right here,” he says. “I see spinach. I see beets. I see raspberries, strawberries, hazelnuts, asparagus. I see elderberries right here. We’re in a diverse setting.”

And as Varney points out, that diversity doesn’t just stop with the plant life; such a mix of food crops allows for a diversity of people as well. (more…)

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has reported that moose populations continue to go down.  Total population is down 23 percent to an estimated 6,500.  The Northwest population of moose is down to just 84. 

As a result, the DNR now has changed moose hunting regulations.

For all the growing pains the LCCMR experienced in the past year, the notion of creating committees that are a hybrid of citizens and elected representatives to address environmental issues has expanded to the newly formed Clean Water Council (CWC). (more…)